Undergraduate

CRW 2100: Intro to Creative Writing

In this course, students will learn about various genres such as fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics with an emphasis on craft elements common to more than one genre. students will also learn about the process of writing, including idea generation, drafting, and revision. This course affords students the ability to communicate effectively, including the ability to write clearly and engage in public speaking.

CRW 3111: Form & Technique of Fiction

A study of short narrative forms such as the anecdote, tale, character sketch, incident, monologue, epistolary story, and short story as they have been used in the development of fiction and as they exist today.

CRW 3111: Form & Technique of Fiction

A study of short narrative forms such as the anecdote, tale, character sketch, incident, monologue, epistolary story, and short story as they have been used in the development of fiction and as they exist today.

CRW 3111: Form & Technique of Fiction

A study of short narrative forms such as the anecdote, tale, character sketch, incident, monologue, epistolary story, and short story as they have been used in the development of fiction and as they exist today.

CRW 3112: Fiction I

An introduction to fiction writing, beginning with a practical study of the various elements of fiction and proceeding through the many processes of revision to arrive at a completed work of art.

CRW 3212: Nonfiction I

An examination of the diverse strategies employed in the forms of nonfiction, including but not limited to memoir, essay, researched essay, micro-memoir, braided essays, nature writing, food writing, writing about place, and/or literary journalism.

CRW 3212: Nonfiction I

An examination of the diverse strategies employed in the forms of nonfiction, including but not limited to memoir, essay, researched essay, micro-memoir, braided essays, nature writing, food writing, writing about place, and/or literary journalism.

CRW 3311: Form & Technique of Poetry

An examination of the techniques employed in fixed forms from the couplet through the sonnet to such various forms as the rondel, ballad, villanelle, sestina, etc. Principles in the narrative, dramatic, and lyric modes are also explored.

CRW 3311: Form & Technique of Poetry

An examination of the techniques employed in fixed forms from the couplet through the sonnet to such various forms as the rondel, ballad, villanelle, sestina, etc. Principles in the narrative, dramatic, and lyric modes are also explored.

CRW 3311: Form & Technique of Poetry

An examination of the techniques employed in fixed forms from the couplet through the sonnet to such various forms as the rondel, ballad, villanelle, sestina, etc. Principles in the narrative, dramatic, and lyric modes are also explored.

CRW 4930: Poetry of Human Crises

The focus of the course will be governed by student demand and instructor interest. Topics to be covered may include writing the literary essay, writing in mixed genres, and utilizing popular conventions in serious works. May be taken twice for credit with different topics.

CRW 4930: Selected Topics in Creative Writing

The focus of the course will be governed by student demand and instructor interest. Topics to be covered may include writing the literary essay, writing in mixed genres, and utilizing popular conventions in serious works. May be taken twice for credit with different topics.

CRW 4930: Crafting the Sentence

The focus of the course will be governed by student demand and instructor interest. Topics to be covered may include writing the literary essay, writing in mixed genres, and utilizing popular conventions in serious works. May be taken twice for credit with different topics.

ENG 3014: Intro to Literary Methodology

Welcome to our literary adventure! In this exciting journey through the world of literature, we’ll explore critical thinking, close reading, and various theoretical approaches. We’ll also read a Florida-based novel, The Nickel Boys, that sheds a light on a crucial era in American history. And we’ll seek to answer the question “What can you do with a degree in English?” Whether you’re a seasoned bookworm or just dipping your toes into literary waters, this course is designed to empower you.

ENG 4060: History of English Language

Have you ever wondered how English came to be what it is today? English spelling seems haphazard. Writers and editors argue over usages. You’ve probably heard the old joke about English mugging other languages for their words, but exchange goes in the other direction too: many people around the world use English words in a different language or English as an additional language. Why does this apparently chaotic tongue have speakers around the world?

English began as a set of dialects on a small island near what was then the edge of the Western world. In this course, you will learn stories of our shared language from prehistory to twenty-first-century global Englishes. We will study how past and contemporary variants developed and how dialects relate to geography, class, race and ethnicity, and other factors. We will explore some of the many different Englishes in use now as well as characteristics and cultural settings of English in different eras. History of the English Language will also introduce you to valuable resources that can help you beyond this class to other courses and life and work beyond the university. You will gain insights into the richness and variety of Englishes as you improve your critical thinking, research, and writing skills. No previous experience with linguistics or the history of English is required.

Requirements:

• Reading, preparation, and class discussion
• Frequent homework and quizzes
• Group presentation on a contemporary dialect of English
• A research summary on a course topic or a creative work in Middle English or Early Modern English
• Final exam

Likely required texts (still under review):

1. Smith, K. Aaron, and Susan Kim. This Language, A River. Broadview Press, 2026.
2. Smith, K. Aaron, and Susan Kim. This Language, A River: Workbook. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2020.

