Undergraduate Courses - Fall 2026
This list includes courses with a special emphasis. Go to the online LSU catalog for general course descriptions not listed here. Refer to the online Schedule Booklet for course times, classrooms, and updates.
ENGL 2000: The Language of Horror
Instructor: Erin Little
Meeting times:
Section 12: T/Th 10:30AM-11:50AM
Section 16: T/Th 12:00PM-1:20PM
Section 21: T/Th 1:30PM-2:50PM
How have humans constructed the meaning of “horror”? How has that meaning changed over time? How does horror appear in different disciplines? The class asks us to consider more mature and specific rhetorical tactics writers may use to develop and support claims in all sorts of areas. Developing our ability to conduct research and sound reasoning, as well as compose writing, we will consider the uses and abuses of horror in fiction, film, environmental science, digital media and more.
ENGL 2000-37: Hospice Care
Instructor: Ann Martin
Meeting time: MWF 10:30AM-11:20 AM
This is a service-learning course. Students will work with The Hospice of Baton Rouge.
ENGL 2000: Writing reality
Instructor: Halley McArn
Meeting times:
Section 26: T/Th 1:30PM-2:50PM
Section 36: T/Th 3:00PM-4:20PM
Section 41: T/Th 4:30PM-6:00 PM
In this class, we’ll study various theories about the meaning of truth to discuss how people claim an understanding of reality in writing. Then, we'll complete writing assignments that practice our fact-checking and visual, rhetorical, and political analysis skills to come to a firmer grasp of the truth(s) evident in several recent public debates. To end the semester, students will craft a term paper on the nature of truth as it plays out in a pop cultural event of their choosing.
ENGL 2000: The Language of Horror
Instructor: Lisa Nohner
Meeting times:
Section 27: MWF 9:30AM-10:20 AM
Section 22: MWF 10:30AM-11:20 AM
Section 29: MWF 3:30PM-4:20 PM
This course asks you to consider and engage with the kinds of writing being done in different disciplines and fields. The course presents an engaging, unique lens through which to study different types of writing: The Language of Horror. How have humans constructed the meaning of "horror"? How has that meaning changed over time? How does horror appear in different disciplines? The class asks us to consider more mature and specific rhetorical tactics writers may use to develop and support claims in all sorts of areas. Developing our ability to conduct research and sound reasoning, as well as compose writing, we will consider the uses and abuses of horror in fiction, film, environmental science, digital media and more. This course is synchronous and delivered via Zoom. Regular attendance is expected. Students will study and practice argumentative writing through the lens of horror and popular culture.
ENGL 2000: Writing for Community Action and Advocacy
Instructor: Sharon Andrews
Meeting times:
Section 11: T/Th 10:30AM-11:50AM
Section 14: T/Th 12:00PM-1:20PM
We will engage with issues that challenge our communities. We will compose writing that first examines scholarly and community perspectives on these issues and then moves toward problem solving and persuasion.
ENGL 2000: Writing about Film
Instructor: Trey Strecker
Meeting times:
Section 31: MWF 9:30AM-10:20 AM
Section 39: MWF10:30AM-11:20 AM
Section 35: MWF 12:30PM-1:20 PM
Students in this course will study what constitutes successful film writing through
a rhetorical focus on argument. Our reading, writing, and discussion will focus on
issues of authorship, genre, representation, and narrative. Students will learn basic
film concepts, techniques, and terminology in an effort to think critically about
film and its role in our lives. Students will compose in multiple modes to improve
their writing skills while gaining a more complex understanding of audience, form,
and the contexts that inform effective argument.
ENGL 2000: Our Built Environment
Instructor: Nolde Alexius
Meeting times:
Section 7: MWF 10:30AM-11:20AM
Section 2: MWF 1:30PM-2:20PM
Section 24: MWF 2:30PM-3:20PM
All assignments this semester will explore, feature, contemplate, and prompt original literary analysis of the work of published fiction writers who served on the LSU faculty, enrolled in undergraduate or graduate classes, and edited the university’s literary magazines.
ENGL 2004-01: Personal Narrative for Social Impact
Instructor: Carolina Murriel
Meeting time: T/Th 3:00-4:20 PM
Write about events or issues in your life that connect to larger societal movements, integrating research and reportage into your personal storytelling. Taught by award-winning journalist and essayist.
