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 2027, 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 2027
Truth and Authenticity in Creative Non-fiction, Dr. Kristine Ervin
No other literary genre is seemingly as fraught with debates about its definition as creative nonfiction. We often feel we have a firm grip on fiction (until we consider Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) or on poetry (until we read a prose poem), but creative nonfiction—with its blurred and blurring boundaries; with its swirling questions surrounding essential truth versus factual truth, memory, subjectivity, and allegiance to aesthetics; and with its often implied contract with its readers—begins and remains slippery with us. With memoir, autobiography, and the personal essay especially, these questions regarding truth and authenticity become further complicated when considering imagination as personal history or the influence of the postmodern perspective, with its attention to multiplicity and fragmentation.
In this course, you will engage with contemporary creative nonfiction texts, including memoir and the personal essay, and with current scholarship regarding the central questions and concerns of the genre—truth, yes, but also topics like identity formation, literary movements (confessionalism, literary journalism), form, and narrative. Along with exploring these subjects through a formal research project, you will also practice in art of writing creative nonfiction, thereby pushing the line of inquiry through multiple lenses to answer or to complicate the questions like “When does changing details bleed into just plain lying? What does truth in nonfiction mean, and does it even matter?”
Feminist Politics of Emotion, Dr. Megan Schoettler
Description: When and where are people 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/when women, men, and gender nonconforming people should feel and act on those feelings. The course will center feminist rhetorical 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. Students can learn about Dr. Megan Schoettler’s research on the English Department’s website.
Native American Literature and Print Culture, Dr. 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.
Parody and Fake News in a “Post-Fact” Society, Dr. Vicki Tischio
Description coming soon.
PDF Listings and Archive
Please see the links below for PDF versions of the seminar descriptions for current, future, and recently offered ENG 400s.