Courses

Lisa Nikolidakis    

T 5:00-7:40pm 

Core: WEM 

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Creative Writing

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the diverse forms within creative nonfiction, emphasizing both historical context and contemporary applications. While we will examine the genre’s evolution, the majority of readings will focus on modern works, providing students with a dynamic, up-to-date perspective. Throughout 
the first two-thirds of the course, students will be introduced to a different creative nonfiction form each week, fostering both understanding and experimentation. In the latter portion, the class will shift to a workshop format, allowing students to refine their skills through collaborative critique and hands-on practice.

Throughout the term, students will hone their craft through a series of writing exercises, prompts, and in-class activities, progressively working toward a more substantial piece for workshop. Key topics will be explored, including—but not limited to—the complexities of memory and its fallibility, integrating research into creative 
writing, essay structures, the ethical considerations of writing creative nonfiction, the multifaceted nature of truth, the role of writing rituals, and the power of personal obsessions in shaping narrative.

Alex Lemon

MWF 10:00-10:50am

Core: WEM 

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Creative Writing

“When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do,” the poet Anne Sexton said, and in this class we are fortunate to have time and space to do that which, in one way or another, we are all supposed to do. The primary focus of this course is your poetry, but to generate high quality work you must develop your skills at writing poetry by reading and discussing poems, and engaging both traditional and contemporary poetics in a variety of ways. Course materials will include collections by contemporary poets who will be reading at TCU this spring and an anthology of modern verse. Requirements include weekly writing assignments, journaling, book reviews, and typed workshop responses. Be prepared for the many ways we can work (discussion, writing 
exercises, workshopping, readingreadingreading), for Wallace Stevens was correct when he said “Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.” (WEM)

Chantel L. Carlson

TR  11-12:20pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Creative Writing

"I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities." —August Wilson

In this dramatic writing workshop, students should become familiar with the possibilities of the modern stage through the exploration of experimental playwrights (and filmed adaptations of these plays) such as Margaret Edson, August Wilson, and Samuel Beckett. Students will study the rise and fall of the character and the ever-changing identity/role of the actor. During the semester, students will also see what's going on in the world of theatre today, including theatrical adaptations, experimentations, and collaborations. Students will not only apply the principles of dramatic writing (including character and plot development, stage directions, and writing dialogue), but will also become familiar with how experimental playwrights challenged these predefined notions of theatre and created new possibilities for the stage. Because this is a writing workshop, students will be able to take advantage of a collaborative environment by receiving author-driven feedback on their own written work. In addition to quizzes, students will write several dramatic exercises/scenes, as well as complete a final project. Film students are also welcome.

Matthew Pitt

TR 11:00am-12:20pm

Core: None

English Major: Writing or Elective  

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Writing Seminar

Peculiar orphans of the prose world, novellas have been praised as the perfect narrative form by some practitioners (Ian McEwan), and rebuked by others (Katherine Anne Porter). The word itself is Italian for “new little thing,” yet the form has been part of the literary lexicon for centuries, predating shorter fiction and novels alike.

This course considers the novella’s long if conflicted tradition, its patterns of construction, and modern resurgence. Through close readings, we will foster an appreciation of the novella as a vibrant, viable form of its own, one that has endured across many aesthetics, eras, and areas of the world, and is unified by more than just 
arbitrary word count. Touchstone examples we may study include novellas by Sandra Cisneros, Danielle Evans, Denis Johnson, Carson McCullers, Leo Tolstoy, Justin Torres, and Edith Wharton.

Drawing from published examples, students will organize notes and fashion a synopsis of their own novella projects, following with submissions of pages, questions and pathways for workshop review. In this setting, writers will receive feedback on how to deepen and expand an initial canvas into something larger. While offering students a means to expand beyond the short story, the course is also an opportune workshop for 
students considering Honors and Distinction creative thesis projects, and/or those who plan to apply for TCU’s Excellence in Literary Fiction (ELF) Scholarship.

Prerequisites: CRWT 10203, 20103, or 20133, plus the satisfactory completion of a prior 30000- or 40000-level Creative Writing workshop.

Daniel Juan Gil

MWF 9:00-9:50am

Core: HUM

English Major:  British Literature, Early Literature & Culture

Writing & Rhetoric Major:  Elective

Creative Writing Major: Literature & Language, Elective

This course explores the shifting terrain of English literature from its earliest surviving epic, Beowulf, to the literary culture of the 18th century—a period marked by extraordinary transformations in language, society, and the purpose of literature itself. As we move from Old English to Middle English to the emergence of Modern English, we will consider literature’s evolving role: as an oral heroic record, as a site of religious devotion and debate, as a tool for regulating literacy and shaping national consciousness, as a medium for new forms of personal and political expression, and as a tool and a critique of colonialism. Alongside canonical works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, we will also read texts that illuminate the historical experiences of real men and women—letters, sermons, popular ballads, and early novels—capturing everything from medieval pilgrimage to the rise of the public sphere.

At the heart of this course is the idea that literature is not only a reflection of history but an active force in shaping it. How did poetry, drama, and prose mediate the anxieties of plague and war, religious upheaval, and the expansion of empire? How did literacy itself become an object of regulation and control? And how did these texts, written in an evolving language for changing audiences, construct the modern idea of literature as we know it today?

