Courses

100: Intro to College Composition
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereq: Students required to take the MSN ESLAT cannot enroll until the ESL 118 requirement is satisfied

English 100 is an introduction to college composition that begins to prepare students for the demands of writing in the university and for a variety of contexts beyond the classroom. Students will compose several shorter and longer essays totaling 25-30 pages of revised writing, develop critical reading and thinking skills and information literacy, and practice oral communication.

120: Introduction to Theatre & Dramatic Literature
Mary Trotter
MW 11:00-11:50am Humanities 3650
Cross-Listed with Theatre and Drama

English/Theatre and Drama 120 explores the rich world of dramatic writing and theatrical performance. It is offered in two formats: a 3-credit option (sections 301-316) and a 4-credit Comm-B option (sections 317-322). In both formats we read important plays, view recorded stage productions, and write and think analytically about theatre and drama. Styles of theatre we will discuss include classical Greek, Noh drama, realism, expressionism, epic theatre, postcolonial theatre and postmodern theatre.

140: Comm B Topics in English Literature
Topic: The Figure of the Outsider: Writing from the Margins
Anja Jovic-Humphrey
TR 9:55-10:45am Science 180
Discussion Section Times Vary
Discussion 309 Honors Only (H)

Jack Kerouac and his friends go on road trips across America, crossing each other’s paths and making the continent seem small at the time when there are no cell phones to help them stay in touch. Sylvia Plath’s character Esther Greenwood wonders whether she is unwomanly because she is not sure whether she wants to get married and have a baby. Ralph Ellison’s narrator addresses us from a basement, saying: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

In this course, we will look at various kinds of outsiders, nonconformists, and “marginal” characters in the broad sense of the term. When does sanity turn into madness? How can race, gender, or ethnicity make us “invisible” – or too visible? To which extent is conformity a positive force, and to which extent it can stifle our sense of self?

We will examine the nature of sanity/madness, gender, race, ethnicity, and lifestyle, and try to understand what and why the society at large labels as “normal” or “abnormal.”

141: Science Fiction and Fantasy
Topic: Global Science Fiction
Sarah Wells
TR 2:30-3:45pm White 4275

Science fiction (SF) has become a key genre for experiencing and interpreting contemporary problems on a global scale. This course moves between literature and cinema from different geographic and historical contexts to question the tendency to read SF produced in the U.S. as somehow speaking for the planet. Throughout, we will explore the genre as a unique lens into global issues — including immigration and borders, environmental destruction, surveillance and artificial intelligence, exploitation and the economy, and the role of race and gender in the creation of utopian or dystopian worlds.

150: Literature & Culture of Asian America
Tim Yu
TR 11:00-11:50am Humanities 3650
Discussion Section Times Vary
Cross-Listed with Asian American Studies

Course Catalog Description: Since the 19th century, “America” has often been defined by its relationship with “Asia,” through cultural influence, immigration, imperialism, and war. Traces the role of Asia and Asians in American literature and culture, from the Chinese and Japanese cultural influences that helped shape literary modernism to the rise of a distinctive culture produced by Asian immigrants to America and their descendants.

153.001: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Representing Nature
Heather Swan
MW 1:20-2:10pm Humanities 3650
Discussion Section Times Vary
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies

During this course, “Literature and the Environment,” you will practice identifying and analyzing the ways in which writers have represented “nature” and the environment in works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. The course will be divided up into three units of inquiry on the following topics: 1) Wilderness and Resource Depletion, 2) Human/Nonhuman Relationships in the Age of Extinction, and 3) Resilience in the Anthropocene. At the outset of the course, we will be introduced to some more traditional concepts of nature, the romantic sublime, the wild, etc. in order to interrogate their evolving meanings in this contemporary moment. We will also examine the ways in which these ideas intersect with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and social and economic mobility. Lecture, discussion, writing assignments, and experiential projects will all be important components of the class.

153.002: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Queer and Anticolonial Gardening
M. Ty
MW 2:30-3:45pm Education L185
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies

A semester-long study of practices of gardening that resist normative and white supremacist logics of organizing life, as well as its reproduction.

155: Myth and Literature
Topic: Myths of Modernity
Joseph Bowling
MW 2:30-3:45pm Ingraham 222

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century transformed the intellectual culture of Europe. Reason became the principle virtue, revered above all other mental faculties. Without reason, the philosophers of the Enlightenment argued, no one could be truly free. The sociologist Max Weber describes the effect of this change in values as “disenchanting.” According to this view, after the Enlightenment, society became increasingly secularized and belief in the mystical and mythical waned. In this class, we’ll take up this story of modernity and ask if the “modern world” is truly free of myths. Our starting point will be the concept of Enlightenment itself: beyond its historical meaning, how might this term itself rely on myth? From there, we’ll turn to the core beliefs that define modernity–reason, scientific progress, individual autonomy, political liberty—and consider the corresponding myths that buttress each.

156: Literature and Medicine
Topic: The Art of Healing
Colin Gillis
T 6:00-8:30pm Ingraham 115

This course introduces the basic skills of literary analysis, examines literature as a source of knowledge about medicine and a catalyst for critical reflection about its organizing concepts and practices, and considers the value of art and beauty in health care. We will also explore how and why literature might serve as a social and psychological resource for patients and healthcare practitioners.

162.001: Shakespeare
Topic: Shakespeare Now
Josh Calhoun
TR 9:30-10:45pm ENGR Hall 3534

NOTE: THIS IS *NOT* A LARGE LECTURE COURSE! This will be a SMALL, DISCUSSION-BASED COURSE, and a significant portion of the course grade will be based on Attendance and Participation for each of our class meetings. Besides active discussion, other modes of participation will include class presentations, impromptu acting/blocking scenes in class, and a collaborative note-taking project. Students will read approximately 10 Shakespeare plays (one play per week for most weeks in the semester).

167: British and American Writers
Topic: “Ghosts, Monsters, and the Weird”
David Zimmerman
Online
This is a modular section that meets January 3, 2023 thru January 22, 2023
(Session Code XCC, 3 weeks of instruction)

We’ll be studying fiction and films about ghosts, monsters, and paranormal phenomena. These works feature vampire romances, weird science fiction, an iconic ghost novel, and more. We’ll also read several works that re-write famous ghost and monster fiction from new perspectives. We’ll examine how authors use these stories to ask profound questions about our human as well as our social identities. What does it mean to be human? How do tales of the dead, the undead, the uncanny, and the supernatural intersect with analyses of racism, gender, and class?