ENGL 2025-07: The Criminal in American Literature
Instructor: Luke Anderson
Meeting time: T/Th 12:00-1:20 PM
Why do criminals occupy such a prominent place in the American cultural imagination? Do they have anything to teach us? We'll seek answers by reading American fiction published in the 20th and 21st centuries that features criminals as main characters. Throughout the course, in addition to our readings, I'll also encourage you to make connections between the criminals we encounter in class and those you encounter in popular media today.
ENGL 2027-05: Poets on Place
Instructor: Erin Little
Meeting time: T/Th 4:30PM-5:50 PM
How do poets convey setting? How do poems represent place in distinct ways that other compositional modes cannot? If the poet is the professor of the five senses (Federico Garcia Lorca), how does the poet use sensory language to evoke specific places? How can we trace related subtext like social commentary in poems about place? This course invites you to investigate various academic and poetic texts with these questions in mind. We’ll start with a broad overview of popular poetic forms and modes before we dive into more complex reading and inquiry. As we trace these place-based questions through our readings, we’ll also work on our own place-based poems.
ENGL 2231-05: Reading Film: Live Action Family Genre
Instructor: Geoff Trumbo
Meeting time: T/Th 3:00PM-4:20 PM
Our movies target the family in multi-generation forms. We will pay some attention to special effects and even animation, but in general the movies we study will use film photography and living actors. Primary themes will include identity, community, and family connections. Our textbook is Nichols' Engaging Cinema.
ENGL 2231-02: Reading Film: "Horror and the Oppressed"
Instructor: Julie Roundtree
Meeting time: MWF 10:30AM-11:20 AM
In this class, we will view a selection of horror films from different points in history and analyze how oppressed individuals are depicted and treated in these films. There will be an emphasis placed on analyzing the depictions and treatment of women, people of color, and those who are differently-abled. Some films will be viewed in class, others will need to be viewed outside of class, in-class discussions will follow, and students will write three essays over the course of the semester.
ENGL 2231-03: Reading Film: The International Horror Film
Instructor: June Pulliam
Meeting time: MWF 2:30-3:20PM
Most Americans are only familiar with Hollywood horror films along with some horror produced in the U.K., Japan, or South Korea. In the International Horror Film, we will look at a wide variety of horror produced outside of the United States. This includes some English language horror from the U.K. and Canada, as well as horror in other languages from all over the world including Mexico, Finland, France, China, Indonesia, and New Zealand.
ENGL 2231-04: Reading Film: Gender and Horror
Instructor: Lisa Nohner
Meeting time: MWF 12:30PM-1:20PM
This course is synchronous and delivered via Zoom. Regular attendance is expected. Students will study horror films through various lenses, among them gender & historical criticism.
ENGL 2300-1: Discourse Analysis
Instructor: Tracy LeBlanc
Meeting time: MWF 9:30AM-10:20 AM
Examining the elements of various forms of discourse through digital ecology perspectives as well as through traditional frameworks like critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, pragmatics, and genre
ENGL 3006-01: Collaborative World Building
Instructor: Jesse Delong
Meeting time: T/Th 3:00PM-4:20 PM
In this creative writing course, students will collaborate with other writers and artists, such as painters, dancers, or actors, to generate pieces of writing inspired by another person’s art. This class is open to those seeking to write in any genre—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or screenplays.
ENGL 3035-01: Monsters & Marvels in the Middle Ages
Instructor: Richard Godden
Meeting time: T TH 10:30AM-11:50AM
The literature of the Middle Ages positively teems with monsters and marvels, with magic and the miraculous. In this course, we will use the confrontation between human and nonhuman, and between natural and supernatural, to survey diverse genres of medieval literature, including the epic, romance, travel narrative, dream vision, and drama. We will encounter carnivorous giants, rather mundane demons, chivalrous monsters, talking birds, pious werewolves, magical objects, and even the undead. In our journey through medieval literature, we will consider the monstrous and the marvelous as a site of contested identities and as an opportunity to interrogate cultural assumptions and anxieties. All readings will be in translation or highly modernized editions.
