Lower Division Courses

Lisa Nikolidakis

MW 4:00-5:20

Core: N/A

What becomes visible when we learn how to pay intentional attention? In this creative nonfiction course, we’ll use travel writing to move beyond the familiar and practice encountering the world with curiosity and care. We’ll read contemporary travel writers and explore how they transform experiences of place, movement, people, and culture into compelling stories. Along the way, we’ll ask what happens to our understanding of ourselves (& others) when we enter unfamiliar places, and how we can ethically turn encounters with real people and places into art?

Students will get into the world, keeping a travel journal that combines observation, field notes, images, artifacts, and other traces of experience. They’ll experiment with the relationship between image and text, considering how photographs, maps, objects, and ephemera can deepen or complicate a written story. And they’ll draw from their experiences and collected material to write, workshop, and revise their own travel essays, transforming encounters with real places and people into compelling creative nonfiction.

No passport required! Meaningful travel can happen across town, across an ocean, or simply by crossing the boundaries of our usual routines.

Sarah Margaret Pittman

TR 12:30-1:50

TR 2:00-3:20

Core: LT, HUM

This course will introduce students to prose fiction spanning from the late eighteenth century to today. We will begin by discussing the origins of Gothic literature in the late eighteenth century and how we see the influence of the Gothic in Romantic, Victorian, twentieth-century, and contemporary literature. We will focus on Gothic literature in this course in order to see how literature of this genre changes over time. For example, while early Gothic novels take place in ancient castles or abbeys in continental Europe, nineteenth-century Gothic novels bring dread and mystery to the country houses, factories, and cities of Britain, where social mobility and industrialization create new anxieties and horrors. With this in mind, we will also discuss how the Gothic helps us understand the dark side of capitalism and industrialism in the nineteenth century and today. Throughout this course, we will focus on the ideas and representations of the afterlife, death, decay, monsters, and desire. This course will also point to ways in which authors used the Gothic to think about landscape and the new norms of domesticity. Students will read and discuss a variety of works, such as excerpts from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of  Otranto and Mary Shelley’s Frankstein, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and short stories. Assessments and assignments will include exams and multimodal projects, respectively.

Madhukari Guha

TR 2:00-3:20

Core: LT, HUM

In this Introduction to Poetry classroom, we will be reading a range of poems by diverse poets belonging to different gender, race, class, and cultural backgrounds. We will be using an intersectional lens to explore how poetry relates to identity and culture and can be a powerful form of expression for both an individual and a community of people. Assignments will include close-reading, performance, and thematic analysis of poetry, discovering poetry and identity in popular culture, creative writing, and reflection.

Amanda Peterson

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: WCO

This section of ENGL 10803 asks us to think about what writing can do outside of formal institutions like work and school. We’ll consider multiple sources of knowledge, avenues for composition, and ways that writing might become relaxing or invigorating rather than a “chore.” Major assignments tentatively include “reactionary” journals and reflection, unexplored histories project, and community action research proposal.

Nataly Dickson

MW 4:00-5:20

MW 5:30-6:50

Core: WCO

In ENGL 10803 Writing as Inquiry- Food, Identity, and Culture, we use the theme of food to inquire, learn, and discuss how reflects and shapes personal and cultural identities through narrative, ethnographic, and reflective writing. This themed course also engages with diverse cultural perspectives on food, critically reflecting on how food serves as a medium for cultural expression, community building, and identity formation. The major projects for this course are the food inquiry narrative essay, food research podcast episode, profile of a food place, and the food artifact collage.

Andreley Bjelland

MWF 1:00-1:50

Core: LT, HUM

Messy love triangles, messier family feuds, questionable side quests, and pranks gone too far: welcome to Introduction to Shakespeare! This semester, we’ll make our way through forests, islands, fortresses, and battlefields as we explore the enduring legacy of William Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances. Through readings, screenings, and discussion, we’ll work together to examine the impact of Shakespeare’s characters, plots, and language in their original Renaissance context. We’ll also track echoes of the plays across time to uncover where we see these themes today, including reality TV, social media posts, news headlines, and our everyday interactions.