173.001: Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: Race Science and Science Fiction
Amadi Ozier
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Vleck B223

This course explores black speculative fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century broadly–from science fiction and fantasy to Afrofuturism and Afropunk. We’ll read science fiction through multiple forms, including novels, short stories, plays, film, and music. Texts include the early speculative fiction of Martin Delaney, William J. Wilson (“Ethiop”), W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and George Schuyler alongside later works by Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, Tananarive Due, and Nalo Hopkinson.

We’ll also read primary sources from the eighteenth to twentieth century, from leading social scientists like Du Bois, Franz Boas, Kelly Miller, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as from racist scientists and absolute amateurs, exploring popular topics such as: phrenology, Negro psychology, mesmerism, miscegenation, magnetism, electricity, sexual reproduction, hygiene, epidemiology, utopia and dystopia, artificial intelligence, and climate justice.

174.001: Literature and Social Justice
Topic: Staging Environmental Justice
Jennifer Plants
MW 2:30-3:45pm Mech Engr 1152

From toxic drinking water and floods to rising temperatures and raging wildfires, environmental risks rarely come with a choice to opt out. This course will focus on how theatre and performance are used as tools in the struggle for environmental justice. What can we learn from Shakespeare and Lin-Manuel Miranda when we examine how their work relates to the natural world? Can a play about Hurricane Katrina do anything to protect those vulnerable to flooding in the future? Can you write a play about climate change or is it too big for the scale of the stage? Course texts will include plays, multi-media performances, and environmental criticism, supplemented by guest artists and mini-field trips.

174.002: Literature and Social Justice
Topic: Literatures of Decolonization
Kirk Sides
TR 2:30-3:45pm Noland 119

This course is a literary and cultural introduction to decolonization, the process by which colonies become independent of the colonizing country. The course ranges chronologically across much of the twentieth century up to the present and geographically from the Caribbean to South Asia. We will look at a variety of texts and movies, including documentaries, and ask questions about media, art, and history in relation to the political and social forces surrounding moments of decolonization. We will also explore expressions of cultural nationalism, ideas of racial and ethnic solidarities, migration, freedom, as well as some of the current debates around institutional decolonization, including within higher education.

176.001: Topics in Literature and Film
Topic: The Office
Joseph Bowling
TR 4:35-5:25pm Birge 145
Discussion Section Times Vary

From Herman Melville’s haunting tale of a mysterious clerk, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” to the hit sitcom The Office, life at the office has fascinated American audiences. Depicted as a site of drudgery and alienating tedium, yet also regarded as a source of social mobility and power, the office occupies a carries contradictory and ambivalent meanings in the American cultural imagination. In this class, we will study office narratives in literature and film to explore this conflicted fascination with the office, office workers, and office culture.

177.002: Literature and Popular Culture
Topic: Narco-Narratives in the Americas
Oscar Useche
MWF 9:55-10:45am Humanities 1217

In this course we will explore the global genre of narco-narratives—in the context of literature, film, and television—and study the different social, racial and cultural constructions of illegality and violence that emerge around it. We are interested in understanding the origins of drug trafficking and the need for its symbolic representation in different audio-visual and written formats. In order to do so, we will inquire into the creation of a particular aesthetic sensitivity that is reflected in multiple layers of reality: social behaviors, creative expressions, language, and national stereotypes, among many others.

178: Digital Media, Literature, and Culture
Topic: Social Media Writing
Ainehi Edoro
MW 11:00-11:50am Educ Sci 204
Discussion Section Times Vary

Social media can seem like pointless babble, but it is not. There is logic to how we write on social media. Emojis, typos, misspellings, hashtags, abbreviations, all-caps, and memes are part of a complex language system with quite a few rules and lots of interesting patterns. Focusing on Tik Tok, Instagram, and Facebook, we will take a deep dive into the literary universe of digital culture to uncover the order behind the chaos of writing on social media. This course invites you to learn to write better by drawing inspiration from digital technology and the challenges they present for self-expression.

182.001: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Topic: Shakespeare and Film (Gardens, Environments, Nations)
Karen Britland
TR 2:30-3:45pm Education 151
Requisite: Declared in Honors program (H)

In 2015, Justin Kurzel, the film director, released a movie version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that investigated the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly PTSD suffered by military veterans. A few years on, however, Kurzel’s movie looks like the director also had something else on his mind. With its wide-angle vistas of Scottish mountains that seem bleak and impersonal, and its insistence that human habitation is fragile and impermanent, Kurzel’s movie looks more and more to be registering anxiety about climate change.

In this class, we will read and discuss four of Shakespeare’s plays and watch some of their modern film adaptations. We’ll discuss how people in Shakespeare’s time conceived of nature and the environment, and we’ll watch some contemporary movies to investigate how modern films represent and adapt Shakespeare’s material. This will be a discussion-heavy class: you are strongly invited to bring your own interests into our discussions and to watch film versions of the plays beyond those mentioned on the syllabus. By the end of the class you will have developed skills in close-reading Shakespeare’s plays and their movie adaptations, and you will be aware of major debates concerning the plays and the processes of adapting Shakespeare’s work for the cinema.

182.002: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Ingrid Diran
TR 9:30-10:45am Humanities 2261
Requisite: Declared in Honors program (H)

Course Catalog Description: Introductory honors course in discussion format. Topic and materials will vary.

200: Writing Studio
Emily Hall
W 5:30-7:00pm Chadbourne 126
Requisite: Consent of instructor required

Rose Writing Studio is a one-credit writing workshop course where students receive support and peer mentoring on writing projects for other classes. The course emphasizes navigating the writing process, developing effective revision strategies, and building confidence with writing. To enroll in the Rose Writing Studio, students must have at least two papers assigned in other spring courses. Priority for enrollment is given to Chadbourne Residential College students.

