ENG 130 Literary Ventures: Ghost Stories
Why do we tell ghost stories? When and where do ghosts appear, and why? What do they want and need from the living? In this course, we will read ghost stories and almost-ghost stories by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Shirley Jackson, and Toni Morrison. These stories are at once timeless and contemporary, frightening and haunting, unsettling and illuminating. They are not only about ghosts, but also family, memory, history, psychology, nature, and place.

ENG 230 The Writer’s Voice
When writers write, they sing, whisper, and shout. This course, an introduction to the English major, emphasizes literature and writing as forms of personal and cultural expression. Our central literary focus is on poetry, but may include fiction, drama, or nonfiction. The course also gives extended attention to student writing as a performative act, conscious of voice, audience, and purposes.

ENG 130 Literary Landscapes: Tales of Belong
Literary Landscapes: Tales of Belonging. What is a landscape? Do I invent my landscape, or does it invent me? How do I make myself at home--or not? The writing and film we will consider in this course raise questions of perception, perspective, and knowledge, in landscapes physical, social, and psychic, in the country, the city, the wilderness, the memory, and the imagination. The works we will read traverse, among others, the Missouri Ozarks, the Texas borderlands, the forests of Mississippi, the streets of Philadelphia, and the topography of dream. Our writing, in turn, will traverse these works as well as the landscape of northeast Iowa.

ENG 185 Poetry and Science
Both poetry and science address the nature of things, the seen and unseen. In this course, we will consider writing at the intersections of poetry and science, from a classical account of the material universe (Lucretius' On the Nature of Things), to poetry written by scientists, to contemporary poetic projects that engage scientific questions, practices, and topics (like Christian Bok's Crystallography). Students will read, discuss, write, present, and conduct their own experiments at the intersections of poetry and science.