Sarah Parijs

MWF 11:00-11:50

Core: LT, HUM

Epics are characterized by their huge scope and length, heroic characters; and supernatural forces, but what defines an American epic, and how do epic themes speak to historical and contemporary interests? This course fulfills the HUM, LT requirement by emphasizing the analysis of American authors and texts through epic genres and archival histories. We’ll read and watch a variety of literary and film epics—which may include Walt Whitman’s democratic poetry in Leaves of Grass, William Faulkner’s Southern Gothic novel about a rural family’s quest to bury their deceased mother in As I Lay Dying, Toni Morrison’s depiction of intergenerational traumas surrounding chattel slavery in Beloved, Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction space film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Christoph Nolan’s recent film adaptation of The Odyssey. We will also examine the historical contexts surrounding these works by considering archival records of writing, political events, and memorabilia across analytic weekly journals, essays, and two group presentations.

Janelle Gray

TR 11:00-12:20

Core: GA, LT

How do Black aesthetics shape the ways Black writers tell stories, remember history, and imagine freedom? Through plays such as Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, students will explore how Black playwrights use language, performance, music, ritual, and theatrical experimentation to challenge dominant narratives and express identity, resistance, and belonging across the global African diaspora. Through discussion, critical writing, and creative projects, students will examine Black aesthetic traditions and experiment with dramatic forms to interpret, honor, and respond to the plays.

Jill Havens

MWF 1:00-1:50

Core: CSV, HUM

This course specifically examines the representation of criminals and outlaws in literature from the Early Medieval period to the modern day, with specific focus on how these depictions help to identify weaknesses and inequities in law over time. We will start with early Viking sagas that depict outlaws as heroes, victims of their cultural and historical circumstances and the unjust laws that constrain them. Next, we will explore the representations of criminality with the better-known ballads of Robin Hood and other medieval popular criminals like Hereward the Wake and Fulk FitzWaryn, who become popular symbols of rebellion and dissent. We will then dig deeper into aspects of criminality and morality with the very problematic but sympathetic character of Moll Flanders. The course will conclude with the Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey which captures the legend of Australia's most famous outlaw, Ned Kelly.

Alexandra Edwards

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: LT, HUM

Between 1940 and 1960, American women wrote some of the most unsettling crime fiction ever published. Vera Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Margaret Millar, and Patricia Highsmith were bestsellers whose books became famous films (Laura, In a Lonely Place), yet the history of the genre is still usually told through Hammett, Chandler, and the tough-guy private eye. This course reads the women’s tradition on its own terms. Its title, borrowed from Mary Wollstonecraft and an internet meme, points three ways: women who wrote “wrong” in a genre built by men, women who do wrong (murderesses, con women, bad wives), and the wrongs done to women that these books expose.

We will read five short, fast, gripping novels from the Library of America’s Women Crime Writers set: Laura, The Blank Wall, Beast in View, In a Lonely Place, and The Blunderer. Over the semester we watch the detective story turn into the suspense novel, as the crime moves from the mean streets into the kitchen and the marriage. We also read these books as evidence of what postwar America felt like from the inside, from the returning veteran to the suburban housewife to the anti-gay purges of the 1950s.

Coursework includes short reading quizzes, handwritten reading notes, group passage-analysis labs, and a “case file” on the genre that the class builds and revises together. Three in-class exams (an early exam, a midterm, and a final) test a shared vocabulary of literary terms. There are no take-home papers.

Alexandra Edwards

MW 4:00-5:20

Core: CA, HUM

Film noir got its name after the fact: in 1946, French critics noticed that a group of American wartime crime films shared a look, a mood, and a set of storytelling habits. Critics and filmmakers have argued ever since about what makes a film noir. This course uses that argument as a laboratory for learning how film genre works.

The semester moves in three units. First, we build a working “noir template” from four classic American films: The Maltese Falcon, Detour, Mildred Pierce, and D.O.A. Next, we test that template against films from other times and places, including Pépé le Moko (France), Stray Dog (Japan), Kiss Me Deadly, and Los tallos amargos (Argentina). Finally, we follow the genre into neo-noir with Chinatown, Devil in a Blue Dress, Memories of Murder (South Korea), and Brick. Along the way, students learn to analyze noir’s visual style (low-key lighting, the night city, voice-over and flashback), its narrative patterns (the investigation, the unreliable narrator), and its famously stylized dialogue. Underneath runs a bigger question: why does a genre so preoccupied with rotten institutions and untrustworthy narrators keep returning, in so many countries, at moments of political doubt?