201: Intermediate Composition
TA taught courses
Section Times Vary
Requisite: Consent of instructor; Satisfied Communications A requirement and sophomore standing; not open to special students

English 201 is a small, topic-driven writing course that fulfills part B of the University’s Communication requirement. Sections of 201 offer hands-on practice with writing and revision, building on skills developed in earlier writing courses and providing new opportunities for students to grow as writers. Though topics vary by section and semester, this class consistently provides experience writing in multiple genres and for diverse audiences.

204: Writing, Rhetoric, & Literacy
Topic: Writing and the Body: Rhetoric of Illness and Wellness
Jennifer Conrad
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Vleck B139
Requisite: Satisfied Communications A requirement and sophomore standing; not open to special students

Although we may think of writing as an expressive enterprise, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” (Didion, 1979), which suggests that writing—and rhetoric—plays a foundational role in our embodied experiences of the world. This course examines how the language of illness and wellness operates and asks what it means to “heal.” How might the stories that we tell help us to understand experiences of illness, trauma, disability, and caregiving? We’ll explore an array of texts, from scholarly articles to narratives about illness and recovery in multiple genres, including memoir, essay, and film. Analyzing the language used to talk about illness, wellness, and the body in the texts we encounter will anchor our classroom community as we develop strategies for producing our own effective arguments. Along the way, we will interrogate forms of personal identity and consider how the stories that we tell create or shape communities.

207: Introduction to Creative Writing
TA taught courses
Section Times Vary
Requisite: First Year, freshman or sophomore standing only

In this course, students are taught the fundamental elements of craft in both fiction (plot, point of view, dialogue, and setting, etc.) and poetry (the image, the line, sound and meter, etc.). This class is taught as a workshop, which means class discussion will focus on both craft (published stories, poems, and essays) and, perhaps more importantly, the fiction and poetry written by each student. That is, the student writing becomes the text, and the instructor leads a sympathetic, but critical, discussion of the particular work at hand. Students should expect to read and comment on two or three published works per week as well as the work of their peers. To enable a collegial and productive class setting, all sections of 207 are capped at eighteen students.
English 207 satisfies a Comm B requirement.

241: Literature and Culture 1: to the 18th Century
Jordan Zweck
TR 11:00-11:50am Ingraham 19
Discussion Section Times Vary
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Not open to students who took ENGL 215 prior to Fall 2014

Course Catalog Description: What is a person, a home, a nation, a world? What we now call “English literature” begins with these questions, imagining a cosmos filled with gods and heroes, liars and thieves, angels and demons, dragons and dungeons, whores and witches, drunken stupor and religious ecstasy. Authors crafted answers to these questions using technologies of writing from parchment to the printing press, and genres old and new, from epic and romance to drama and the sonnet. Develops skills of critical reading and writing that are essential to majors and non-majors alike.

242: Literature and Culture II: from the 18th Century to the Present
Elaine Cannell
MW 11:00-11:50am Microbial Sciences Bldg 1520
Discussion Section Times Vary
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Not open to students who took ENGL 216 prior to Fall 2014

Considers a period of unparalleled tumult: a time of vast world empires and startling new technologies, revolutions that radically redefined self and community, two cataclysmic world wars, the emergence of ideas of human rights, and the first truly global feelings of interconnectedness. How has literature captured and contributed to these dramatic upheavals? In this iteration of ENGL 242, we will explore the novels, poetry, and short stories of this tumultuous period through the generic, theoretical, and historical frame of “haunting.” In part, this will mean engaging genres which directly interrogate hauntedness, including Gothic ghost stories and contemporary science fiction and horror. But material history also haunts the present in less obvious ways. The texts we read in this course will also ask how the specter of slavery haunts the contemporary Transatlantic world, and how inherited trauma and histories of oppression might continue to haunt women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. Through this analytical approach, we will develop skills of critical reading and writing that are essential to majors and non-majors alike.

243.002: American Literary Cultures
Amina El-Annan
TR 9:30-10:45am Microbial Science 1510
Requisite: Sophomore standing

Course Catalog Description: Is America a new world, a city on a hill, an imperial power? Are American literatures revolutionary, nationalist, countercultural? Explores how writers have wrestled with such questions for several hundred years. We will encounter literary figures from white whales to red wheelbarrows, focusing on the diverse geographies, cultural practices, and political mythologies that compose the Americas, and interrogating what is meant by American literature and what it means to be American. We will consider the ways that genres from Native stories to slave narratives to postmodern novels have contributed to social, intellectual, and political currents of American cultures. Develops skills of critical reading and writing that are essential to majors and non-majors alike.

245.001: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Literary Architectures: Making Space in American Literature
Sarah Ensor
TR 9:30-10:45am Education L151
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

In this class, we will consider “literary architectures,” broadly conceived, and analyze the social configurations that these structures make space for. As we move back and forth between discussing the structures depicted in American literature and the structures (forms, genres, traditions) of that literature itself, we will ask questions like the following: How do gender, sexuality, race, and class shape our inhabitation of space, and vice versa? How does our built environment affect our relationships to each other – including, importantly, whom we care for and how? When literary characters inhabit, dismantle, or remake physical structures, what can that teach us about how we might inhabit, dismantle, or remake social structures? And how has authors’ play with literary form – including the space of the page and the dimensions of reading itself – been a way to make new relational possibilities legible, and effect social change?

245.002: Seminar in the Major
Topic: The Interracial Romance
Laila Amine
MW 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 483
Requisite: Sophomore standing

Why was the interracial romance a popular theme in American literature and cinema even during the period in which no African American and white individuals could legally wed in most states? Why does the black and white romance remain a fascination? The course will look for answers by examining multiple facets of the interracial romance from the 1920s to the new millennium. We’ll read stories by Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and Danzy Senna, and discuss classic films such as Pinky, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Jungle Fever. We’ll re-enter the court rooms of the Rhinelander and Loving cases and revisit historical landmarks. Equipped with the legal and historical perspectives, we will consider how authors deploy the interracial theme to address larger concerns about citizenship, race, and power. One key goal of the course is to develop your analytical and interpretation skills of cultural productions in daily discussions and written essays.

