We are dedicated to teaching excellence. Our faculty not only continually develop new, fresh, cutting-edge courses we diligently revise existing courses to maximize their pedagogical and intellectual possibilities and to better engage students. We seek to maximize the attention each student receives by maintaining small class sizes. Decidedly old–fashioned and steeped in the best traditions of the liberal arts, we believe in the benefits of face-to-face communication, in-class discussions, timely lectures, and accommodating office hours–in short, we believe in working on the basics and in pushing our students (whose names we know and in whose success we are clearly invested) to be the best readers, thinkers, and writers they can be.

To give you an idea of the curricular diversity we offer, here is a sampling of new and often innovative courses we've offered in recent years:

Undergraduate:

Literature and the Environment: The Wilderness Debate; Samuel Beckett's Fiction; Literary Modernism; U.S. Realism & Naturalism; The problem of Evil in Literature and Film; Shakespeare; Milton; Irish Ghost Stories; Salman Rushdie; Science Fiction: Other Worlds; Dylan and His Times; Gothic Fiction and Film; Victorian Literature and Culture; Asian American Literature; Adventures in Pynchon; Petromodernity; Faulkner; Canadian Literature; Enlightenment Frontiers; Shakespeare and Film; Northern Ireland's "Troubles"; Contemporary Irish & N. Irish Literature; U.S. Writers of Color; Multicultural British Literature; Literature and Music; Romanticism and Social Justice; Literary Approaches to Drama; Contemporary Caribbean and Island Literature; Life of Poetry; Chaucer; Medieval Literature: the Language of Love; Anglo–Saxon Literature; Medieval Frame Narrative; Medieval Storytelling; Death and Literature; Medieval Lyric; Literature and the Environment; American Renaissance; Ecocriticism and Montana Literature; Montana: Poetics of Place; Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens; Contemporary Women Fiction Writers; SF: Philip K. Dick & Ursula K. Le Guin; Literature, Media, and the Public Sphere; Seduction, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

Graduate:

Eco-phenomenology; American Literature: Autotheory; The Contemporary Novel; Comparative Literature: Whales & Shaggy Dogs; Woolf & Beckett; American Post-War Poetry; Romanticism and Eco-Criticism; Petromodernity; Atlantic Passages; Empire and Resistance; Re-thinking the Animal; Music and Literature; Eco-feminism; The Question of Modernity; Imperialism and Romance; Anthropocene Dreams; India and the English Novel; Salman Rushdie; Literature and Ecological Justice; Medieval Theories of Love; Art and Literature in Late Medieval England; Leslie Marmon Silko; Ecocriticism; The Ecology of Native American Literatures; Critical Theories in Native American Literatures; Virginia Woolf; Milton and the Romantics.