Students watch about one film a week on their own. All readings are free on D2L. Coursework includes short in-class quizzes, handwritten viewing notes, weekly group labs that break down a film sequence shot by shot, and a class-built noir template revised after every film. Three in-class exams (an early exam, a midterm, and a final) test a shared vocabulary of film terms. There are no take-home papers.

Nataly Dickson

MWF 8:00-8:50

MWF 9:00-9:50

Core: WCO II

In ENGL 20803 Writing as Argument- Podcasting, we will use the “podcast” theme to learn how dialogue through the podcast genre affects how we argue. There are three major projects in this course, including a rhetorical analysis of a podcast and podcast episode. We will be using podcast equipment and do live recordings in class, giving students the opportunity to exercise verbal arguments and practice being attentive audiences. This course will also provide a basic tutorial of Audacity, an audio editing software.

Sarah Margaret Pittman

TR 8:00-9:20

TR 9:30-10:50

Core: WCO II

This course will focus on the analysis and creation of arguments in various forms of media, such as print and digital media, that are centered on current local and national topics and concerns. Students will learn about the writing process and how to decode persuasive messages. Assignments in this course include rhetorical analysis essays on advertisements and protest songs, a personal argument essay, and a multimodal project for the digital realm.

Andreley Bjelland

MWF 9:00-9:50

MWF 10:00-10:50

MWF 11:00-11:50

Core: WCO II

In this course, we will research, analyze, and create arguments about campus trends, campus problems, and campus communities through the lens of business communication. Projects include a trend analysis, research-based pitch, and mock consulting reports. Through these projects, we will strengthen our skills in collaboration, communication, and clear, concise, and persuasive writing.

Yingwen Yu

TR 9:30-10:50

TR 11:00-11:50

Core: WCO II

Indigenous Foodways explores how food connects Indigenous communities to land, identity, memory, storytelling, cultural survival, and sovereignty, with particular attention to Indigenous foodways and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Through essays, cookbooks, memoir, film, and other media, including works by Sean Sherman, Enrique Salmón, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, as well as Gather and Red Chef Revival, students examine food as both a cultural practice and a form of knowledge. As a composition course, the class uses the theme of foodways to teach rhetorical analysis, research, source evaluation, and evidence-based argument for different audiences and genres. Major assignments include a rhetorical analysis, research proposal and annotated bibliography, response writing, and a semester-long project in which students research a food or dish and transform their findings into an audience-specific genre such as an article, speech, blog, or video.

Victoria Washington

TR 11:00-12:20

TR 12:30-1:50

Core: WCO II

Black Language and Writing offers the unique opportunity to engage the rhetorical tradition of Black language to learn how Black writers have made arguments for their own humanity as a means of survivance in a racialized society. Students will practice formulating, expressing, and defending arguments of their own. Together we will analyze the rhetorical patterns of Black writers like Ida B. Wells, musical and visual artists like Billie Holiday and Basquiat, comedians like Wanda Sykes, and other rhetoricians to determine how they construct compelling arguments.

Sarah Parijs

MWF 1:00-1:50

MWF 2:00-2:50

Core: LT, HUM

Cultural representations often frame sea monsters as dangerous, horrific, and unknowable villains; however, they are also represented as love interests, friends, objects of wonder, and vulnerable beings meriting ethical consideration. In emphasizing the analysis and production of multimodal arguments, we will explore how we define the role of the sea monster in popular culture and science; how such portrayals influence ideas surrounding the environment, power, and economic and scientific progress; and what it means to live in the environment. This course fulfills the WCO requirement by focusing on critical reading, analytic thinking, and academic writing skills. Students will focus on an extended research project for the semester by developing a topic proposal, a summary and analysis of their research, an argument directed at a specific audience, and a visual presentation of their argument.

