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Graduate Course Offerings

Professor Zamora

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Wednesdays 7:10pm–10:00pm

This course seeks to answer questions about the complexity of Latinx communities in the 21st century as represented in literature and media. We will ask questions such as, “How do Latinxs reject imposed definitions of Latinidad? To what extent are transnational dialogues establishing a ‘new’ Latinidad? And how are respective histories recognized and shifted through representations of inclusive Latinidades?” Our course traces the academic trajectory of Latinx Studies to highlight the nuanced communities encompassed under the term “Latinx” today with specific attention to Latinx Studies methodologies and research practices. The course will trace Latinx Studies scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Anibal Quijano, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Jillian Baez, and more. Just like the Latinx community is nuanced and complex, this course will focus on interdisciplinary and multimodal texts, such as: Zoot Suit, Real Women Have Curves, Gentefied, The Inheritance of Orquîdea Divina, and performances by Bad Bunny.����

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Professor Kocher

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Tuesday 7:10pm–10:00pm

This course will explore the plays and performances that were central to the theatrical explosion that took place in England during the long eighteenth century. From bawdy comedies by Wycherley and Behn to the didacticism of Lillo’s tragedy, we will consider not only the texts but dive into the archives to learn about how these plays were performed and received by audiences. We will also try out a bit of acting ourselves to better understand the complexities of the plays and performers who ruled during the Age of the Actress.��

Professor Taylor

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Tuesday 4:00pm–6:50pm

This course will focus on Latinx speculative literature, film, and music. Paying particular attention to the subgenre of Latinx Futurisms, we will trace Latinx speculative fiction’s connection to Contemporary Futurisms, particularly its intersections with Afrofuturisms, Indigenous Futurisms, and Caribbean Futurisms. Latinx Futurisms are an identifiable subgenre, movement, mode, and aesthetic within the field of science fiction and fantasy studies. Latinx Futurist creators use science fictional thinking to showcase that, even in the face of the apocalypse, we can engage in science fictional thinking to build a better tomorrow, to heal and rebuild, to look towards a more collaborative, collective way of being in the world. We’ll focus our studies on recent Latinx science fiction and fantasy literature to discuss how these authors are reshaping the genres. Latinx speculative fiction creators whose work will consider includes writers such as E.G. Condé, Nalo Hopkinson, David Bowles, Sabrina Vourvoulias, ire’ne la silva, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia; filmmakers such as Alex Rivera, Jorge R. Gutiérrez, Ryan Coogler, and Robert Rodriguez; as well as musicians such as Cardi B, Princess Nokia, Ibeyi, and more!

Professor Anderson

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Monday 4:00pm–6:50pm

This workshop is designed to unlock innovation and cultivate inspiration in your creative nonfiction. To that end, we will explore a variety of forms, styles, subjects, writerly perspectives, and more within essays, collections, and memoirs from literary change-makers of present and past. Sample potential texts include The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin, The Exit is the Entrance: Essays on Escape by Lydia Paar, and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves by J. Drew Lanham. These readings—paired with craft essays, writing exercises, and class discussions—are envisioned as springboards for forward leaps in your writing and thinking. Workshops will enhance that forward movement, offering a productive space to test new approaches and personalize time-honored methods. We will also collaborate on individualized reading lists that generate unique creative projects intended to fuel growth long after our semester ends.

Professor Furman

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Thursday 4:00pm–6:50pm

This writing workshop will provide valuable collaborative feedback on your writing. We will also read a range of fiction (stories and novels) to introduce you to various models that, collectively, should go some way toward demonstrating the elasticity of the genre. Place, and “knowing your place,” was the key theme I had in mind when I sat down to the difficult task of selecting these precious few models that we’d have time to read during a single semester. I chose books whose creation seems uniquely inspired by place, broadly conceived, some interrogating conventional notions of what we call “setting” in fiction. The hope is that immersing ourselves in works inspired in this fashion might encourage us not to imitate this work, per se, but to seek out and pursue with ferocity our own “places” we wish to explore via stories and novels. Books, after all, per Emerson, “are for nothing but to inspire.” ��

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Professor Chenovick

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Monday 7:10pm–10:00pm

Eros and intellect are often made to seem like opposites. The idea that love and desire are “blind” or irrational is idiomatic, and the erotic has long been treated as a function of the body rather than the mind. The critical and literary texts in this course challenge these surface-level truisms. While critical works like Valerie Traub’s Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015) invite us to consider critically the possibility that sex could be a mode of thought as well as the subject of critical inquiry, influential works of feminism and queer studies such as Audre Lorde’s influential essay “The Uses of the Erotic” (1978) and Ela Pryzbylo’s recent Asexual Erotics (2019) challenge the conflation of the erotic with the sexual, offering new ways of thinking about both the sexual and the erotic and about the intersections of body, mind, and affect.��

