08/31/2026
Still thinking about what courses to sign up for? The UMass English department has FIVE online English courses for you to take this fall semester!
Swipe right and check out what we have to offer.
ENGLISH 117: Ethnic American Literature
Puerto Rican Narratives of Migration, Exile, and Return.
This course will engage with texts that portray Puerto Rican people’s experiences of exile from the archipelago, migration to the United States, and the possibility and impossibility of return.
The course will grapple with questions on how do artists in the archipelago and the Diaspora understand Puerto Rican identity differently? How do Afro-Puerto Rican, q***r, and women writers critique the constant erasure of Black, q***r, and feminist histories and perspectives from the history of the archipelago? How do these authors portray the entanglements between belonging, citizenship, and colonialism?
ENGLISH 132: Gender, Sexuality, Literature, and Culture
Ever wondered why a pop star’s outfit caused a cultural uproar? Or how the same word means something completely different depending on who says it? This course is where abstract theory meets real life—grappling with Race, Gender, Disability, Class, and Culture through powerful 20th-21st century texts that fundamentally reshape how we see the world and how we understand our reality.
ENGLISH 254: Intro to Creative Writing
Writing As Practice
How do I start writing? How do I keep the piece going? How do I end it?
These are the questions we will explore through the semester. In this course, you will focus on the process of writing, how deliberate practice improves our ability to create strong sentences, craft intricate narratives, and form a compelling work. You can expect to read works from Madeline ffitch and Haruki Murakami, poetry from Sylvia Plath and Tongo Eisen-Martin, as well as creative non-fiction from David Foster Wallace and Maxine Hong Kingston.
ENGLISH 391AG-01: Writing Comics!
This is not a course about artwork or superheroes. It is a nuts-and-bolts look at comics specifically from the writer’s side that treats the graphic novel as a med