Sarah Robbins

TR 11:00-12:20

Core: WCO II

This themed offering of ENGL 20803 for Honors students will explore questions about how twenty-first century authorship is responding to an array of powerful cultural forces that can both support and complicate our individual and collaborative writing. We’ll try out composing in genres that foreground visual rhetoric, an increasingly vital element in the publication marketplace (e.g., in photos for online journalism and advertising, in images for graphic narrative books). We’ll experiment with media-enhanced approaches and technology-influenced tools for collaborating with peers and with networks of writing, including generative AI. We’ll analyze examples of visual design in spaces and places that may or may not be inviting in how they are set up to draw in audiences/users. We’ll address questions about ethics and authorship in an era when many consumer-based concerns (such as building a paying readership for writing [platforms]) impact diverse writing sites. We’ll read some examples of “stolen” and possibly unethical authorship to track ongoing questions about who gets to tell different stories, and how.

Major writing projects:

A personal narrative revisiting an example of your own authorship; a visual design piece prepared and interpreted as a small-group project; an analysis of design rhetoric in a place, space, or performance text; a collaborative interpretation of a novel depicting “stolen” (or at least problematic!) authorship in the publishing marketplace.

Required texts for reading:

Colfer, Eoin, Andrew Donkin, and Giovanni Rigano. Illegal: A Graphic Novel. Sourcebooks Young Readers, 2018.

ONE book about “stolen” authorship (to be selected for reading in a small group after class meetings have begun) Examples:

Colapinto, John. About the Author. Harper, 2001.

Korelitz, Jean Hanff. The Plot: A Novel. Celedon Books, 2021.

Kuang, R. F. Yellowface: A Chilling Novel of Racism and Cultural Appropriation. William Morrow, 2023

Ismael Quinones

TR 9:30-10:50

Core: CSV, HUM

In this course, we will survey the history, rhetoric, and performance of power and protest during the Civil Rights Movement, the histories of Latin America, and contemporary movements. Students in the class will work on speeches, a debate, and multimodal writing for transformational change.

Adam Gellings

TR 2:00-3:20

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: FAR

This class pays special attention to the language of food. Words as ingredients. Something passed down & passed around, bringing us to that common table. A place where we all share.

Tyler Dukes

TR 1:00-12:20

Core: LT, HUM

 

In this introductory class, we will close read, analyze, and consider the performance of Shakespeare’s dramatic works to explore how language, stagecraft, and direction create meaning and pleasure. But we will also ask ourselves critical questions for any future doctor, nurse, therapist, or human who will inevitably need medicine in their lives: What are its frontiers? What are its limits? How do we cope?

A central interest of this course is to inquire into how medicine in its early modern forms was understood and practiced, the illnesses it addressed, the cures it promised, and its limitations. From the horrifying threats of plagues, to psychological fractures, to the spiritual dimensions of care, to authoritative (and charlatanic!) physicians and folk healers, we will examine how medicine works literally and metaphorically in Shakespeare’s plays.

You will leave this class with a sharper image of medicine on the Shakespearean stage, and whether you are bound for the clinic or simply human, greater empathy for anyone who seeks to heal or be healed.

Major Readings:

Timon of Athens

Julius Caesar

Macbeth

All’s Well that Ends Well

King Henry VIII

Tyler Dukes

TR 12:30-1:50

Core: LT, HUM

This course introduces students to the long tradition of women’s writing from the medieval period to the modern day. Across a wide range of genres (including poetry, fiction, and life writing), we will explore how women authors with disabilities use the page to talk back to medical authority, redefine care, find meaning in their lives, and probe societal standards of “normalcy.”

No previous background in Women’s Writing or Disability Studies is required—only a willingness to read closely and ask hard questions.

As a class, some of our guiding queries will be: What qualifies as “women’s writing?” How do women writers with disabilities use literary form to express pain, pleasure, and survival? Can studying disability change the way we understand health and human variation today?

Major Readings:

Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Alshammari, Head Above Water

Martineau, Life in the Sickroom

Woolf, On Being Ill

Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos

Kenny, My Disability Is Divine

Cavendish, The Blazing World

Leduc, The Centaur’s Wife

David Sutton

TR 9:30-10:50

TR 11:00-12:20

Core: LT, HUM

This course will explore the development of the Hero's quest and how each hero is presented with tests and trials to become something greater than they were in the beginning.  Texts explored will include: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Batman: A Death in the Family, and Alanna: The First Adventure.  Students will engage in active discussions, draft argumentative papers, and create rivoting presentations alternated with each selection. 

