English 400 Seminar Topics and Descriptions

All English majors complete ENG 400 Research Seminars as they approach the end of their undergraduate careers. These capstone courses are small in size and enable students to apply research skills and explore specialized topics in literature, writing, theory, and other areas. All majors must have completed their Core requirements before taking a seminar. Topics vary from semester to semester.

Looking for descriptions for other special topics courses? See the All Major Courses page.

Upcoming English 400 Seminars

Students can learn about the professor’s research interests from their faculty pages on the department’s website.

** NOTE: If you plan to take two ENG 400 seminars in Spring 2026, you will need to either submit a RamPortal Student Registration request (choose "Duplicate Course Enrollment" from the Challenge menu) or contact spaylor@wcupa.edu for assistance with enrolling into the second seminar. **

Spring 2026

Truth and Authenticity in Creative Non-fiction 
Kristine Ervin

Description coming soon

Feminist Politics of Emotion 
Megan Schoettler

When and where are women allowed–or expected–to express emotions such as rage, hope, shame, and joy? This research seminar will examine how we are “schooled” into gendered and rhetorical experiences of emotions and how feminists have pushed back against scripts that dictate how and when women and men should feel and act on those feelings. The course will center Black feminist theory and investigate how dominant narratives, including those of rape culture and the Sapphire stereotype, reinforce gendered ways of feeling and acting. Students will take on their own research project, investigating the social-cultural scripts of emotion, including how these scripts are represented and resisted across various forms of media. Students can learn about Dr. Megan Schoettler’s research interests from the English Department’s website.  

 

Native American Literature and Print Culture 
Carolyn Sorisio

This course examines American Indian authors’ diverse, creative, and extensive use of authorship and print culture in the nineteenth century. We will ask what circumstances encouraged some American Indians to become authors and examine the choices they made when doing so. We will discover how authors such as Black Hawk, William Apess, Elias Boudinot, John Rollin Ridge, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, and Zitkala-Sa wrote in diverse and evolving genres such as life writing, non- fiction, poetry, and fiction. Drawing upon Native American literary studies, book history, and postcolonial and historical methods, this course will build upon methods and methodologies that you may have been introduced to in ENG202 or ENG 206/296. See
more about Professor Carolyn Sorisio’s scholarship here.

 

Comics at the End of the World 
Kyle Vealey

There is no doubt that our world is in crisis—socially, environmentally, economically, politically. With our increasing awareness of large-scale, complex problems, such as climate change, racial injustice, and viral pandemics, it is also no wonder that such crises have become encoded and/or reflected in popular media such as comics. And historically this has always been the case with comics as a medium. Since their rise in popularity from the 1930s onward, comics have long been used to address social, environmental, and economic crises in ways that communicate, translate, or frame them for a larger public. 

In this ENG 400 seminar, we will delve into the way comics and other visual narratives grapple with our world’s most complex and wicked problems—both historically and contemporarily. Specifically, we will consider questions such as: what role do comics play in creating public narratives of social, environmental, or economic crises? What are the rhetorical and/or visual affordances of the comic medium? And in what way can comics and other forms of visual narratives work to help us address contemporary matters of concern, such as climate change or social injustices? This seminar will examine comics depicting various end of the world scenarios (personal, social, environmental) and treat them, in Kenneth Burke’s words, as equipment for living. That is, we will read these end of the world comics as public rhetorics that encapsulate and name our current apocalyptic anxieties. Through this examination, we will work to extract lessons and strategies from these narratives to make sense of ongoing global crises that threaten life as we know it. 

 

 

 

 

 

PDF Listings and Archive

Please see the links below for PDF versions of current and future ENG 400 listings, as well as an archive of past seminars.