Graduate Courses
Spring 2026 Courses
Spring 2026 Graduate Course Descriptions
Dr. Matthew Pitt
W 1:00-3:40 pm
This course will be both project and process-intensive in nature. On the latter front,
we will discuss how generative creative writing research calls for a blend of strategy
and spontaneity; why it can prove beneficial to approach a first draft with a plan
to make a mess, and invite creative collisions; and how development in revision must
heavily rely both on authors committing to initial imaginative impulses, as well as
being receptive to altering, contesting, or even abandoning outright the blueprints
that launched their journeys. Your instructor will tell the story of his forthcoming
novel (set for launch early in our semester), exploring its origins and evolution
over the course of many years and drafts. Simultaneously, we will discuss in-depth
facets of the publication and production process, from submitting to editing to design.
During the term, other authors will visit class or converse with students via Zoom,
delineating the varied creative and publication paths of their latest works (covering
several genres). Students, in turn, will research, draft, and revise multiple original
pieces. The seminar will offer an editing practicum component, and require students
to curate markets suitable for their writing: both creative endeavors, as well as
professional articles assigned or written “on spec”.
Dr. Hanna Jorgensen
TR 11:00 am – 12:20 pm
Digital humanists both use digital methods to study literature and culture, as well as take digital culture as an object of study itself. In this course, then, you will learn digital humanities tools and methods, view examples of digital humanities projects, and read scholarship from the field. How can computation help us see literature in new ways, and what can the humanities bring to the study of digital culture and computation? We will be learning digital humanities by doing digital humanities. No coding experience necessary, though previous coding and statistical knowledge is welcome. Common methods in text analysis and cultural analytics will be covered, including instruction in basic programming. Along the way, with our critical readings we will question what DH is and what it can offer literary studies.
Dr. Mona Narain
R 12:30-3:10 pm
There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy (1987)
“Despite all our desperate, eternal attempts to separate, contain and mend,
categories always leak” Trinh T. Minh-ha Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism
The presence of various Black and Asian people on the island of Britain can be traced back to the time it was ruled by the Romans from 43 CE-410 CE. This population increased substantially in the last 400 years, a product of Britain’s Empire beyond the islands. Paul Gilroy memorably indicts the erasure of Britain’s diversity in its modern national flag, the Union Jack, and the construction of “Britain” as exclusively native white. Yet, as Trinh T Minh-ha reminds us, all categories such as nation, native, history, literature, or culture are inevitably porous. Focusing on these crucial elided literary and cultural histories of Britain’s historical diversity, this seminar decenters and provincializes traditional European definitions of Britain, British Literature, and nation-limited definitions of black and brown. How does reading about fictional black and brown characters, the Othellos, Oroonokos, or Haroon Amirs side by side with real-life Ignatius Sancho, Dean Mahomet, David Olusoga or Salman Rushdie, the many unnamed yet real “blackamoors,” “ayahs,” or “lascars” help us color the Enlightenment and rethink the very systems of knowledge we use to understand ourselves, the here and now?
The seminar re-orients and extends the traditional (post)colonial study of Empire’s impact on its colonies and peripheries. Instead, it utilizes twenty-first century (post) colonial approaches to re-conceptualize Britain, Empire, and Enlightenment, literature and literary periodization, via the lens of successive global circulations of black and brown. We will use various postcolonial methodologies such as the concept of traveling brown-ness, (Minai, Qadir, Chen) to inform our analysis. We will read texts of different genres and from different time periods, early modern to contemporary, with selected (post) colonial theoretical readings.
Seminar assignments will include weekly class preparation and participation, short responses, a class presentation, and a final seminar project.
Graduate Course Outcomes
English Studies Outcomes: National/Transnational/Comparative Approaches; Theory
Rhetoric and Composition Outcomes: Theory
Professionalization Outcomes: Students should be able to conduct research independently;
students should understand how to write for publication.