David Sutton

MW 4:00-5:20

Core: LT, HUM

This course will explore the relationship between Manga and Anime as different cultural themes are explored.  Major focuses include: Pacifism and The Quest for Peace, Ritualistic Suicide, and Death and Rebirth.  Works explored will include: Howl's Moving Castle, Gundam Wing, Dragon Ball Z, Angel Beats, and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

Anna Sims

MWF 12:00-12:50

MWF 1-1:50

Core: LT, HUM

Introduces concepts of close reading and the creative writing workshop. Engages questions of the role of reading in culture, its impact on understanding complex issues, and the connection of reading to composing.

Chantel Carlson

TR 9:30-10:50

TR 11:00-12:20 

Core: FAR

In this introductory creative writing course, students will read and analyze plays, experimental collaborative performances, and poetry, specifically focusing on identity expression through the written word and performance. Students will also get experience writing their own plays and poetry, as well as receive constructive critiques on their own written work. Because this is a writing workshop that values inclusivity, students will participate in a collaborative environment through workshops and group assignments.

Beginners welcome!

Janelle Gray

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: FAR

What makes a scene impossible to look away from? In this class, we'll explore how to write stories that are meant to be performed--on stage and on screen. Together, we'll break down powerful scenes driven by conflict, character, and dialogue using student-picked plays, TV shows, and movies. Then, you'll bring your own stories to life through workshop and collaboration.

Gunja Nandi

TR 2-3:20

Core: LT, HUM

This course is an introduction to the close reading and critical examination of poetry. The primary purpose of the course is to familiarize students with various ways to read, analyze, and take pleasure in poetry. To that end, this course will introduce the students to eminent poets as well as different poetic forms and traditions in English literature like the epics, elegies, sonnets, lyrics, metaphysical poetry, dramatic monologues, etc. Accordingly, the course will traverse through different literary periods and engage with the respective historical contexts. Students will have opportunities to explore poetry in contemporary pop cultural media in juxtaposition with the assigned material to enhance their relatability and understanding. We will examine a plethora of themes including, for instance, the relationship between poetry and personal identity. In learning about different poetic forms, we will also consider how poetic expression engages with ideas and experiences that tend to elude other prosaic modes of expression. In this course, students are expected to participate in close reading, textual analysis, and class discussion.

Sarah Margaret Pittman

MWF 11:00-11:50

MWF 12:00-12:50

Core: LT, HUM

This course will introduce students to literature spanning from the late eighteenth century to today that focuses on social issues to explore how literature is shaped by its historical and cultural contexts. We will begin by discussing poetry that depicts the hardships and inequalities present during the Industrial Revolution before we shift to study an early social novel and novella from the mid-nineteenth century. We will also look at contemporary songs and works of literature to better understand how storytelling spurs social reform and change. Students will read a variety of works, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. We will also analyze adaptations and reimaginings of social novels to examine why stories of disparity and adversity are still relevant today. This course will include a combination of traditional assessments and creative projects. For example, students will write their own lyrics for a protest song. As an introduction to literature course, students will also learn to identify plot, theme, setting, point of view, and poetic techniques. 

Dallas Brister

MWF 9:00-9:50

MWF 10:00-10:50

Core: LT, HUM

Welcome to English 10133, Introduction to Literature. In this course we will read a variety of literature such as short stories, poems, fiction, and memoirs that feature disability. We will examine how the disabled body acts as a symbol in literary tradition, how setting and environment leads to or hinders access, narration and voice, and finally how literature acts as a social critique of the way disability is viewed and understood in society.

 

Lorenzo Casanova

TR 12:30-1:50, 2:00-3:20

Core: LT, HUM

The course will explore genres such as short stories, novels, and films centered on queer experiences. It will emphasize queer literature and highlight the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality within heteronormative society. The physical movement across rural and urban regions offers alternative ways of survival for the LGBTQIA+ community. The course will explore how regional spaces in queer literature embody social and political connections, emphasizing storytelling as world-making for queer communities. Also, students will become familiar with interpretive strategies and will examine the course texts about literary antecedents, literary analysis as a research method, and the cultural circumstances of composition. Subtopics will often vary by section. This course cannot be repeated for additional credit.