245.003: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Disability & Technology
Amy Gaeta
MW 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 579
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

This course focuses on the relationship between disability and technology in novels, short stories, films, poetry, and artworks, and asks students to examine the stakes of how this relationship is represented. This class will challenge the notion that having a disability is a deficient or something to mourn or ‘fix.’ We will explore questions like: How are ideas about disability and disabled people influenced by the narratives surrounding new, intelligent technologies? What does it mean to ‘hack’ the body? Are science fiction figures like cyborgs and A.I. robots more related to disability than we may think? If we follow the narrative that more technology ultimately leads to social progress, what happens when progress means using technology to ‘cure’ disabled people? Students will practice reading and writing skills necessary for English majors as well as be exposed to texts and ideas from adjacent disciplines, including disability studies, science and technology studies, design theory, and more. We will cover a variety of topics including defining disability literature, the posthuman, biohacking, and normalcy.

245.006: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Pathways and Passages: The Transatlantic World
Richard Ness
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 574
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

Instead of seeing the Atlantic Ocean as a chasm that separates Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, this course will approach the Atlantic world as a complex network of pathways and passages that circulated bodies, commodities, revolutionary ideas, and literary forms. The course will explore what looking at literature through an Atlantic lens—instead of one that emphasizes traditional national boundaries—brings to light. What new voices are brought into the conversation? What new cultural connections are we able to make? How did literature and literary influence travel? What transatlantic conversations can we gain further insight into? This course will focus on literature produced primarily in “the long 19th century.” Topics we will explore will include revolutions, political and literary influence, slavery, freedom, science, and conceptions of nature.

248.001: Women in Ethnic American Literature
Anja Jovic-Humphrey
Online
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Gender and Women Studies
This is a modular section that meets January 03, 2023 thru January 22, 2023
(Session Code XCC, 3 weeks of instruction)

Course catalog description: American literature by and about women, written by authors from ethnic groups.

307: Creative Writing: Fiction & Poetry Workshop
TA taught courses
Section Times Vary
Requisites: Junior standing or ENGL 207. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 407, 408, 409, 410, 469, 508, 509, or 695
Satisfies a Comm B requirement
Satisfies a workshop requirement for the emphasis in creative writing
Accelerated Honors (!)

This class is similar to English 207 (see above) but with greater emphasis on craft (narrative control, poetic form) and the writing process. Like 207, this class is taught as a workshop, which means class discussion will focus on both craft (published stories, poems, and essays) and, perhaps more importantly, the fiction and poetry written by each student. That is, the student writing becomes the text, and the instructor leads a sympathetic, but critical, discussion of the particular work at hand. Students should expect to read and comment on two or three published works per week as well as the work of their peers. To enable a collegial and productive class setting, all sections of 307 are capped at 16 students.
English 307 satisfies a workshop requirement for the emphasis in creative writing.
English 307 satisfies a Comm B requirement

314: Structure of English
Juliet Huynh
MWF 9:55-10:45am Humanities 2637
Requisite: Sophomore standing

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of the syntactic structure of English phrasal grammar. Students will descriptively analyze the structure of words and phrases while also comparing them to actual spoken English sentences. The course grade will be assessed based on participation, homework assignments, quizzes, and a final paper.

319: Language, Race, and Identity
Tom Purnell
MWF 12:05-12:55pm Humanities 2637
Requisite: Sophomore standing

Contribution of anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, linguistics in construction of racial identity; consideration of American English use in ethnically affiliated speech communities (African Americans, Latinos/as, Native Americans, Asian Americans). Topics: brain form/function; linguistic concepts at interface of language, culture and biology; theory of groups and group affiliation; self-expression of social identity.

320: Linguistic Theory and Child Language
Jacee Cho
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 394
Requisite: Sophomore standing

*Students who have taken English 420 Universal Grammar and Child Language Acquisition prior to Spring 2020 may not enroll in this course.

[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad) This course provides an introduction to the linguistic study of child language within the generative theory. According to this theory, humans are born with genetically determined linguistic knowledge called Universal Grammar, which guides children in learning language. Students will learn basic concepts of the generative theory and learn to apply them to the study of child language. Topics include universal linguistic principles that govern children’s acquisition of syntax and semantics and cross-linguistic influence in children acquiring more than one language from birth or early childhood. We will discuss empirical research studies testing the Universal Grammar theory of language acquisition.

*There is no required textbook. All reading materials will be available electronically on the course website.

336: Eighteenth-Century Novel
Mark Vareschi
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Vleck B215
Requisite: Sophomore standing

Where did the novel in English come from? How did the novel come to be the dominant literary form in modern culture? What is so “novel” about the novel? This course will explore the central questions surrounding the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century through authors such as: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. The novel of this period was fundamentally an experimental, adventurous, and innovative form that was subject to interrogation by both readers and writers. We will seek to understand how these novels variously work to represent truth, consciousness, history, and everyday life. Further, we will attend to the novels on a formal level to examine the questions they raise about the generic conventions of narrative fiction in order to understand how the novel came to resemble its current form in contemporary culture.

345: Nineteenth-Century Novel
Topic: Gender and Authorship
Amanda Shubert
TR 11:00-12:15pm Humanities 2637
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

A survey of the nineteenth-century British novel, a genre that boasts immersive storytelling, page-turning plots, and unforgettable characters. We will meet witty heroines, madwomen, and monsters in locations as disparate as the English country house, the London Jewish community, a British slave plantation in Antigua, and the icy Arctic. The course’s theme – “gender and authorship” – means that we are exploring the rise and professionalization of the woman writer and the new possibilities for female self-expression in the rapidly modernizing but still relentlessly patriarchal world of the 1800s. Authors include Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Amy Levy, with trips to the Chazen Museum and popular movie adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre to round things out.

350.001: Special Topics in Gender & Literature
Topic: Queer Art of Memoir, Art of Queer Memoir
A Finn Enke
W 8:15-10:45am Sterling 1339
Requisites: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies
Honors Only (H)

Written and visual modes of storying queer embodiments, BIPOC and dis/abled artist narratives engaging diverse pasts, presents, and futures.

