Online English Graduate Courses
Online English Graduate Courses
MU English offers online graduate courses for high school teachers and other qualified students seeking graduate-level credit hours, post-baccalaureate experience, or enrichment in English literature, language, and creative writing.
- Certify to teach dual credit courses: This program of 6 courses fulfills the Higher Learning Commission requirement for 18 credit hours at the graduate level, needed to teach dual-enrollment high school/college English courses. If you already have a Master’s degree in another subject, you only need 18 additional credit hours in English to teach college-level English courses.
- Earn a Graduate Certificate in English with 18 credit hours
- Take electives for your Masters of Education (English Education emphasis) degree
- These courses do not count towards Mizzou's MA or PhD degrees in English for students receiving assistantships but are open to self-funded English MA students with the Director of Graduate Study’s approval.
- Learn about and apply for admission for non-degree students
- Any questions? See Mizzou Online (enrollment and finances) or contact Frances Dickey (curriculum)
Schedule of courses:
All courses listed below are 100% asynchronous (no scheduled sessions to attend); other courses may be available with a synchronous component. Contact Frances Dickey at dickeyf@missouri.edu for more information.
Fall 2023: 16-week courses
- Taught by Dr. Joshua Brorby
- Novels by Charlotte, Emily, and Ann Brontë in the context of Victorian literature and the history of women's writing. Texts include Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Villette.
- Taught by Prof. William Kerwin
- Shakespeare’s plays with some attention to other Renaissance texts
- Taught by Prof. Karen Piper
- Multinational fiction of the postwar and contemporary eras
Fall 2023: 8-week courses
- Taught by Prof. Phong Nguyen
- An intensive writing workshop in which student stories and related literary texts receive close reading and analysis
Spring 2024: 16-week courses
Taught by Prof. Noah Heringman
This advanced course on transatlantic Romantic poetry follows the gaze of British and American poets as they looked back and forth across the Atlantic. The British Romantic poets came of age during the French Revolution and many of them saw the American Revolution as the spark that touched off the political and cultural transformation of Europe. The American Romantics, writing more than a generation later, took their inspiration from the natural world, much as the British Romantics had done, and many of them read deeply in the European philosophy associated with earlier Romantic movements. American abolitionists of the 1830s and 1840s also took inspiration from the abolitionist movement that had begun in England in the 1770s. These crossings resulted in a rich braiding of poetic traditions despite the ocean that separated them.
In this course we engage with four topics, five genres, and six poets. The topics of mutual interest to both Romanticisms are abolition, revolutionary politics, science, and industrialization. The five poetic genres that were most important to both groups of poets were the ode, the ballad, the elegy, the sonnet, and the epic. These sets of shared political and literary concerns enable us to read individual poems by a large number of poets from both sides of the Atlantic. A deeper study of three British poets (Charlotte Smith, William Blake, and William Wordsworth) and three American poets (Emily Dickinson, William Cullen Bryant, and Walt Whitman) allow us to examine the myriad influences on and developments of individual poets who came to define the field. Writing for this asynchronous online class includes many informal exercises including discussion board posts and a reading notebook as well as three short formal essays, one each on a genre, an author, and an issue.
Taught by Prof. Carsten Strathausen
This upper-division course will explore adaptation principles and practices with a variety of forms of literature that were not originally written for film. We shall study the relation between literature and film via a detailed analysis of popular movies and the literary texts— novels in particular—that inspired them. Although we shall discuss some historical and theoretical texts, particularly at the beginning the course, the emphasis overall lies on close readings of the chosen texts and the corresponding films. A central goal of this course is to question the “fidelity” model on which most comparative analyses of film and literature are (still) based. A second goal is to explore the central theme commonly shared by all texts and movies we will discuss, namely “human nature”. What do we mean when we talk about “human nature”? How has the “other” of humanity (e.g. machines and monsters, vampires and aliens) been depicted in literature and film over the last 200 years?
