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Course Info for ENGL - 116 - 01, Fall 2026
Class number: 3493 Title: Unveiled: Early Black Voices Department: English
Career: Undergraduate Component: Lecture Session: Regular
Instructor's Permission Required: No Grading Basis: Regular Units: 1.00
Enrollment limited to 15 Current enrollment: 6 Available seats: 9
Start date: Tuesday, September 8, 2026 End date: Wednesday, December 23, 2026 Mode of Instruction: In Person
Schedule: TR: 2:55PM-4:10PM, 115V - 103 Instructor(s): Paulin, Diana
Prerequisite(s): None
Distribution Requirement: Meets Humanities & Identity Power Equity Req
Note: For English majors, this course fulfills the additional 100-level, post-1800, elective, additional literature or film, and UVSJ requirements. For all students, it fulfills the College’s IPE and HUM requirements.
Course Description:
This course surveys African American literature in a variety of genres from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Through the study of texts by Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Julia Collins, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Dunbar, Ida Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, we will explore how these writers represented and influenced the history of people of African descent in the U.S., from slavery and abolition to early struggles for civil rights; how their work has intervened in racial formation and imagined the black diaspora; how literary innovations have engaged with continuing political questions of nation, gender, sexuality, and class.