SUMMER SESSION II & FALL COURSES ENROLLING NOW
Mimicry with Jeffrey Stuker: A Two-Part Course in June and August
SPRING COURSES NOW COMPLETE
Winter 2026 Course One
ENCLOSURE in Dorothy Wordsworth
& Jane Austen’s Emma:
a course in Pastoral Prose & Protest
taught by Stacie Vos
Tuesdays
9:30 PST/5:30 GMT
February 3-March 10
$375 (sliding scale)
I went up into the lane
to collect a few green mosses
to make the Chimney gay
against my darling’s return.
The Grasmere Journal
In this course we will read two texts: the combined edited journals of Dorothy Wordsworth and the novel Emma of Jane Austen. Both texts engage heavily with what can be called the “pastoral,” a term usually reserved, paradoxically, for the most elite male poets from the originator Virgil (Eclogues) to Renaissance writers like William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. In these prose works by Austen and Wordsworth, the pastoral becomes a space for invention, combination, and critique. Unlike their predecessors, Austen and Wordsworth wrote social critique in their own voices, not in the voices of imagined shepherds.
These texts help us to consider again the questions posed by the brother of Dorothy Wordsworth, William, and his collaborator Samuel Coleridge, when they asked, what is poetry? What is a poet? The place of literature in the world, and the relationship between prose and poetry in our heretofore patriarchal literary history, will remain at the core of our thoughts.
Readers in this weekly seminar will be invited to unpack the various genres and perspectives presented in these works, considering how the casual life-writing of Dorothy Wordsworth compares to the novel of Jane Austen, whose 250th anniversary has just passed with much celebration.
Course Two
Woolf & Browne
with Vos & Stuker
a course in close reading
February 2026
Thursdays at 930 PST/1230 EST/530 GMT
$375 (sliding scale)
Rhyme and metre helped the poets to keep the tumult of their perceptions in order. But the prose writer, without these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in interminable catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the convolutions of his own rich draperies.
“The Elizabethan Lumber Room”
by Virginia Woolf
How is reading a creative act? This course will facilitate close readings of essays by Virginia Woolf and Thomas Browne, with particular emphasis on the process of attentive interpretation of a sentence in order to unearth multiple, often contradictory, expressions of meaning. Rhetorical, historical, literary, and social subjects attain new density precisely by attending to them as elaborate constructions of language.
Readings will include essays by Virginia Woolf (especially her Times Literary Supplement piece on Browne and a recent edited collection of her essays by Oxford University Press) and Browne’s HYDRIOTAPHIA, Urne Buriall and Religio Medici.
This course is co-taught by writer Stacie Vos and visual artist Jeffrey Stuker. Both have studied at Yale and UC San Diego and have taught the close reading of literary and theoretical texts at various schools over the past two decades. Stuker has a current essay out withLARB Quarterly and Vos has recently published with postmedieval.
R E G I S T R A T I O N
Course One (Enclosure in Austen’s Emma & Wordsworth’s Journals):
contact stacie.vos@aya.yale.edu
to register by January 10 ($25 late registration fee after this date)
drop-ins welcome throughout course for $45 per session
Course Two (Browne, Woolf & Close Reading):
contact stacie.vos@aya.yale.edu & jeffrey.stuker@gmail.com
to register by January 10
About Enclosure Academy
Enclosure Academy is a new component of the ongoing programming of the Enclosure Group (est. 2020). With a first course called Lives of Good Women in the fall of 2025, the virtual academy will continue to offer brief and interactive seminars on topics related to women’s writing, the history of devotion, and the structures of enclosure across time and medium.
For more information, to join the group, and/or attend our next event, please contact us and follow us on Instagram (@enclosedwithin).
To revisit past blog posts, click here.