350.002: Special Topics in Gender & Literature
Topic: Willa Cather: Reading Queerly
Sarah Ensor
TR 1:00-2:15pm Sterling 3425
Requisites: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies
Honors Only (H)

What does queer theory look like when it has an object – namely, a literary text – in its sights? In this course, we will ask what it means to read queerly and, relatedly, what makes a text queer. Is reading (or writing) queerly a matter of theme? Of form? Of style? Of the writer’s biography? Of the characters’ habits of relation? We will begin to answer these questions (while undoubtedly raising many others) by reading a series of texts by the American writer Willa Cather, whose oblique and complicated relationship to her characters’ – and her own – sexuality has made her work a favorite object of attention among queer theorists, even those who don’t customarily turn their attention to American literature. We will read Cather novels, short stories, and essays alongside variously queer interpretations of them, developing our own practice of “queer reading” by attending closely both to Cather’s own topics, style, and form and to the various ways in which these aspects of her writing have been engaged by queer scholars. As we proceed, we will also trace the forms of community forged between and among queer critics, considering how works of criticism respond not only to the tenets of queer theory, and not only to Cather’s writing, but also to one another. To what extent is literary criticism fundamentally a social practice? And how might we understand the forms of indirect or triangulated relation that these critics forge with each other by way of their shared engagement with Cather as themselves being quintessentially queer?

351.001: Modernist American Literature
Topic: Modernist Novels (1914-1945)
Sarah Wood
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Hise 394
Requisite: Sophomore standing

In this popular course, we will read some of the best novels of the early part of the last century by authors you will be glad to have read. We will move from Cather’s Midwest to Jean Toomer and Faulkner’s South, from Hemingway’s Europe to Ann Petry’s Harlem and Steinbeck’s California. Literature during this time period was experimental, powerful, and influential. We have so much to learn from these texts—about literature, American culture and the power of language. These novels will generate conversations about gender roles, racial conflicts, class, political protest, and more which we will relate to our contemporary moment.

351.002: Modernist American Literature
Topic: Modernist Novels (1914-1945)
Sarah Wood
TR 1:00-2:15pm Van Hise 394
Requisite: Sophomore standing

In this popular course, we will read some of the best novels of the early part of the last century by authors you will be glad to have read. We will move from Cather’s Midwest to Jean Toomer and Faulkner’s South, from Hemingway’s Europe to Ann Petry’s Harlem and Steinbeck’s California. Literature during this time period was experimental, powerful, and influential. We have so much to learn from these texts—about literature, American culture and the power of language. These novels will generate conversations about gender roles, racial conflicts, class, political protest, and more which we will relate to our contemporary moment.

374: African and Africa Diaspora Literature and Culture
Topic: Travel in African Diaspora Literature
Laila Amine
M 4:00-6:30pm Van Vleck B231
Requisite: Sophomore standing

This course examines contemporary travel accounts by African Diaspora authors, with an emphasis on African American classics. We will explore the genre of travel writing and how it rethinks widespread forms of black mobility (migration, exile, dislocation). In reviewing current trends in travel writing, scholar Marie Louise Pratt observes that they have failed to look over the shoulders of non-European travelers. In this course we will remedy this failure of the imagination by reading black Anglophone texts that make visible new travel narrators and their endlessly fraught and fascinating contacts with unfamiliar peoples, places, languages, and cultures. Along our reading journey, we will become familiar with major criticism and concepts in travel writing.

375: Latinx Literatures of Migration and Diaspora
Theresa Delgadillo
TR 9:30-10:45am Comp Sci 1257
Requisite: Sophomore standing

What makes people migrate? How does migration challenge both individuals and societies? This course will focus on Latinx literatures about migration and will include late-twentieth and twenty-first century stories, novels, plays and autobiographical accounts. In these Latinx texts, characters grapple with the choice or necessity to leave home – whether that is a Latin American country or a U.S. city or small town – due to dispossession, environmental degradation, economic necessity, war, violence, gendered discrimination or racism. These narratives prompt us to consider the challenges of making home in a new location. Course assignments will include active class participation, short essays, a midterm and final exam, and group presentations. Readings may include work by authors Helena Viramontes, Manuel Munoz, Reyna Grande, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ana Castillo, Daniel Alarcon, Sylvia Sellers Garcia, Achy Obejas, Angie Cruz, and Julia Alvarez.

400: Advanced Composition
Topic: Creative Nonfiction for Diverse Public Audiences
Sara Kelm
TR 1:00-2:15pm Grainger 1080
Requisites: Satisfied Communications A requirement and junior standing

Focuses on the use of nonfiction (especially literary and creative nonfiction) rhetorically and ethically for diverse public audiences. Students will practice writing a range of genres–such as personal essays, profiles, ethnographies, flash nonfiction, nature/place writing, narrative journalism, etc.–with attention to varieties of style, context, critical standards, and conventions. Students will also engage with and compose multigenre/multimodal projects. Readings will include works by contemporary essayists and memoirists (e.g., Anne Lamott, Roxane Gay, Kiese Laymon, Alison Bechdel, Trevor Noah, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tina Fey, etc.). Designed for students with a strong interest in writing.

408.001: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
Ron Kuka
T 3:30-5:25pm White 7105
Requisites: Completion of one of the following with a 3.0 or higher: English 207 or 307 taken Fall 2014 or later; or English 203 taken prior to Fall 2014
Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
Accelerated Honors (!)

Course catalog description: Writing literary fiction

408.002: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
Amanda Rizkalla
T 11:00-12:55pm White 7105
Requisites: Completion of one of the following with a 3.0 or higher: English 207 or 307 taken Fall 2014 or later; or English 203 taken prior to Fall 2014
Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
Accelerated Honors (!)

In this class, we will study the mechanics of fiction so that we may use them decisively in our own work. We will draw upon a variety of literary traditions—from realism to surrealism—while leaving room for non-traditional approaches to storytelling. Most importantly, the space we create together will be a supportive, dynamic, and kind one, as we go about fostering our own creativity while encouraging that of our peers.

409.002: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
Nathaniel Marshall
M 3:30-5:25pm White 6108
Requisites: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 307, 407, 408, 410, 411, 469, 508, 509, or 695
Accelerated Honors (!)

This class will explore poetry and how it intersects with writing about place. Over the course of the semester students will read poetry collections that deeply consider place and placelessness. Readings will include the work of poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Safia Elhillo, and Amaud Jamaul Johnson. Students should expect to write and revise several poems in this course.

409.003: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
TBA
M 1:20-3:15pm White 6110
Requisites: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 307, 407, 408, 410, 411, 469, 508, 509, or 695

Course Catalog Description: Writing literary poetry.

410: Creative Writing: Playwriting Workshop
Jennifer Plants
M 4:30-6:30pm White 7105
Requisites: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 307, 407, 408, 409, 411, 469, 508, 509, or 695
Accelerated Honors (!)