Spring 2024: 8-week courses
Taught by Prof. Gabe Fried
In this eight-week online workshop, students will expand their notions of how poetry can engage the elemental, poignant, and often disquieting subject of childhood by drafting new poems that take up the its perceptions, language, and landscapes. In doing so, they will explore the potency and the vulnerabilities of children, as well as the thrall of childhood nostalgia. Students will rediscover and deploy the cadences of childhood rhymes, riddles, chants, taunts, and games, using those beats and melodies in new and surprising (sometimes creepy!) ways. Throughout, we will trace the sometimes fraught relationship of children to each other and to former children (a.k.a. adults). In order to expand our sense of how we might portray and make use of childhood in poetry, we take inspirations from poets like Cameron Awkward-Rich, Catherine Barnett, Elizabeth Bishop, Paula Bohince, Lucie Brock-Broido, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jennifer Chang, Natalie Diaz, Cornelius Eady, Joy Harjo, Robert Hayden, Randall Jarrell, Stanley Kunitz, Brenda Shaughnessy, Craig Morgan Teicher, and others.
Offered in the second eight-week session.
Summer 2024
Taught by Prof. France Dickey
Taught by Prof. Maureen Konkle
Taught by Prof. Phong Nguyen
Taught by Prof. Michael Marlo
Fall 2024: 16-week courses
Taught by Prof. Karen Piper
From women in the French resistance to survivors of genocide in Rwanda, this class will focus on women writing about war in the mid-to-late twentieth century. We will look at the way in which women’s experiences of war have ranged from being targeted or victimized to being active participants. We will also discuss the impact of war on intimate relationships, including problems with PTSD, and analyze connections between nation building, war, and notions of masculinity. We will we be reading contemporary fiction about wars around the world, including Africa, India, Europe, Japan, Iraq, and Serbia.
Taught by Prof. John Evelev
Struggling first with the Puritans’ distrust of fiction and later to overcome the cultural domination of Britain, the novel quickly became the dominant expression of American literature in the nineteenth century. This course traces the major shifts of genre and form within the American novel from its beginnings in epistolary novels of manners and seduction in the late eighteenth century to the naturalistic depiction of urban poverty and vice in 1900. While noting the important formal transformations within the American novel, we will also explore some of its persistent social and political concerns, including women’s “private” experience as privileged topic (contrasted with women’s underprivileged role in American public life), the creation of a distinctly American past (which may be based upon and unsettled by injustices), and the threat of racial and class violence.
Texts to be studied include: Hannah Foster, The Coquette (1797);Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (1827); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851); Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855); Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896); Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901); Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893/1896)
This is an asynchronous online course. There will be required weekly discussion board posts, 4 short essays, and a final project that revises and expands one of the earlier essays.
Fall 2024: 8-week courses
Taught by Prof. Scott Garson
In this course, students will learn advanced fiction-writing techniques and approaches, such as drawing connections between disparate elements within a story. To that end, this course will introduce students to the vocabulary and techniques of fiction writing, as well as strategies for implementing them. In addition to undertaking close reading and generative writing exercises, students are encouraged to enter into a wider literary context, positioning their work in dialogue with published fiction of the past, present, and future.
Create a schedule that meets your needs:
- Work at home or on the road; no on-campus meetings or scheduled times
- Courses may be taken in any order
- Start in August, January, or June
- Complete 18 credits in 18 months, or take courses at your convenience
- Not necessary to take all six courses unless seeking to fulfill the 18-credit requirement
- Earn Graduate Certificate in English with 18 credits
Develop key skills and knowledge:
- Study classic works and encounter new authors
- Deepen your knowledge of the English language and literature in historical and cultural context
- Learn and apply a variety of critical methods for interpreting literature
- Develop advanced analytic and writing skills through structured assignments and feedback from experienced doctoral faculty
Eligibility:
- Bachelor’s degree or higher from an accredited college or university
Tuition:
- For the 2021-22 academic year, distance graduate students pay $460 per credit hour including fees (= $1380 per 3-credit course) (see Cashier's office webpage for more information)
I want to get started! What do I do now?
I am already enrolled in a program at MU other than the English PhD or MA:
- Sign up for courses on Mizzou Online
I’m not enrolled in any program right now:
- Learn about and apply for admission for non-degree students (apply now for summer classes!)
Questions?
Contact Mizzou Online with other questions about application, tuition, technology, or how to enroll
Contact online program director Frances Dickey with questions about course content, faculty, preparation, and other aspects of curriculum
Anne Myers
Director of Graduate Studies
AnneMyers@missouri.edu