English Honors students looking for an Honors Connected Course should contact Dr. Discenza at ndiscenza@usf.edu.

ENG 4907: Writing Studio Theory and Practice

ENG 4907 will introduce students to writing consultation practices, research into writing processes, and how to write across the disciplines. This course will also explore theories of cognition, learning, and education with an objective of acquiring and demonstrating transferable skills.

The course serves as a prerequisite for working in the Academic Success Center's Writing Studio as an undergraduate writing tutor; however, it does not guarantee employment.

Interested in registering? Contact WillFordeMaz@usf.edu. 

ENG 4934: Senior Literature Seminar - Speculative World Fiction

Speculative fiction asks tantalizing questions, and imagines possibilities – of science and technologies, human behaviors, environmental changes, colliding social systems and cultures.

Let’s explore World authors and texts that experiment with fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and magical realism to imagine possible worlds. Sometimes in the here and now, sometimes in the future, and some even traveling into the past to experiment with possible outcomes.

Texts may include:

• Octavia Butler, Kindred
• Nnedi Okorafor, Binti
• Yevgeny Zamiatin, We
• Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
• Hao Jingfang, “Folding Beijing” (novella)
• Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves
• Marie Ndiaye, The Witch
• Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic
• Bong Joon Ho, Parasite

ENG 4936: Honors Seminar II

“Memory is so firmly fixed in the body,” write Suzanne Paola and Brenda Miller. “Sometimes, what matters to us most is what has mattered to the body.” In this Honors Seminar, we will close-read and discuss a range of contemporary nonfiction texts, with particular attention to how these personal narratives ask larger, cultural questions about embodiment, belonging, love, loss, and disability.

AML 4111: 19th-Century American Novel

A study of the American novel from its beginnings through 1900, including such novelists as Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Crane, and Dreiser, among others.

AML 4933: Studies in American Literature & Culture - Exposed: Survival in Contemporary American Fiction and Film

America has always made its people a promise: work hard, find a home, raise a family, and you will be safe. But what happens to the people that promise leaves out, and to the ones it lets down? This course follows characters who have to survive when the usual protections fail them. A mother keeps her children fed through a Depression winter. A teenage girl holds her family together in the Ozarks. A motel full of kids lives in the shadow of a theme park. Older workers chase seasonal jobs across the West in their vans. A community fights for its life during the AIDS crisis.

Each week we pair a film with a short story or short novel and watch the same struggle play out on screen and on the page. The course moves through four modules: Home, Work, Family, and Community. In each one we ask what keeps people safe, who gets that protection and who is left exposed, and how race, class, gender, and sexuality shape the answer. Along the way we look at what people build when the official systems fail them: chosen families, neighborhoods that look after their own, art, and collective action.

You will learn to read a film as closely as you read a story and to write about how each form tells its truth differently. Some of these works are hard to watch and hard to read. Many are funny, tender, and defiant. All of them ask what it takes to get by in America, and what it would take to do more than survive.

Content Note

Be prepared to watch, read, and discuss material about race, class, gender, and sexuality that some may find difficult or disturbing. Active participation (watching, reading, discussing, and writing about every assigned text) is required.

ENL 3015: British Literature to 1616

A survey of representative prose, poetry, and drama from its beginnings through the Renaissance, including such poems and figures as Beowulf, Chaucer, Malory, More, Hooker, Skelton, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson.

ENL 3230: British Literature 1616-1780

This is a survey course of British literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the English throne and concluding with the American Revolution. We will read a wide range of authors and genres, including essays, poetry, drama, letters, and fiction in order to understand more thoroughly the cultural, social, and political features of the period. As we read authors such as Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Frances Burney, we will be considering how they are also helping to shape the culture of an era that would see the reopening of the theatres, the emergence of a thriving print marketplace, and the professionalization of women authors. This is an asynchronous online course. Please contact Dr. Jessica Cook with any questions: jlcook4@usf.edu.

ENL 4122: 19th Century British Novel

Scholars generally hail the nineteenth century as the Age of the Novel. From serious triple-decker masterpieces to popular sensation fiction, the novel dominated the Victorian literary scene. This semester, we will tour a small corner of this rich literary landscape, selectively touring some of the best fiction from the latter half of the nineteenth century:

• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin, 1998)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula

Text selections subject to change.

Note that due to the length of these works, the reading load for the course will be relatively heavy, approximately 200-300 pages per week. Assignments include in-class (Blue Book) exams and short papers.