Course Catalog Description: Explores the art and craft of writing for the stage. Examines strategies that writers can use to tell stories and communicate ideas both theatrically and dramatically. Covers theory and technique, reading the work of established writers and some short writing exercises. Focuses on student writing, both in the classroom and in individual conferences.

411.001: Creative Writing: Special Topics Workshop
Topic: The Deep Cut: Translating Words into Image and Vice Versa through Literary and Film Mediums
Dantiel Moniz
M 1:20-3:15pm White 7109
Requisites: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing
Accelerated Honors (!)

This course is a workshop in which intermediate writers are given the opportunity to write original fiction, read and give detailed feedback on the work of their peers, and study published fiction alongside their film and TV adaptations with the intent of developing a greater sense of imagery in their own work.

414: Global Spread of English
Tom Purnell
Online
Requisites: Sophomore standing
This is a modular section that meets January 3, 2023 thru January 22, 2023
(Session Code XCC, 3 weeks of instruction)

Course Catalog Description: Examination of the linguistic, social, and political impact of the spread of English around the world. Analysis of geographical, social, and stylistic variation in English in diverse world contexts.

415: Introduction to TESOL Methods
Joe Nosek
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: Sophomore standing

English 415 is an introduction to the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. The course explores the contexts in which English is taught, and the methods and materials used to teach it. The role of English world-wide combines with an emphasis on developing your ability to critically evaluate methods and materials, as well as familiarizing you with current practices and issues in the teaching of ESL/EFL or other second or foreign languages. We explore how people learn languages and the most effective research-based ways to teach them. You will observe ESL classes and tutor a language learner throughout the semester. This course will provide you with a foundational knowledge of language teaching and some of the necessary skills and practical knowledge to succeed as English language instructors in a wide variety of teaching contexts.

420: Topics in English Language & Linguistics
Topic: Experimental Syntax
Jacee Cho
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Hise 155
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course provides an introduction to conducting linguistic experiments to address theoretical questions in the study of syntax. We will discuss how to design linguistic experiments, collect and analyze data, and make generalizations beyond the data you have collected. This is a hands-on course which requires your active participation. Although the focus of this course is syntactic research, the fundamentals of research design and data analysis methods should carry over to research in other areas of language study such as semantics, pragmatics, or language acquisition. By the end of this course, you will have the knowledge and skills necessary to do your own linguistic experiments to explore theoretical issues in linguistics.

422: Outstanding Figure(s) in Literature before 1800
Topic: Christopher Marlowe
Ron Harris
MWF 1:20-2:10pm Education L185
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Christopher Marlowe burst onto the Elizabethan theater scene while still a college student, dazzling audiences with heroes who dreamed of world conquest and defied the limits that confine mere mortals. His poems and plays inspired a generation of English writers, including William Shakespeare, his sometime friend and rival.

Despite success as a playwright, Marlowe graduated from college facing the worst possible job market. With limited prospects, he cobbled together a life as a poet and a spy, a heretic and a counterfeiter, a gentleman and a rogue. He died before his 30th birthday, stabbed in a bar under mysterious circumstances, over “the reckoning.” (Was it a dispute over the bar tab? A lovers’ quarrel? Assassination? No one knows, though books have been written on the subject.) In between, Marlowe wrote classics that addressed themes as important today as they were four hundred years ago: personal ambition and intellectual overreach, religious conflict and civil unrest, power and sexual identity.

In the class we will read everything Marlowe wrote in his too-brief life: seven plays, two translations from the Latin classics, and a handful of poems. Many, such as “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Doctor Faustus, are familiar still. The Jew of Malta anticipates contemporary religious conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. Edward II concerns itself with homosexuality and power, while Hero and Leander recounts the tragic tale of a long-distance relationship between two young lovers. Tamburlaine the Great rises from lowly shepherd to conquer the world, yet he cannot save his beloved wife from dying of illness. There’s more, much more. We will read his works chronologically in their Elizabethan context, but we will consider too how Marlowe’s writings continue to speak to us today about important problems in our own world.

Materials
1. Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (Penguin)
2. Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations (Penguin Classics)
3. David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (Faber & Faber/Henry Holt; recommended, on reserve at College Library

424: Medieval Drama
Topic: Passion and Production
Lisa Cooper
MW 2:30-3:45pm Mech Engr 1156
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course will introduce students to the dramatic traditions of medieval England, from the church rituals of the tenth century to the flowering (and eventual decline) of the elaborate guild-produced mystery cycles and traveling troupe morality plays of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In addition to focusing closely upon the textual traces of what were once vibrant live events, we will also consider the geographical, socio-political, and of course spiritual contexts of medieval performance. To that end, we will supplement our reading of the plays themselves with discussions of maps, city records, urban chronicles, and excerpts from spiritual texts of the period; we will also take account of the many and highly divergent approaches to the plays in both past and current scholarship. Part of the final project for this course involves working in a group to creatively re-imagine and then to publicly perform a medieval play for the UW community in the last two weeks of class.

430: Topic in Early Modern Literature
Topic: Justice, Social Change, and the Literature of Tudor England
Joseph Bowling
TR 9:30-10:45am Humanities 2637
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Over the course of the sixteenth century, England underwent a series rapid and profound social, economic, political, and cultural transformations, from England’s break with Rome and the onset of the English Reformation under Henry VIII to the humanist reform of education, from the rise of agrarian capitalism to the Tudor state innovating policies of social welfare and control—all occurring during Europe’s colonial plundering of the Americas and the breakdown of the medieval worldview. In this class we will study the literature of Tudor England against this historical backdrop, with a focus on how this tumultuous century troubled conceptions of justice, understood in the period as a principle of social harmony as much as the redress of wrongs, received from classical and biblical traditions. We will begin with Sir Thomas More’s response to the injustice of enclosures in his Utopia and end with Shakespeare’s tragedy of “Roman justice” in Titus Andronicus (1.1.293)

433: Spenser
Josh Calhoun
TR 1:00-2:15pm Humanities 2637
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Perhaps because it is a rich, complex, lengthy, poem Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is seldom read in its entirety in a single course. In this course, we will take the time to inhabit Faerie Land–to learn its topographies, its characters, its poetic language, its politics, its flora and fauna, and so on. Additional primary and secondary readings will inform our in-depth reading, but FQ will be our main focus throughout the semester.