Sarah Parijs

TR 9:30-10:50

Core: LT, HUM

Simultaneously a product of Japanese culture and globalization, anime is an audiovisual form of film and television which is often framed as form of entertainment catered to and for children. While this childlike and simplistic categorization is frequently challenged by its multi-genre approach to varying subjects and themes, this course outlines the aesthetics and ideological contexts of theories of the child, childhood, and maturation across anime and its adaptations from other genres such as manga, history, literature, and folklore. As an introduction to film analysis, this course will examine a broad survey of genres in anime to learn about fundamental aspects of film, television, and literary adaptation techniques, like mise-en-scene, characterization, framing, sound, and more. We will also watch and read stories by a variety of directors and authors; learn about how anime and its adaptations define the child and social, biological, behavioral, environmental, and political processes of growing up. 

Lisa Nikolidakis

MW 4:00-5:20

Core: LT, HUM

Whether it’s nuclear panic, forests that won’t let you go, or rogue AI systems, ecohorror taps into our deepest fears about the world we’re creating, altering, and destroying. In this course,

we’ll explore how ecohorror films reflect and amplify environmental anxieties, while also learning how films work on screen through core elements like mise-en-scène, sound, editing, and narrative. From the eerie wilderness of The Blair Witch Project to the economic terror of Parasite to dystopian chaos of Snowpiercer, we’ll analyze how films construct nature as a monster (or are we the monsters?), and examine the social, political, and environmental forces shaping those fears. You’ll leave the course with a strong film vocabulary, the ability to critically analyze how movies create meaning, and a framework for making your own short ecohorror film, culminating in a final screening and Oscar Party.

Alexandra Edwards

TR 5:00-6:20

Core: LT, HUM

What do gangsters, screwball comedies, and film noir have in common? They're all products of one of the most powerful — and most controlled — creative systems in American history: the Hollywood Studio System. In this course, students will trace the history of Hollywood from the dawn of sound film through the system's gradual decline, watching and analyzing films like Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, and Double Indemnity along the way. We begin with two 1929 short films starring jazz legends Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington, and follow Hollywood's story through the Pre-Code era, the censorship battles of the Production Code, wartime filmmaking, and the shadowy world of film noir. Using a five-category analytical framework — narrative, aesthetic, ideological, historical, and industrial — students will learn to read films not just as stories but as cultural artifacts shaped by censorship, commerce, and politics, ending with Singin' in the Rain as a film that looks back at everything Hollywood built, and everything it cost.

Ismael Quinones

TR 11:00-12:20, 12:30-1:50

Core: WCO I

We will study, practice, and produce writing that “imprints” in time. From speeches that enacted political change, arguments that shaped the public, histories of ancient times, and visual rhetoric in contemporary life, students will participate in democratic deliberation, study histories of social movements, and imagine how we write a better world into existence.

Ashok Bhusal

MWF 9:00-9:50, 10:00-10:50, 3:00-3:50

Core: WCO

Welcome to the Fall 2026 ENGL 10803 class! This course is designed for you to engage in various forms of compositions with writing serving as your starting point. Through these compositions, you will learn about yourself and the world. To accomplish this, you’ll engage in processes of composition including invention, critical reading, drafting, revision, and editing as you complete written as well as non-written tasks that will enable you to make sense of the world around you. This is a skill-oriented, hands-on and task-based class and so I want you to see every assignment as a “final exams” since an aggregate of the points you earn from each task throughout the semester will determine your final grade. 

Shelby Oubre

MWF 1:00-1:50

MWF 2:00-2:50

Core: LT,HUM

This course covers British literature from the 16th century into the early 17th century. The major authors we will cover include, Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Cavendish. Our core focus for the semester is based on Philip Sidney’s claim in Defense of Poesy that poetry is the best method for teaching (specifically history and morality) and the most direct way an individual may make the world as they see. In short, we will investigate how imaginative literature aided English efforts to form a national identity and social consciousness, and to speculate upon its future during a time of immense change and instability.