LIT 2000: Intro to Literature - 19th-Century American Women's Writing

What did women write about in the 1800s? Love, marriage, work, money, friendship, politics—and just about everything else. In this course, we’ll dive into the writing of nineteenth-century American women and explore how they used literature to make sense of the world around them. Through a wide range of poetry, short stories, novels, and drama, we’ll encounter both well-known writers and fascinating authors whose work deserves to be rediscovered. You’ll learn how to read literature closely and make compelling arguments about what texts reveal about the people and cultures that produced them. No prior experience with nineteenth-century literature is required—just curiosity about what women were writing, thinking, and grappling with nearly two centuries ago.

LIT 2109: Great Literature of the World - Voyages and Returns

Set off on a journey across the world and through literary history! With this course, you will travel from the familiar into the unknown, explore the depths of other lives and cultures, and then come back home again. The voyage and the return are two of the fundamental narratives of all fiction: we will follow these essential themes from ancient epic to medieval tale, postcolonial narrative to contemporary graphic novel. Starting with Homer’s 𝘖𝘥𝘺𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘺 and continuing with a wide-ranging series of stories, poems, and novels, we will investigate issues of adventure and war, exile and belonging, place and displacement, exploration and empire, identity and community. You will transform this class into your intellectual home base—and lay the cultural groundwork for the many future journeys that await you.

LIT 3301 : Cultural Studies & Pop Arts - Japanese Anime Films

Looking at Japanese anime films from the early days of the art form to the present, we'll examine the stylistic particularities of this medium, consider how production and industry realities shaped these narratives, and track the development of various themes such as gender, family pressures, the risks of new technology, the boundaries of the self, environmental degradation, and the consequences of war. Looking at major studios and directors, we'll consider how their work is distinctive as well as how it conforms to larger trends. By the end of the class, students will have a solid understanding of the technical, historical, and cultural aspects of Japanese anime.

LIT 4932: Selected World Authors

How does literature capture the great drama of growing up? This course explores how individuals and societies alike achieve independence, looking for answers in the coming-of-age narratives that illuminated and fueled the age of decolonization. Ranging through the later twentieth century to the present day, we will read novels of education from around the world, tracking postcolonial hope, disillusion, and progress. We will meet major global writers from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Kazuo Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy to Tsitsi Dangarembga—plus a few filmmakers to boot. Reading and writing across borders, we will investigate the tensions between self and society, idealism and realism, dreams and action, innocence and experience. Throughout, this course will encourage you to author your own narrative of education and reflect on your own coming of age in college.

ENC 2251: Professional Writing

The course is an introduction to techniques and types of professional writing, including correspondence and reports. It is designed to help strengthen skills of effective business and professional communication in both oral and written modes. This course affords students the ability to communicate effectively, including the ability to write clearly and engage in public speaking.

ENC 2251: Professional Writing

The course is an introduction to techniques and types of professional writing, including correspondence and reports. It is designed to help strengthen skills of effective business and professional communication in both oral and written modes. This course affords students the ability to communicate effectively, including the ability to write clearly and engage in public speaking.

ENC 3370: Expository Writing

This is a course that teaches the techniques for writing effective prose, (excluding fiction), in which student essays are extensively criticized, edited, and discussed in individual sessions with the instructor and with peers.

ENC 3370: Writing Technologies

This course introduces students to essential writing and design technologies they will use in their careers and provides students the opportunity to practice writing and design while building a technological literacy around the use of new tools.

ENC 4218: Visual Rhetoric for Technical Communication

Students explore how information is understood and conveyed visually, with a focus on document design and rhetorical analysis of visual content, ultimately developing knowledge of visual rhetoric and best practices in communicating across audiences and contexts. 

ENC 4260:  Technical and Professional Communication Capstone

This portfolio-based capstone course allows students to further develop and demonstrate mastery and integration of the skills, principles, and knowledge gained from their professional and technical communication coursework.

ENC 4403: Grant Writing

Grant proposals are persuasive documents written for specific institutional audiences and writing them well takes rhetorical skill as much as technical knowledge.

ENC 4403 treats grant writing as a rhetorical practice. Students examine how funding organizations set their priorities and how writers turn an idea into a compelling case for support. Students will learn to identify the core elements of grant proposals and the structures of funding institutions, and to research funding sources to find appropriate opportunities. They will also learn to analyze, articulate, and respond to the purposes and audiences that shape funders' expectations. In addition, students will develop flexible, collaborative strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading texts, with attention to writing that is usable, accessible, and inclusive. These rhetorical and research skills carry over to professional writing in nonprofit, government, educational, and research settings.

ENC 4940: Professional Internship

Supervised professional work-and-learning experience under the direction of an employee of a participating firm and a University faculty member.