What does Sappho have to do with Audre Lorde? What about Shakespeare and Ocean Vuong? This course will explore how ideas and dimensions of queerness have shifted and changed over the course of centuries, leading up to the present. We will start with the ancient Greeks and end with modern queer poets, arriving at the 21st century by way of William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and various other poets and writers who have explored, defined, or meandered around queer identity within their work. While the class will be primarily rooted in the English literary tradition, we will also make time for both ancient influences and modern postcolonial writing, asking what stories have been left out of the English canon and popular conceptions of the queer writer. We will consider the imperfect nature of the archive, queer existence as monstrous, queerness as commodity, and patterns of queer subtext and critical erasure. Class will meet once a week for two hours and the majority of class time will be devoted to class discussions on the assigned readings. Students will be graded based on attendance and participation, weekly discussion posts, and two short papers (one due in week 6 and one due at the end of the semester).