Andreley Bjelland

MWF 1:00-1:50

Core: LT,HUM

Messy love triangles, messier family feuds, questionable side quests, and pranks gone too far: welcome to Introduction to Shakespeare! This semester, we’ll make our way through forests, islands, fortresses, and battlefields as we explore the enduring legacy of William Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances. Through readings, screenings, and discussion, we’ll work together to examine the impact of Shakespeare’s characters, plots, and language in their original Renaissance context. We’ll also track echoes of the plays across time to uncover where we see these themes today, including reality TV, social media posts, news headlines, and our everyday interactions.

 

Brandon Manning

TR 9:30-10:50

Core: LT, HUM

This course will serve as an introduction to discourses around the American dream in Black literature and culture. We will move in chronological order and think through how Black writers, thinkers, and cultural producers have represented and interrogated ideas around the American Dream. We will focus on issues of cultural and legal inheritance as part of the American Dream. We will begin with Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again” and read other seminal voices like James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and others. We will engage different genres and mediums as we seek the answer to questions such as: How have Black writers navigated issues of citizenship and the promise of the American Dream? To what extent does cultural inheritance demonstrate the complexity of the American Dream?

Yingwen Yu

MWF 11:00-11:50

Core: LT, HUM

In Sister Nations, Winona LaDuke writes, “The women are telling stories, the women are singing, listen, listen. Read, read.” This course takes up that invitation by exploring contemporary Native American women’s writing across fiction, poetry, and visual media. Together, we will examine how these works engage with identity, land, community, and survival, while connecting oral traditions to present-day cultural, political, and environmental issues. Students will read, discuss, and reflect on powerful voices that challenge dominant narratives and reimagine the future.

Madhukari Guha

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: LT, HUM

There is an assumption that women writers tackle domestic, cosy, and lowbrow genres such as the romance and the fairy tale. This course will help dismantle that myth by teaching writings of women in the genres of romance and fairy tale to show how these genres are not apolitical, and regularly addresses the inequality of power across gender, nationality, race, color, and class. We will be reading texts by celebrated women novelist from the nineteenth to the twenty first centuries from Jane Austen to Margaret Atwood.

Azadeh Ghanizadeh

MW 4:00-5:20

Core: LT, HUM

This course offers an introduction to women’s writing and literary expression from both national and global perspectives. Although we will read a variety of works by women from different backgrounds, our central text will be The Second Sex by French existentialist scholar Simone de Beauvoir. Our focus will be on how women have used writing as a mode of resistance, self-definition, and cultural intervention across different historical moments and geopolitical contexts.

Readings include fiction, memoir, poetry, essays, and visual texts, with authors ranging from canonical figures to contemporary voices. Alongside literary texts, we will engage feminist theory, postcolonial thought, and transnational perspectives to deepen our understanding of women’s narratives in the contexts in which they are produced and received.

The course will be discussion-based and will include close reading and critical thinking to develop analytical tools to think deeply about voice, authorship, and representation. This course invites students to consider how women’s literature contributes to broader conversations about identity and civic life in the world today.

Jill Havens

MWF 11:00-11:50, 2:00-2:50

Core: LT, HUM

Humans have always felt the need to tell stories about their lives, to share their experiences, to explain the things they cannot understand or to express their own truths. Many stories from ancient civilizations have survived and come down to us now as myths. Myths take many forms, carry many meanings, and serve many purposes; and these stories can tell us much about the needs, values, beliefs, and concerns of the people who found comfort in their gods and heroes. In this course we will explore a variety of myths from the Classical world of the Greeks and Romans to the Iron Age of the Celts and Dark Age of the Vikings. As we read these stories, we will try to understand their meaning for those who originally told and heard these stories, and the purpose these stories had for the people who believed in their truth. We will also examine how modern Western culture has been shaped by this legacy of ancient myth and even impact everyday aspects of our own lives.

Layne Craig

MWF 1:00-1:50, 2:00-2:50

Core: LT, HUM

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, facing his own cancer diagnosis, turned to the words of playwright Samuel Beckett to characterize the sense of limbo he felt in facing his prognosis, repeating to himself the quotation, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” For Kalanithi, and for many facing medical diagnoses and crises, narrative and literary language provide frameworks, inspiration, and a sense of identity that can have profound effects on their experience of illness and health. In fact, these effects are being acknowledged by more and more medical schools as they integrate health humanities courses into their curricula. In this class, we’ll examine the ways in which stories influence our views of illness and health. Most readings will be twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and memoirs depicting issues such as infectious disease, mental illness, cancer, and reproductive health.