The literary texts in this course also challenge, provoke, and delight in the multiplicity of attitudes they take toward sexuality, eros, and intellect, ranging from the ways the love sonnets of Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare use metaphors as a means of understanding and creating erotic experience to the ways seventeenth-century devotional writers like John Donne and Richard Crashaw position their sometimes shocking imagery of erotic touch and union with God as an activity of the “understanding” that produces physiological sensation. Reading these critical and literary texts in tandem with one another, we will investigate some of the varieties of eros in early modern literary texts in order to expand our own ability to think critically about the ways that the categories of thought and sensation, body and intellectintersect both in our own present-day cultural and critical approaches to eros.��

Professor Mason

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Friday 4:00pm–6:50pm

Comp Theory & Methods will focus on the intersections of theory and practice, specifically pedagogical practices, within the field. As writers, scholars, and teachers of composition, we will examine major pedagogical theories of composition and will analyze the ways in which the elements of a rhetorical situation—writer, audience, context, and text/language—are treated according to each. We will consider the ways in which competing theories of composition inform pedagogical practices, such as modes of instruction (lecture/discussion, demonstration, peer, group), selection and use of heuristics and other instructional materials, and methods of response and assessment.

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Graduate Course Offerings

Professor Taylor Hagood

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Thursday 4:00pm–6:50pm

This course will focus on the large, protean, flexible, and provocative concept of undeadness in literature and film of the United States South since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From classic Southern Gothic of William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell to the later twentieth century work of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison to the zombies of The Walking Dead, this course explores the implications of southern horror. The course will be approached across theoretical systems and disciplines.

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Professor David Medina

Wednesday, 4:00pm–6:50pm

In The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Edward Said reminds us that “culture” is both something one possesses and a boundary that defines who belongs and who does not. Borders, whether physical or ideological, emerge from such boundaries and shape how literature encodes power, difference, and identity. This course explores American literature from 1700 to 1900 through the lens of boundaries and borders. Throughout, we examine how material objects, ideas, and texts alike become sites where culture is produced and contested. Our readings will focus on how colonial American and european writers constructed boundaries, such as one bewteen "civilized" and "savage," how those boundaries become tangible borders, and how authors challenged, redefined, and resisted these divisions. Our readings include, but will not be limited to: travel narratives, epics, novels, captivity accounts, and short works of fiction. Special attention will be given to how material bibliographic objects—books, periodicals, and archival forms—functioned as instruments of colonial expansion, class production, gendered discipline, racial classification, and cultural boundary-making. By attending a rich archive of literature produced from 1700 to 1900, students will gain a deeper understanding of how early American authors negotiated cultural and political borders and how the boundaries established during this period continue to shape American history, literature, and culture.

Professor Alexander Slotkin

Tuesday 4:00pm–6:50pm

While we typically think of rhetoric as persuasive speech, scholars now recognize rhetoric to include everything from still and moving images to sounds, artifacts, places, and more. But what is rhetoric? How do we study rhetoric, and what does it look like? Is rhetoric cultural—and, if so, how do different communities practice it? Can plants and animals use rhetoric, too? These questions point to the breadth and depth of rhetoric as a concept and a field of study, one that invites us to explore its multiple definitions, histories, and futures.

Taking up these questions, this course introduces students to contemporary and enduring issues in the field of rhetorical studies, with particular attention to how scholars define rhetoric, study it, and apply rhetorical theories across diverse contexts. We’ll explore a wide range of topics, including rhetoric and the body, rhetoric and the environment, and rhetoric and culture.

Professor Ian MacDonald

Monday 4:00pm–6:50pm

Whether for good or ill, the language of literary theory and its attendant Continental-philosophical influences is a part of the study of literature in the academe. Whether or not one holds to the arguments these various theorists make or takes a position of “post-theory” that suggests they have led the field of literary analysis off track, any student of the subject at the graduate level is expected to have some grasp of the work of Marx, Saussure, Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno, Fanon, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Williams, Derrida, Said, Spivak, Gates, Butler, Halberstam and more. ENG 5019 serves as a crash course for these avenues of inquiry from the historicism and idealism of Hegel through the branching specialties of the twenty-first century. Touching on most (if not all) the names introduced here, the course traces a collection of elements which, compounded, aggregate to form a theoretical foundation that bleeds into nearly all contemporary academic discourse surrounding how and why we read literature in the present.

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Professor Julieann Ulin

Wednesday 7:10pm–10:00pm

This course will provide you with a foundation in literary research that is necessary to write critical essays in your graduate courses. You will gain research skills through a series of written assignments designed to introduce you to the tools and methodologies of literary research, the specific resources at ����Vlog, author societies, key publications and journals in your chosen field, calls for papers, grant applications and support, and the profession more generally. The course will use James Joyce's Ulysses��as a case study.

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Professor Ian MacDonald

Tuesday 7:10pm–10pm

This course begins in, but branches off of Afrofuturism to focus on the increasing output of speculative literatures being written in or centering Africa. Tracing sf along routes delineated by colonialism and Empire, this course attends to the problematics and potential opened up by sf written in and about postcolonial contexts and specifically the cultural matrices intersecting the African continent in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Authors include Nnedi Okorafor, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Tade Thompson, Mashigo Mohale, Namwali Serpell, and Sofia Samatar.