Graduate Courses

Brad Lucas

M 5:00-7:40

This graduate course is focused on Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) as a field of study, with related attention to Writing in the Disciplines (WID), technical and professional writing, and writing studies more broadly. We will familiarize ourselves with the historical origins of WAC and current conversations in WAC/WID scholarship, but our primary aim is to work as a research team that learns about methodology (e.g., interviews, surveys, institutional ethnography, program assessment) in context, conducts primary research on unit-specific WAC/WID practices at TCU, positions that work in relation to contemporary praxis and, prepares a collective research report—and plans for individual publication—to share with university leadership, scholarly audiences, and other stakeholders.

Readings will draw heavily from The WAC Clearinghouse: Writing-enriched curricula: Models of faculty-driven and departmental transformation (2021); Diverse approaches to teaching, learning, and writing across the curriculum: IWAC at 25 (2020); Toward a transnational university: WAC/WID across borders of language, nation, and discipline (2023); Adapting the past to reimagine possible futures: Celebrating and critiquing WAC at 50 (2023); Institutional ethnography as writing studies practice (2023); and Teachers talking writing: Perspectives on places, pedagogies, and programs (2023). We will also read from Writing in the disciplines: Advice and models (2016; Bedford/St. Martin’s), evaluate the framework presented in Sustainable WAC: A whole systems approach to launching and developing writing across the curriculum programs (2018; NCTE Press), and assemble a working library of related scholarly journal articles. In preparation for the major project, students will share weekly writing, complete CITI certification, lead a pedagogical presentation or workshop, and prepare a book presentation.

Daniel Juan Gil

M 1-3:40

This course explores the evolution of avant-garde poetry from the early modern period through to modernist movements in British and American literature, with a focus on the representation of bodies and the transformation of language. We will examine how early modern poets used language to reflect reality—particularly the human body—and trace a shift in modernist avant-garde poetry where language itself takes on a material existence, becoming a kind of body in the world.

We will read major critical theories of the avant-garde, bodies, new materialism and object oriented ontology and apply these models to both early modern and 20th-century poetic movements. Throughout the semester we will investigate how the poetic experience is reconfigured through the process of secularization as the sacred becomes secularized and as poetry comes to bear the weight of spiritual and existential questions once addressed in a religious context. Through readings that span early modern poets such as John Donne and George Herbert, to modernists like T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, we will consider how poetic form, language, and the representation of the body both reflect and resist their cultural conditions.

Required work will include class presentations, written responses to readings and a final full-length research essay that allows students to draw connections between historical periods and theoretical frameworks. Students may tailor this final essay to fit into their own areas of scholarly interest.

Ismael Quiñones

W 12:30-15:10

Four quadrants— history, rhetoric, decolonization, and theory will animate our graduate seminar. By tracing relations amongst each quadrant, we will survey, craft, and interrogate traditional, radical, and potential histories of rhetoric. We will trace colonialism in ancient Greece, Rome, and Christianity to delineate inheritances to rhetorical theory. By traveling in and out of time to the colonization of the Americas, we will investigate antagonisms between rhetoric and anticolonial struggle. Together, we will reimagine potential possibilities through decolonial theory for a history of rhetoric that resists colonialism rather than transits in it.

Lisa Nikolidakis

T 3:30—6:10

This generative workshop will allow students to develop longer nonfiction projects on topics of their choosing. We will focus on structuring both individual pieces and book-length works, as well as confronting the common questions of writing nonfiction: What are our ethical boundaries when turning real people into characters? What is truth? Reality? How do we position our work in a genre with such elastic and blurry boundaries? In addition to the many philosophical questions raised by CNF, we will focus on technique as well—including (but not limited to) nailing down your chosen voice, writing page-turning dialogue, and the importance of scene development. This class will be deeply encouraging and supportive, and the aim is to help student translate and transform their memories into readable, relatable content.

Jason Helms

R 12:30-3:10

A study of selected major figures and issues in the history of rhetoric. Student cannot receive credit for WRIT 55243 and ENGL 80703.

In this course we will be discussing the interactions and overlaps between rhetoric and technology, particularly with respect to race. We will read a variety of theories of technology and society, dipping into many varied fields. The goal will be for us to each gain expertise and breadth in our own research and teaching on/with technology in the field of rhetoric. I include myself in this and will be learning a great deal from each of you and the projects you take on. While race may seem like an unusual focus of such a course, you will see through the readings that it is far more than an addition or section for practical application.

This course will equip you with the necessary knowledge and tools to read and conduct research along the intersection of race, rhetoric, and technology. It will also help you develop the skills to write, revise, and submit an article for publication that addresses these areas.

The overall project for this class will be to produce an article for submission to a journal. Every major assignment is built around that goal. We will work slowly and carefully at it, with many rounds of revision.

Prerequisites & Concurrent Enrollment:

No prerequisites. Student cannot receive credit for WRIT 55243 and ENGL 80703.

Required Materials:

1. The following books:
2. Benjamin, Ruha (ed.). Captivating Technology
3. Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
4. Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete?
5. Haynes, Cynthia. Homesick Phonebook
6. Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants
7. Monteiro, Mike. Ruined by Design
8. Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
9. Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds
10. Vitale, Alex. The End of Policing
11. Wark, McKenzie. Capital Is Dead
12. Various handouts and selected material online
13. Regular access to TCU e-mail
14. Regular access to files on thumb drive, dropbox, or other device

Mona Narain

TR 11:00-12:20

This course asks and examines the questions, what are “Global Souths” and how can we utilize this term productively to understand the nexus of race, capitalism, and the legacies of empire that have continued to produce cultural and geopolitical differentials of power? Emerging in the twenty-first century, the phrase “The Global South,” is used to refer to regions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania. We will interrogate the efficacy of the term, refuse any fixity by exploring its various connotations, and seek to decenter western modes of understanding by focusing on global South-South connections. The lens of Ocean Studies is a particularly fluid and useful model to study texts and ideas from the early modern period onwards to contemporary critical fabulations. We will use Ocean Studies to examine the connected histories and crosscurrents between Global Souths, including the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the Black Atlantic.

We will read both canonical and non-canonical early modern and contemporary texts in English and in translation, which explicitly create and connect life and cultural histories. Theoretical readings from Lisa Lowe, Engseng Ho, Vijay Prashad, Dados and Connell, Paul Gilroy, and Magali Tiseyra-Armilas, among others, will help us in conceptualizing various Global Souths. Potential literary texts we will read are those that connect histories, locations and lives and as diverse The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) by Amitav Ghosh, The Isle of Pines (1668) by Henry Neville, The Woman of Colour (1808) Epeli Hau’ofa’s essay “Our Sea of Islands” (1994), Aphra Behn’s poem “A Voyage to the Island of Love,” (1697) Craig Santos Perez and Derek Walcott’s poetry, Dalit short stories from India (2013) edited by B. Rangrao, Aimee Cesaire’s play A Tempest (1969) and films such as Disko Afrika: A Malagasy Story (2023). Through the assigned readings and their juxtaposition, the course seeks to make visible surprising interconnections and intimacies between diverse peoples, cultures, and geographies,which have been rendered subaltern through erasure and subjugation. It invites participants to envision and conceptualize South-South epistemologies that are embodied, fluid, accountable, and heterogeneous.

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.