ENGL 3220-01: Major Themes in Literature: Belonging
Instructor: Alexandra Meany
Meeting time: T/Th 1:30PM-2:50PM
What does it mean to belong? And what does it mean to be excluded? This course examines the theme of “belonging” across a range of multiethnic U.S. literatures with special attention to how ideas about “race” and “citizenship” shape experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Through novels, films, and critical scholarship we will consider how writers imagine racial and national belonging in different contexts. Each text will be read in conversation with its historical moment, allowing us to see how literature both reflects and reshapes key debates about race, nation, and identity in the United States.
ENGL 3301-01: Writing with style
Instructor: Jonathan Osborne
Meeting time: MWF 1:30PM-2:20 PM
In the process of writing, we spend most of our time focusing on research, connecting ideas, and putting those ideas on paper. While we may have an audience in mind for our writing, we don’t spend much time on style or crafting the writing for our audience. This course draws from historical and contemporary theories of style to help students think deeply about the writing process and develop a strong understanding of academic style.
ENGL 3674-01: Music and Autobiography
Instructor: Angeletta Gourdine
Meeting time: T/Th 12:00PM-1:20 PM
Mary J Blige famously told/warned her listeners that "if [they] look at [her] life," they would see what [she has] seen." Accordingly, this course looks at the intersections of music and life writing in contemporary African America.
ENGL 4001-1: Art and Craft of Cultural Criticism
Instructor: Zach Shultz
Meeting time: MWF 9:30AM-10:20AM
In this class, we will survey the broad field of creative nonfiction with a particular focus on the craft of writing about culture. Cultural criticism examines how pop culture (books, TV, film, music, art) reflects and sometimes challenges norms and power structures in society. In the first half of the course, we will read a variety of texts from critics like Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrea Long Chu, and Zadie Smith, and supplement readings with podcasts, videos, blogs, and digital media. In the second half of the course, you will workshop an original essay that combines pop culture analysis with personal narrative, while also learning to write reviews and cultural commentary for magazines, literary journals, and other print and online publications.
ENGL 4023-1: Life Writing: fact, and fiction
Instructor: Joseph Kronick
Meeting time: TTH 9:00AM-10:20AM
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.” Wilde is associated with two things that scandalized Victorian society: art for art’s sake and homosexuality. Our class begins with Wilde’s defense of art as lying and then turns to The Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, two works, one a dark and unsettling novel, the other a masterpiece of comedy, that fulfill Wilde’s dictum "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame." We will follow with his autobiography written in prison. We then turn to Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past,” a work left unfinished because of her suicide, and two novels of hers haunted by death: Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. We will conclude with one of the most scandalous and misunderstood novels of the 20th century, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and his much-admired autobiography, Speak, Memory. The class will focus on the relation of the writer’s life to his and her art and questions of the morality or immorality of art and what it says about society then and now.
ENGL 4060-01: Homesickness in British Romantic Literature
Instructor: Christopher Rovee
Meeting time: MW 3:30PM-4:50 PM
What is the longing we call "homesickness" and how did this desire for a lost place enter into our secular literature around 1800? This course surveys the writing of British Romanticism with attention to this distinctive modern feeling.
ENGL 4300-01: Political rhetoric in theory & practice
Instructor: Jonathan Osborne
Meeting time: MWF 10:30AM-11:20AM
Students in this course will study political rhetoric in its ancient and modern forms, learning about the history and theory of the art of persuasion in political spaces. Focusing on politics within the United States, we will read and listen to a wide range of texts and speeches from political actors – politicians, community organizers, concerned citizens, etc. We will inquire about differences in the use of rhetoric by rhetors from different political parties, how identity (race, gender, etc.) informs rhetoric, and the impact of modern influences on political rhetoric, such as social media and the Trump presidency.
ENGL 4680-1: The Bollywood Blockbuster
Instructor: Pallavi Rastogi
Meeting time: TTH 1:30PM-2:50PM
This course examines the Bollywood blockbuster since the 1990s, a period marked by the global boom in Hindi cinema consumption. We will focus on how these movies combine high drama, low comedy, tear-jerker romance, lavish settings, and spectacular song-and-dance sequences to offer insight into life in a changing India and its growing diaspora. Through close analysis of iconic blockbusters such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Lagaan, Parineeta, and Kahaani, we will consider how Bollywood’s extravagant music, choreography, and visual style represent, critique, and fantasize about reality. The course will also investigate how Bollywood aesthetics travel globally through crossover productions such as Bend It Like Beckham and Polite Society.