Writing Intensive Seminars in English (WISE)
In these highly regarded, small-group seminars, students explore unique topics in English-language literature while also honing their research and writing skills through series of assignments that culminate in a substantial original research essay. Classes are capped at 8 to allow for individualized attention and rich feedback. Enrollment is by permission. English majors must take at least one WISE to fulfill WIM, ideally before senior year, and may take more than one WISE if there is room. (Majors, minors, and prospective majors receive invitations to rank preferences via an online form each year.) Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For more information, contact the English Department’s Student Services Officer, Farrah Monet Moreno (farrahm [at] stanford.edu (farrahm[at]stanford[dot]edu)), and/or the Faculty Director of WISE, Alice Staveley (staveley [at] stanford.edu (staveley[at]stanford[dot]edu)).
Autumn 2025
English 5RA: Race and Technology in the African American Literary Tradition
Instructor: Kay Barrett
TuTh 4:30-6:20
In her groundbreaking book Race After Technology (2019), sociologist Ruha Benjamin asserts that we must understand “race as technology.” That is, race and racism are tools specifically designed to divide, rank, and discriminate. To see race as technology is to expose how our social infrastructure has been built on anti-Black racism, a reality further reflected in emerging technologies that perpetuate racial biases and injustices, from predictive policing to computer-aided diagnosis systems. In this course, we will investigate the multifaceted relationship between race and technology as we analyze works of African American literature and film—ranging from Harriet Jacobs in the 19th century to Octavia Butler and Ryan Coogler in the 20th and 21st—through an Afrofuturist lens. How do we define “technology” in the context of the African American literary tradition? What are the various roles and functions of technology presented in these texts? Can we understand particular Black storytelling and filmic techniques as technologies themselves designed to decode social systems and structures? To what ends have contemporary Afrofuturist texts reinterpreted and reclaimed technology through a Black and/or African lens? Placing our primary texts in conversation with thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Christina Sharpe, we will explore these questions and more throughout this course.
English 5SA: Indigeneity Across American Literary Cultures
Instructor: Lydia Burleson
MW 4:30-6:20
How did early American writers use representations of Nativeness to convey their own Americanness? How have Native authors written in relation and resistance to this move? And what does the interplay between these modes reveal about the evolution of nation-making across American literary cultures? Staying with this productive tension, this course will proceed in two parts. First, pairing works by early Anglo-American authors like Mary Rowlandson and Lydia Maria Child with readings in Native studies, settler colonial studies, and decolonial theory, we will excavate how canonical texts have naturalized American settlement while also exploring critical approaches that denaturalize those views. From there, we will move to wholly center 20th and 21st century Native voices, from canonized Native writers like Tommy Orange and Leslie Marmon Silko to Native horror satirists Stephen Graham Jones and Morgan Talty, focusing on the various tools and methods through which these authors converse and contend with Native appropriation and erasure. Throughout, this course will provide the theoretical grounding to gain a decolonial perspective on American literary history, to engage with complicated questions of American identity formation, and to critically read and analyze texts’ Native narratives in their explicit and implicit forms.
WINTER 2026
English 5TA: Renaissance Posthumans
Instructor: Unjoo Oh
WF 11:30-1:20
“Posthuman” often conjures up images of distant futures populated with cyborgs, clones, and various other naturally and artificially intelligent beings. But the posthuman is not the exclusive domain of futuristic speculation. After all, the post in “posthuman” can be taken to indicate what is after but also beyond the human. In this course, we rediscover a Renaissance world rife with posthuman beings, encounters, and imaginings, animated by active debates about whether to define the human as universal, rational, and self-contained—or not. Drawing on critical posthumanist frameworks supplemented by tools from textual material studies and digital humanities, we will explore works of poetry, drama, and prose that bend and blur boundaries between human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and mechanical. What happens to human readers who listen to the language of cats, or puzzle over the similarity between moss and broken automata, or observe the flames that erupt between “male” and “female” stones? Asking these questions—and much more—we will also consider how the early modern posthuman resonates with our contemporary moment.
English 5UA: Queer Monstrosity
Instructor: Sarah Coduto
TuTh 3:00-4:50
What makes a monster? Which peoples, bodies, behaviors, and identities are deemed monstrous at particular moments in history? What does the cultural construction of “monstrosity” tell us about a society’s anxieties, taboos, and fears? Are monsters, who symbolize deviations from established conventions and norms, inherently queer figures? And how have LGBTQ+ cultural producers re-appropriated the images and tropes of monstrosity as tools and techniques for self-fashioning? In this course, we will explore how same-sex desire and gender transgression have been represented in Anglophone literature, film, and television through various monster figures, from lesbian vampires and ghoulish hauntings to angels, demons, cyborgs, and serial killers. Students will be exposed to a variety of theoretical schools, including queer and trans theory, monster studies, psychoanalysis, film and media studies, and critical disability theory, in order to develop a shared grammar for describing horror, monstrosity, uncanniness, abjection, and even queerness itself. Primary texts will range over 200 years of literary, visual, and media history, and might include selections from Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Flannery O’Connor, Tony Kushner, and others; films and other media might include The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, and Jennifer’s Body.
SPRING 2026
English 5VA: Influencers: Conduct Literature from Medieval Origins to Social Media
Instructor: Rebecca Adams
MW 4:30-6:20
Books that promise their audience the key to a better life have always had undoubtable mass-market appeal, as have fictional texts with less overt yet no less moralizing themes. Since the late Middle Ages, various iterations of what is broadly known as “conduct literature” have perennially proved some of the most popular content among readers and consumers. This course will explore the development of this phenomenon, tracing our collective taste for media that models “the good life” (whether in moral, social, or material terms) from some of the earliest Middle English instructive poems, to Victorian etiquette guides, to mid-twentieth-century magazine columns, to modern-day influencer content. Interweaving explicitly instructional works with selections from poetry and fiction, we will ask: How do we define “conduct literature”, and what makes it unique as a genre? What do readers seek within these texts, and what are they offered in return? What can the historical prevalence of this genre tell us about our own culture’s reading habits? And do texts of this nature play into traditional patterns of conformity and control? As we explore such questions about literary and cultural values across time, we will also hone our skills in critical reading and research writing.