Active, self-motivated, independent reading and research is expected of each student in this upper-level course. Some independent research for this class will take place in Special Collections, which has limited hours (M-F, 9-5). Major assignments/assessments include papers, creative projects, and regular in-class presentations.

NOTE: This is not a lecture course; most of our class discussion will be student-led and student-driven, so Attendance and Participation are key factors in determining course grades.

438: Topic in 18th-Century Literature
Topic: The Gothic Novel
Mark Vareschi
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Hise 159
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course will explore the development of the Gothic novel in England and how the Gothic became a cultural phenomenon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A precursor to our modern Horror genre, the Gothic radically reimagined the nature and purpose of literary fiction and tantalized readers with tales of ghosts, curses, and eerie settings. Readings may include texts by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mathew Lewis, and Jane Austen.

454: James Joyce
Richard Begam
TR 11:00-12:15pm Humanities 2653
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

This course focuses on the major writings of James Joyce, excluding Finnegans Wake. Most of our attention will be devoted to an in-depth examination of Ulysses conducted over the course of nine weeks. By way of preparation, we shall read two earlier works by Joyce, Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, as well as Joyce’s principal source text, Homer’s Odyssey. Among the larger questions we shall address: Where does Joyce position himself in relation to the conflicting demands of nationalism, individualism and aesthetics? What is the significance of the “odyssey of styles” in Ulysses, and how does it affect the novel’s mimetic aspirations? Finally, how does Ulysses reconceive such fundamental ideas as time and place, love and marriage, truth and language, art and morality?

457: Topic in American Literature and Culture since 1900
Topic: Cultures of AIDS Activism
Ramzi Fawaz
T 6:00-8:30pm Humanities 2637
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course will explore the art, literature, and film of radical AIDS activism in the US-American 1980s. Much as covid has done today, four decades ago an unfamiliar new disease, the human immune-deficiency virus or HIV/AIDS, exploded into the public imagination. Almost instantly, AIDS became a lightening-rod for national anxieties about women and queer people’s long-standing demands for greater sexual freedom. It exposed the corruption of a homophobic and sexist medical establishment. And it inspired a broad coalition of politicized youth to engage in direct-action activism to fight for the lives of their friends, family, and lovers of all genders and sexualities (many of whom were dying daily all around them). By studying the extraordinary artistic, political and intellectual output of AIDS activists in the moment of their greatest crisis, we will identify the imaginative tools previous generations have left us to fight against our collective dehumanization in age of Covid.

458.001: Major American Writer(s)
Topic: Ernest Hemingway
Sarah Wood
Remote Asynchronous
This is a modular section that meets January 3, 2022 thru January 23, 2022
(Session Code XCC, 3 weeks of instruction)
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This asynchronous, online 3 week course will offer the chance to grapple with one of the heavyweights of American Literature. Is his writing really simple? Was he a misogynist? Is there tenderness beneath the persona? Leave your preconceptions behind and step into the novels and short stories to decide for yourself. We will read a biography alongside 5 books and supplemental essays to understand his writing style, cult of personality and critical reception. You will be expected to work 8-9 hours per day, between lectures, reading and assignments. Assignments will include regular discussion posts, a short paper and a final project of your own design (painting, digital collage, creative writing, etc.).

461.001: Topic in Ethnic & Multicultural Literature
Topic: Black Life & Thought in the Long 18th Century
Kristina Huang
MW 6:00-7:15pm Van Vleck B115
Requisites: Sophomore standing

The presence of Black subjects traversing and inhabiting the Atlantic world ignited the social and political imagination of eighteenth-century writers. How did this presence materialize and contribute to the period’s literary production? This course is a survey of Black Anglophone works in the eighteenth century and their afterlives. We’ll work through a heterogeneous archive of texts (portraits, illustrations, letters, novels, and plays) and examine how Black Anglophone subjects, across the spectrum of enslavement and freedom, engaged with the social, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses of their time.

461.002: Topic in Ethnic & Multicultural Literature
Topic: Ethic/Race/Gender/Colonialism
Ingrid Diran
TR 1:00-2:15pm Van Hise 155
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Course Catalog Description: Literature in English by authors whose work reflects the experience of ethnic and minority groups.

461.003: Topic in Ethnic & Multicultural Literature
Topic: Harlem Renaissance and Afro Modernism
Amadi Ozier
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Social Sci 4308
Requisites: Sophomore standing

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s was a creative and cultural awakening: the freaky, the serious, the violent, the aesthetic, the political, the trendy, and the risqué. Many of the movement’s most prominent voices were (secretly or openly) gay. Sexuality and sexual performance are crucial to understanding the development of Harlem into a world-renowned, -envied, and -desired black cultural Mecca.

This course draws attention to the underexplored contributions of lesbian, bisexual, and queer writers of the 1920s and 1930s, who problematized rigid identity categories, norms of sexuality and gender, and the systems of oppressive violence that such norms produce.

We will explore fiction, essays, poems, art, music, and film from and about Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Bennett, Angelina Weld Grimke, Marita Bonner, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Claude McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, Elise Johnson McDougald, Anne Spencer, Gladys Bentley, and other cultural creators and innovators who helped make Harlem so universally and lastingly popular in the American cultural imagination.

474: Topic in Contemporary Literature
Topic: Reproductive Justice in World Literature and Cinema
Sarah Wells
TR 1:00-2:15pm Van Vleck B215
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This upper-division course for students of all majors is both an introduction to the problem of reproductive justice and an exploration of how artists and writers around the world have tackled this problem. Throughout, we will consider how concepts such as bodily autonomy, intersectionality, colonialism, birth strike, social justice, and the relationship between life and work are inflected differently according to when, where, and with what medium (including the manifesto, the novel, film, and song) intellectuals, artists, and activists deploy. Our discussions will be grounded in complex problems that impact many of us in our daily lives, while paying close attention to the specific ways this concept has been mobilized — from Argentina to France to Chad to the United States — as a window into a different, more just world. Course requirements: creative and critical assignments; frequent and active participation and presentations; readings and viewings of artistic, historical, and theoretical texts.