Kit Synder

MW 4:00-5:20

MW 5:30-6:50

Core: LT, HUM

What does a cyberpunk future look like? And is it inevitable? In this course, we use the cyberpunk genre to explore important questions about our future and what it means to be human. We will engage with common cyberpunk themes like corporate power, technological advancements, and the persistence of hope. Students will analyze literary works as well as video games in order to reflect on our future and what the cyberpunk genre can teach us.

Gaming skills and knowledge is not required to participate in the course!

Sarah Margaret Pittman

MWF 8:00-8:50

MWF 9:00-9:50

Core: WCO II

This course will focus on the analysis and creation of arguments in various forms of media, such as print and digital media, that are centered on current local and national topics and concerns. Students will learn how to compose rhetorical analysis essays, argumentative essays, and multimodal projects for the digital realm. In this class, students will complete a combination of traditional essays and creative projects.

Victoria Washington

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: WCO II

In 20803, your written inquiry led you along new routes and brought you to new places. Now, it’s time to find your voice. Writing as Argument offers the opportunity to practice formulating, expressing, and defending arguments of your own. As a class, we will analyze the rhetorical patterns of writers, musical and visual artists, comedians, and other rhetoricians to determine how they construct compelling arguments. From there, you will flex your rhetorical muscles by researching and developing a thesis on a specific topic. Lastly, the course will culminate in a final exam framed as a class debate where you will have a chance to collaborate with your peers to create and present your closing argument. Gird up your loins. It’s time to fight.

Mat Wenzel

TR 9:30-10:50, 12:30-1:50, 2:00-3:20

Core: WCO II

What does it actually mean to make an argument — not a fight, but a real conversation? In this course, we take the writing and inquiry skills from ENGL 10803 and put them to work across all kinds of media: written, visual, spoken, and digital. Working in small groups, you'll research and produce your own podcast series on topics that actually matter to you and your communities. Along the way you'll get better at finding and using sources, analyzing how arguments work, and composing for real audiences. The podcast is our main format, but the bigger question we're asking all semester is: how do you get into a conversation that's already happening — and say something worth hearing?

Hannah Jorgensen

MWF 11:00-11:50

Core: CA, HUM

Digital humanists both use digital methods to study literature and culture, as well as take digital culture as an object of study itself. How can computation help us see literature and culture in new ways? No coding experience necessary, though previous coding and statistical knowledge is welcome. We will be learning digital humanities by doing digital humanities. We will be reading various academic articles, popular articles, and reviewing project websites, but you will also learn some basic tools to build your own project. In the final part of the course, you will identify a dataset you are interested in studying with a small group and complete a final digital humanities project that draws on both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Sarah Ruffing Robbins

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: GA, LT

How have American individuals and groups addressed the challenge of finding home? What do you know about your own family’s history of moving around within and across parts of the US and the world? How does your own sense of “homeplace” relate to historical issues and social movements in a globally-situated US culture with a long history of complex migrations, by individuals and groups? Through reading and writing that incorporates personal responses and a series of inquiry projects, we’ll explore questions about migration, settlement, and (sometimes) resistance in literary and pop culture texts—including visuals and films as well as printed ones. We’ll also do research projects to explore Americans’ searches to claim “home” in a nation shaped by migrations of different kinds, both within and across borders.

Overall, we’ll ask how stories told in various forms can document and support, but also sometimes question, folks’ efforts, when they move around, to sustain familiar social networks, honor long-held values, and hold on to prior identities even as, by moving to a new place, they may well find themselves changing in varying ways.

Caylie Cox

TR 9:30-10:50

Core: N/A

Technical and professional writing forms a large part of many job duties across nearly every industry. In the business world, writing makes things happen, and documentation is the lifeblood of a company. But too often, technical writing courses are just…boring! This class is my attempt to make technical and professional writing instruction interesting and (dare I say it?) fun. Instead of writing documentation about real products, you and your group members will create a fictional product within the world of a book—sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian, or any other fiction genre you can think of. We’ll use real technical writing genres to guide your work on this “product” from design and testing to marketing and sales.