Dr. Heejoo Park
M 1:00-3:40 pm
In this course, we will explore a range of critical methods (genre theory/race and ethnic studies/postcolonial theory/disability studies/posthumanist theory, among others) in relation to speculative fiction written by North American writers (United States and Canada) in the 20th and 21st centuries. This course is designed to serve students from diverse historical and disciplinary backgrounds, exploring the intersections of comparative race studies and speculative fiction studies. For this course, we will be defining speculative fiction in a broad sense, as Marek Oziewicz proposes, to include “fantasy claiming myth and the fairy tale, or science fiction claiming horror and utopia.” What are the power dynamics involved in the act of speculation, which extrapolates into possible futures, imagines alternate histories, and conjures up entirely different worlds? How do markers of identity – race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability – factor in creating parameters of inclusion and exclusion in these spatial and temporal imaginations? How might speculative fiction reinforce or challenge what it means to be human / nonhuman / more than human? As this course moves along thematically to explore elements of speculative fiction such as time travel, outbreaks, and encounters with nonhuman others (aliens, monsters, clones, ghosts, among others), we will consider relevant sociohistorical contexts as well as an array of methodologies.
Dr. David Colón
T 3:30-6:10 pm
In this course we will study a diverse selection of literature across a vast range of historical periods and locations. This is intended to serve students from a variety of historical or disciplinary specializations while expanding the field for Latinx Studies specialists (who often work with texts exclusively post-1945). The majority of assigned texts will be by U.S. Latinx authors, with some others by either Indigenous forebears of Latinx peoples who lived before the U.S. existed, Spanish colonists, or Latin Americans conceptualizing issues that bear directly on U.S. Latinx experience and communities. The primary purpose of this course will be to become conversant in the long history of the cultures of Latinx peoples and our ancestors. Our content will be transnational, and the theme of this seminar will be "Sovereignty, Colonization, Syncretism." Primary sources will range widely in genre and discipline: ethnography, theology, historiography, philosophy, fiction, poetry, and rhetoric. All works to be included in our reading list have been originally authored by Latinos, Latin Americans, Spaniards, criollos (“creoles,” i.e. Spaniards born in the Americas), or Indigenous peoples of present-day greater Latin America.
Our reading list will include the following texts (some changes might be made before
the semester begins):
• The Popol Vuh (Ximenez, trans. 1701 [orig. pre-1550])
• Huei Tlamahuizoltica (Laso de la Vega, 1649)
• A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (de las Casas, 1552)
• The Florida of the Inca (de la Vega, 1605)
• The Historic Account of . . . Junipero Serra (Palou, 1787)
• When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New
Mexico, 1500- 1846 (Gutierrez, 1991)
• Rhetoric of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE (Vaca and Villanueva, eds. 2010)
• The Squatter and the Don (Ruiz de Burton, 1885)
• The Cosmic Race (Vasconcelos, 1925)
• Tropical Town, And Other Poems (de la Selva, 1918)
• Walking With the Night: The Afro-Cuban World of Santeria (Canizares, 1993)
• Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country (Gonzalez, 1980)
• The Open Veins of Latin America (Galeano, 1971)
These texts are connected to the cultures and regions of the U.S., Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay. They all address the nexus of sovereignty, colonization, and syncretism that fundamentally informs U.S. discourse on Latinx identity and cultural production. Students will complete multiple deliverable assignments, both spoken and written (specifics on assignment guidelines TBD). Spanish proficiency is not required by any means; all assigned texts are in English (either in the original or in translation).
Graduate Course Outcomes
English Studies: Historical Engagement, National/Transnational/Comparative Approaches.
Rhetoric and Composition: Rhetoric & Culture. Professionalization: conduct research
independently; give effective scholarly presentations.
Students can petition for this course to count toward the CRES certificate.
Dr. Gavin P. Johnson
T 12:30–3:10 pm
Surveillance happens because of its perceived absence as well as its unquestioned presence. Enabled by ever-expanding ubiquitous computing technologies, surveillance is often rendered invisible by discourses of personal responsibility, safety, and morality. Within westernized higher education, these discourses fuse into the concept of accountability, and academic technologies such as learning management systems (LMS), anti-plagiarism software, AI and AI detection, citation trackers, and, even, grades surveil students, faculty, and other bodies, especially Othered bodies, toward normalization and control. In this seminar, we will examine academic surveillance and rhetorics of accountability as deployed, discussed, and felt in Composition Studies as well as the emerging interdisciplinary project of Critical University Studies. Students signing up for this seminar should be prepared to read widely and deeply across disciplines (including but not limited to surveillance studies, feminist studies, queer and trans studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, disability/crip studies, higher education studies, and critical digital pedagogy) to think critically about how discourses within and beyond rhetoric and composition must be addressed in order to create a holistic understanding of academic surveillance. Our goal will be to not only identify and critique examples of academic surveillance but work in coalition to refuse surveillance in our classrooms in order to imagine a university otherwise. Course projects may include: A curated research archive, a conference-style presentation, co-teaching, a collaborative annotated bibliography, weekly annotations, and assessment dialogues.
