The Daily Pennsylvanian spoke with several Penn graduate students and faculty members in the English department about how they formulate courses for The One Series program — a cornerstone of the undergraduate major.
The program, which offers four to six different seminars each semester, allows students to dissect a major literary text and is required for undergraduates pursuing an English major. Class discussions typically include emergent research methods, advanced writing, and debates surrounding canonization.
In an interview with the DP, Undergraduate Chair of the English Department Nancy Bentley explained that the TOS model benefits both the undergraduate students who take these specialized courses and the “advanced” English graduate students who “hone their pedagogical skills” as they learn to design and teach them.
Bentley stated that English department faculty members begin working with graduate students “two years before they actually teach their own course.”
“In a pedagogy class, we start discussing what kinds of texts they might select for their course,” Bentley said. “Then the following year, we start working with them closely to build a description and to build a syllabus.”
Bentley added that instructors choose their course text in consultation with the undergraduate English chair and a committee that oversees undergraduate classes in the department.
“The idea is that that one text allows students to go really deeply into both that text and a constellation of questions that surround that text,” Bentley said. “These courses seem like a nice way to really go in depth and slowly read a text so that you are really sure you know it.”
Fourth-year Ph.D. candidate Clara Jimenez, who is currently teaching a course in the program titled “Many years later: Márquez, Macondo, and the Magically Real,” also noted the benefit of TOS model.
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“What’s really interesting about the way that it’s structured is that you spend so much time being able to actually get into the weeds of each of the sections that you partition out for a certain class session,” Jimenez told the DP. “It gives all the students a lot more time to really get into the themes and really understand what’s going on in terms of characterization and character development plot progression.”
Sixth-year Ph.D. candidate Jonathan Dick, who taught two courses in the program and currently serves as a graduate mentor for TOS instructors, said he was part of the first teaching after the model was “institutionalized.”
Dick explained that before the program existed, graduate students in the English department taught “what was called a junior research seminar” with “very similar aims” to TOS. The purpose of the junior research seminar, as with TOS courses, was to introduce students to “norms of academic research through an intensive and sometimes theoretical study of a particular subject.”
According to Dick, graduate students leading the junior research seminar were often teaching what they were writing about in their research dissertations, which led to courses that were “really complicated” and “a little bit too niche.” Dick said that some courses “sometimes didn’t get enrollment because they seemed a little bit esoteric,” which is why the department switched TOS — “partly to alleviate those concerns and to increase enrollment.”
Bentley noted that the English department encourages instructors to think about the students’ interests more than their own academic research when choosing the text so as to not become “bogged down.”
“When we redesigned the program and invented The One Series program, we tried to actually say, ‘Well don’t think about what you’re most engaged in with your own research … think about what you enjoyed most in your own undergraduate training,’” Bentley said.
Dick also described the program as “unique,” adding that it was “really refreshing” to be “allowed to unfold a conversation” over the course of a semester.
“In so many of our regular English classes, because we’re trying to expose students to a whole range of literary objects and histories, you barrel through a lot of objects at a breakneck speed,” Dick told the DP. “But with The One Series, because one of the points is to do a sustained investigation of an object over the course of a semester, students are allowed to exfoliate different aspects of the objects that they wouldn’t have had time to interrogate in other courses.”
Dick stated that when crafting the syllabus and choosing the text for the first TOS course that he taught in fall 2023, titled “Reading Middlemarch,” he thought the novel would be a “really fantastic anchor for a One Series course because the book is very long and very complicated.”
For Dick’s second course — taught in spring 2025 and titled “The Life of the Mind: Literary Study and the Campus Novel” — he “wanted to think about why the English major was a really robust site of cultural representation at the moment when universities seem hell bent on destroying and emaciating English departments.”
Dick described his selection of Hannah Arendt’s novel as “picking something that [he] thought would be complicated and rich enough to unpack over the course of a 14 week term.”
Similar to Dick, Jimenez chose her course’s text based on what she “thought would not be too excessively long, but also feel like it could take up a majority of semester.” She ended up choosing “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez primarily due to a recent film adaptation that received “a lot of attention and a lot of buzz.”
Jimenez said she felt as though, within the English department, there are “not a ton of courses … that focus on Latin American literature.” She emphasized the importance of highlighting Latin American literature and influential Latin American authors in her course, so that students could glean a “comprehensive understanding of what was going on in the literary world in Latin America.”
“It’s really important for [students] to see that there’s a whole global literary scene outside of the U.S. and outside of just the English language, where really great authors have produced some amazing literature that speaks to what was happening in history when it was written and how it is still really relevant to what’s going on in our lives now,” Jimenez said.
Fourth-year Ph.D. candidate Michael Watkins, who taught a TOS course titled “American Infinity: Walt Whitman’s Revolutionary Leaves of Grass” last fall, said he chose the book “Leaves of Grass” to teach poetry and “make the case for Whitman being an important part of the American poetry canon.”
Watkins added that he wanted to “go against the grain” because poetry is “rare” in both TOS and the English department.
“The ability with The One Series to expand one moment in literary history is really cool, because you have the time to answer questions about works that would otherwise be brushed aside,” he said.
Watkins added that his process for building the course was deeply informed by his “point of view in the literary world”
“Part of being a graduate student in English is that you care a lot about a relatively narrow slice of the literary world, and you can only do so much to reorient yourself toward a different aspect of the literary world,” Watkins said. “It’s inevitable that what you’re teaching is going to be filtered by your research interests.”
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Senior reporter Amy Liao covers clubs and societies and can be reached at liao@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies philosophy, politics, and economics. Follow her on X @amyliiao.
