The English Department has an especially strong community of scholars whose work focuses on the novel and short fiction. Courses span more than three centuries and traverse the globe. Students can trace a history of fiction from the romances, epistolary fiction, satire, and Gothic novels of the eighteenth century through the proliferating popular forms and expanding readership created by nineteenth-century global and cultural expansion. The trajectory continues in courses that investigate contemporary experimental narrative, postcolonial fiction, and popular forms such as science fiction or detection, graphic novels, and digital productions. A concentration of courses in the novel and short fiction also offers students lively encounters with a variety of critical methodologies and theoretical perspectives.