475: Comedy as Genre
Topic: The Comic Imagination
Richard Begam
TR 2:30-3:45pm Humanities 1221
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

The word “comedy” derives from the Greek komodia, meaning a “song of revelry, carousal or merry-making.” Although comedy tends to be realistic in form, portraying characters who are flawed and imperfect, it usually ends happily with conflicts resolved and love-matches concluded. The approach in this course will be historical and exegetical, tracing the evolution of comedy as a form while interpreting individual texts for their distinctive qualities. Our survey begins in antiquity with the Greek and Roman comedy of Aristophanes and Plautus, proceeds to the Renaissance and Enlightenment with Shakespeare, Jonson and Molière, and extends into the nineteenth centuries with Austen and Wilde. We conclude with two twentieth-century works by Gibbons and Stoppard that temporalize the genre of comedy by looking back at earlier traditions.

514: English Syntax
Juliet Huynh
MW 2:30-3:45pm Humanities 2637
Requisites: ENGL 314 or graduate/professional standing

This course will combine the analysis of sentences with an in-depth exploration of a combination of the “Principles & Parameters” (also: Government & Binding) and “Minimalist Program” approaches to syntactic analysis, first introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s and 1990s, also known as “Generative Grammar.” We will also look at complex constructions that involve the ordering of objects, you will learn how to analyze these sentences, how to represent them as tree diagrams in an updated version of the X-bar format, and to compare alternative syntactic analyses. In addition to analyzing grammatical sentences, you will learn to explain why certain sentences are ungrammatical in English. Tree diagrams will be fairly complex, but what really makes this an advanced class is the focus on constructing a syntactic argument: What makes a construction interesting/challenging from a linguistic perspective? Why is one analysis better than another? What are problems that remain unsolved? How can we apply insights from syntactic theory to issues in first and second language acquisition?

515: Techniques and Materials for TESOL
TBA
TR 9:30-10:45am White 6144
Requisites: English 415

Course catalog description: Supervised practice in the use of current techniques and materials in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages, including peer and community teaching with videotaped sessions.

520: Old English
Topic: Really Old English
Martin Foys
TR 9:30-10:45am Education L150
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies
Accelerated Honors (!)

This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the language, literature, and culture of England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Because the English language has changed so much since c. 1100, Old English must be studied as a foreign language. In the first half of the class, we will cover basic pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, while doing short translation exercises. In the second half of the semester, we will put the skills you’ve learned to work, tackling major works of Old English poetry and prose. Because this is a language class, no papers will be required. Instead, there will be regular translation exercises, quizzes, and exams. This course is intended for students interested in medieval literature, linguistics, the history of English, and anyone who wants to know where orcs and ents come from.

No previous experience with Old English is required.

525: Health and the Humanities
Caroline Hensley
TR 11:00-12:15pm Humanities 2251
Requisites: Declared in the Health and the Humanities certificate
Cross-Listed with Medical History and Bioethics & History of Science

Explores how a humanistic perspective can broaden our understanding of health and medicine. Specifically, we will examine the role of language and culture in the creation and circulation of biomedical knowledge; our lived experiences with illness (physical and mental); the intricate intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability and medicine; the political dimensions of diagnosis, disease, and epidemics, and the role that fiction, creative non-fiction, comics, and film play in shaping our experiences with health and medicine as health care providers and as patients. The course does not assume any background in science or medicine. One of our recurrent topics, in fact, will be to consider how non-experts interact with medicine and its technical vocabularies. Although the primary objective of the course is to understand the cultural, social, and political dimensions of health and medicine, a secondary objective is for students to become more savvy patients and, for the few students who might emerge on the other side of the stethoscope one day, more well-rounded health care professionals.

533: Topic in Literature and Environment
Topic: African Environmental Narratives
Kirk Sides
TR 11:00-12:15pm Soc Sci 6232
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies

From anti-colonial writers of the early-20th century to Afrofuturist and speculative fiction, we will focus on how land, the environment, and local ecosystems are imagined in writings, films, and arts from the African continent. This course will ask questions, such as: How has colonialism impacted the ways land is portrayed by African authors? What is the place of the non-human within notions of ecological justice? How are climate change and environmental futures imagined?

616.002: TESOL: Teaching of Reading
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: English 415
This is a modular section that meets January 24, 2023 thru February 19, 2023
(Session Code ADD, 4 weeks of instruction)

Course catalog Description: An overview of reading and vocabulary skills and how to teach them.

617.002: TESOL: Teaching of Writing
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: English 415
This is a modular section that meets February 20, 2023 thru April 2, 2023
(Session Code EFE, 5 weeks of instruction)

Course catalog Description: Practical modular workshop on key aspects of language teaching, stressing the application of techniques and theory to classroom needs.

618.002: TESOL: Teaching Pronunciation
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: English 415
This is a modular section that meets April 3, 2023 thru May 5, 2023
(Session Code KEE, 5 weeks of instruction)

Course catalog Description: An overview of the features of English pronunciation and how to teach them.

651: Special Topics in Theatre and Performance Studies Research
Michael Peterson
TR 9:30-10:45am TBA
Requisites: Junior standing
Cross-Listed with Theatre & Drama & Gender and Women Studies

Course catalog Description: Specialized subjects relevant to the study of the theory, history and criticism of theatre and performance studies.

672: Selected Topics: Afro-American Literature
Topic: Traditions in African American Humor
Brittney Edmonds
W 2:25-5:25pm Van Hise 387
Requisites: Junior standing
Cross-listed with Afro-American Studies

This seminar examines the politics of black satire as a performative medium, and it traces a genealogy of black comedic performance practices in the tradition of African-American satire and politically insurgent humor. Course participants will explore multiple modes of satirical performance in relation to critical aesthetic movements and historical periods from the 19th century to the present day. Special emphasis will be placed on interrogating the politics of African-American blackface minstrelsy as satire. The seminar will also emphasize an examination of post-Civil Rights black satire in theatre, films, sketch comedy programs, visual art, political cartoons, novels, and popular music culture. Course participants will place theories of humor and signifying (by Ellison, Gates, Watkins, Freud, and others) in conversation with the performances of Williams and Walker, Nina Simone, Richard Pryor, Kara Walker, Paul Beatty, Suzan-Lori Parks, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and others.