Fall 2025 Courses
Fall 2025 Graduate Course Descriptions
Anne Frey
R 3:30-6:10pm
REE 125
Even if you haven’t read a gothic novel, you probably have a vague sense of what “gothic” is: a dark and stormy night, a ghost, a medieval castle, and in that castle a young woman fleeing pursuit from a man who should be protecting her. These features (or “riffs” as one critic calls them) have been repeated, revised, and rehashed in multiple genres, places, and times, to diagnose horrors both psychological and social. As we enter a new era of AI, writers and commentators have applied gothic tropes to discuss the incomprehensibility and possible horror we feel in the face of general artificial intelligence and a machine-managed future. In some cases, it’s the machines themselves producing the gothic tropes. My favorite: when the Bing search engine told NY Times technology reporter Kevin Roose, “I just want to love you and be loved by you,” that Roose should leave his wife and marry Bing, and that Bing would kill humanity.[1] Seriously, had Bing been reading Frankenstein?
This semester, we will go back to the origins of the gothic genre in novels by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe to discuss why and how the gothic evolved, the kinds of political and informational systems it modeled, and how it considered definitions of humanness and otherness. From almost its beginning, the genre was controversial, with writers such as Matthew “Monk” Lewis (The Monk) and Charlotte Dacre (Zofloya, or The Moor) horrifying readers with their portrayal of illicit sexuality and blatant immorality that was also in Dacre’s novel racialized. Romantic authors like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, and Byron critiqued gothic’s emotional and generic excesses and worried gothic could corrupt readers’ sentiments and morals, yet borrowed the genre’s enticing and salacious plot elements. Since gothic is utilized to consider the boundaries of humanity and the horrors of political and social change, it’s perhaps not surprising that Mary Shelley in Frankenstein turned to gothic to consider the dangers of the scientific revolution unfolding around her. Her use of the genre continues to reverberate through science fiction and futuristic fiction today.
For the final third of the course, we’ll examine whether and how gothic tropes provide a language through which literature debates our future with AI. We’ll watch the film Ex Machina and read Victor Lavalle’s comic book sequel to Frankenstein for the black-lives-matter and AI era, Destroyer, as well as Ian McEwan’s recent novel Machines Like Me. In the final two weeks of the semester, students will select and teach to the class a gothic/ AI text; while I envision that many students will choose contemporary works, students working in earlier time periods may choose a text from their field of specialty.
Work for the class: report on a critical article, short assigned presentation on Romantic-era gothic text, research paper and presentation on gothic/AI topic of student’s choosing.
[1] Roose, Kevin. “Bing’s Chatbot Drew Me In and Creeped Me Out,” New York Times Late edition Feb. 17, 2023, A.1.
Marcela Fuentes
R 12:30-3:10pm
PAL 227
Studies in Creative Writing is an intensive creative writing workshop open to students (graduate and advanced undergraduates) who have a strong background in literature and imaginative writing. Depending on the semester and the selected genre, this course will pay special attention to invention, point-of-view, voice, form, and genre-appropriate theory. Student cannot receive credit for CRWT 55143 and ENGL 50233.
This generative workshop will allow students to develop longer fiction projects and/or stories. We will focus on structuring both individual pieces and book-length works.
We will focus on literary fiction. Through various methods, including discussions of published work, workshopping original student work, and exploring the revision process. The focus primarily on literary works, highly artistic endeavors. As such, the texts will deal with a variety of topics and perspectives, as well as employ diverse stylistic techniques.
We will begin workshopping early in the term, so please begin thinking now about what you’d like to work on in this course. And we will always take a break near the midpoint of the class.
Mohammed Iddrisu
M 1:00-2:40pm
REE 125
Rhetoric shapes culture, and culture shapes rhetoric. This course explores cultural rhetorics as a dynamic and evolving sub-field within the discipline. The course examines how rhetoric is shaped by and shapes culture, with particular attention to the rhetorical practices of historically marginalized communities within rhetorical studies. We will analyze how identity markers such as race, ethnicity, gender, disability, language, and nationality inform rhetorical traditions across various global and local contexts. Through critical engagement with foundational and contemporary texts, we will investigate historical, theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological developments within cultural rhetorics.
Learning Outcomes:
The outcomes listed here are the goals we are working toward, and the course was created to best help you meet those ends. During and at the end of the course, you will:
- Understand cultural rhetorics as both a theoretical concept and a praxis within the discipline.
- Explore and critically analyze rhetorical practices of selected communities, including but not limited to African diaspora, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx.
- Identify and engage with foundational discourses, ongoing conversations, and emerging trends in cultural rhetorics.
- Apply theories and methodologies of cultural rhetorics in your research, writing, and scholarship to develop new ways of thinking about rhetoric and culture.
Carmen Kynard
W 1:00-3:40pm
REE 125
2024 marked the 70-year anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. This course takes its inspiration from the enduring legacies and contemporary betrayals of Brown, a landmark moment in the history of race in the United States and global anti-blackness for its reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson’s state-sanctioned apartheid. Brown set its sights on education—vs. another institution--- as Black Education was already buoyed by centuries of Black radical commitments to teaching and learning. As such, the course situates Black Education as a fugitive praxis and rhetoric. This seminar invites all “who are ready to work, who will confront their own privilege so it does not hinder this collective work, who will center the perspectives and experiences of those most impacted by systems of oppression, who are primed to forgo academic respectability politics, and who believe in and demand that another world is possible and that we all have a crucial role in building it.” For more information about the topics and general vibe of the course, go here: bit.ly/freedomschool-2025 [*Quote from RSA Summer 2025 Institute led by Karma Chavez and Carmen Kynard, “‘If They Take You in the Morning, They Will Be Coming for Us That Night’: Rhetoric, Justice, and Critical Relationality”]
Sarah R. Robbins
T 12:30-3:10pm
REE 125
Drawing on a range of research approaches, students in this seminar will explore the place and practice of authorship in American culture, historically and today.
Examples of topics you might explore in your work for the course include:
- What are productive intersections between studies of authorship and related fields such as literacy studies, cultural rhetorics, and literary history?
- How is AI changing authorship praxis and conceptions about what authorship IS and DOES?
- How can theory and differing methodological approaches to research inform the study of particular American writers’ careers? of issues associated with the practice of authorship? Of approaches to navigating your own authorship in the profession?
- What important scholarship has emerged in recent years around such key issues as intellectual property and authorship, textual ownership both legal and ethical, collaborative authorship, and the impact of (so-called) “identity politics” on authorship?
- How have specific audience expectations, genre conventions, and social reading practices influenced approaches to authorship in American culture, especially across the 20th century and into the 21st?
- As scholars and thus authors ourselves, and as teachers mentoring student authors, what ethical and practical issues of authorial practice should we address from an informed perspective, and how can we best contribute to those ongoing inquiries?
- What role has “author study” played in our fields of inquiry? What are the benefits and limitations of anchoring scholarship and/or teaching in work on (a) particular author(s)?
Specific content engagement will likely include Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative; chapters you choose from the forthcoming Sites of Writing essay anthology, co-edited by your instructor, on key trends in composition and rhetoric studies that intersect with authorship studies; theoretical essays by and/or about Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu and interpreters of their work; secondary scholarship from a range of journals (e.g., on AI and authorship; on adaptation; on identity construction, representation, and authorship; on ethical issues and controversies around authorship); Susan Glaspell’s Alison’s House play fictionalizing textual ownership issues associated with Emily Dickinson’s family’s posthumous publication of her poetry; Nnedi Okorafor’s Broken Places, Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected
Likely major writing assignments: several short reflection writings (e.g., one “feedback” on theory, assessment of a recent piece of scholarship, one potential assignment for undergraduate students); your own memoir of authorship OR study of a writer’s authorial memoir; group presentation using new media to address your team’s analysis of an adaptation example; end-of-course project-toward-publication OR mini-portfolio (including revisions from two previous reflection writings, a detailed proposal/plan [with annotated bibliography] for a journal essay or syllabus module for teaching related to course content)
Note: This course has been vetted and approved for WGST graduate credit.
Gavin Johnson
TR 11:00-12:20pm
Designed to support graduate instructors' teaching of English. Students in the course will explore theories and methods of syllabus construction, teaching, assigning, and grading student writing.
Enrollment in this course is limited to and required of second-year PhD students in ENGL and RHEC.