Karen Steele

TR 11:00am-12:20pm 

Core: HUM, LT, WEM, HT

English Major: British Literature, Global & Diasporic

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Literature & Language, Elective

A small island nation, Ireland has for more than a hundred years commanded an unusual place of honor in the world of literature. Beyond the fact that it is home to four Nobel prize-winning writers (and the greatest English-language writer never to win the Nobel, James Joyce), Ireland stands out because literature has played such a central role in its history and in all the major social and political struggles of the past century. Our seminar will focus on the Irish Literary Revival and its aftermath, when artists adopted the stance of street orators and some of them actually took up arms to emancipate the women, workers, and nation of Ireland. We will study literature alongside the politics and history of this vibrant time, drawing on archival materials such as spy reports and radical and seditious newspapers. The class presumes no background in Irish politics, history, or culture, but by the end of the semester, you will become proficient in formal analysis of literary texts and primary historical documents, 
as well as knowledgeable about Irish culture, history, and its political context.

Bonnie Blackwell

T 6:00-9:40am 

Core: WEM 

English Major: British Literature 

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing: Literature & Language, Elective

This course focuses on the questions: Why Austen? And: Why Now? In this semester-long Jane Austen course, we will read Jane Austen’s novels, including her early works, unpublished in her lifetime. We will watch 2-3 film adaptations of each novel, comparing diverse cultural responses to the same work. We will also watch ancillary productions which attempt to revisit or recapture Austen’s formative years, her Regency world, or to bring her distinctive courtship rituals to modern-day participants. We will develop a critical conversation about what these books mean to modern readers and movie-goers and ask thorny questions about Austen herself, and her goal of becoming a publishing success. Required books will include: Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Lady Susan (these may be read online at the Republic of Pemberley or Project Gutenberg). 

Films screened will include: Love and Friendship, Becoming Jane, From

Brandon Manning

TR 2:00-3:20pm

Core: HUM

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Literature & Language, Elective

This course serves as an advanced seminar on the black humorous and satirical tradition in African American literature and visual culture. We will begin the course cultivating a genealogy of black folk expressive culture that leads into a robust representation of humor and satire during Antebellum slavery. We will examine the role of humor, satire, and play in shaping and responding to different moments of black cultural production in the 20th century: the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the move towards multiculturalism in the 90s. We will look back to figures like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, and others, and 
put them in conversation with contemporary writers and cultural producers like Paul Beatty, Issa Rae, and Key and Peele to consider how humor and satire have evolved and in what ways has it stayed the same. We will seek the answer to questions such as: What is black satire? What role does humor play in black cultural production? And, how does laughter and misunderstanding function within the broader matrix of black cultural production?

Mona Narain

MWF 11:00-11:50am

Core: CA, GA, WEM

English Major: British Literature, Global & Diasporic Literature

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Literature & Language, Elective

In this course we will read some exciting texts that represent Literatures written in English from different parts of the world today. Due to the legacies of colonization and occupation, billions of people across the world use English. However, previously colonized peoples have changed the language and made English malleable to reflect the intertwining of their indigenous and colonized pasts. They have produced some of the most exciting and innovative writing in English in the last century. We will concentrate primarily on writing in English from (post) colonized nations in Asia and Africa and the diasporic communities of Britain, Asia, and Africa. Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory will provide the framework through which we will engage in a cross-cultural analysis. We will examine the differences, similarities, conflicts, and interrelationships between the literatures of global south to begin to fashion methodologies that respond to the challenges of reading global ethnic literatures in their full complexity. From a comparative angle, this course will explore the historical, 
social, cultural, and racial contexts which shape each literary text. 

Students should anticipate a heavy reading schedule, which will include literary theory, primary and secondary literary texts, regular attendance, extensive class participation, presentations, in class written responses and research papers.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803, ENGL 20803 and at least one 10000- or 20000- level ENGL course
Core Curriculum Outcomes: CA, GA and WEM

Anticipated Literature Course Texts:
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Anchor Books) ISBN 0-385-47454-7
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (Penguin) ISBN 0-14-013270-8
Mohsin Hamid The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harvest Books) ISBN 978-0-156-03402-9
Nnedi Okorofor Binti (Tom Doherty Associates) ISBN 978-0-8525-3
Gurinder Chadha Bend it Like Beckham (film) (film shown in class)
Marjane Satrapi Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon Books, Random House) ISBN 0-375-42230-7

Ariane M. Balizet

TR 2:00-3:20pm

Core: None

English Major: British Literature, Early Literature & Culture, Research Seminar

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Literature & Language, Elective 

This course begins with a set of core questions: What can literature do for us in times of social isolation? How does beauty persist in the face of death? How does disease intersect with privilege, politics, and art? How might cultural histories of contagion help us understand life during and after a pandemic? Together, we will examine works of poetry, prose, and drama from the English Renaissance and present day through the lens of plague. Focusing on literature produced during the “plague years” (1592-3, 1603-1611, 1664-1666), this class examines the relationship between pandemic and literature in the broadest sense, from metaphors comparing falling in love to “catching the plague” to the material consequences of closing the London playhouses to prevent disease. We will also compare our study of the Renaissance with the depiction and experience of plague in 21st century poetry and fiction. 

As a Research Seminar, this course has three chief aims: to introduce students to the representation of plague in Renaissance England; to train students in sustained, long-form research on a topic in British Literature; and to identify skills, interests, and strengths for students’ professional futures through the development of a career 
portfolio.

Assignments for this course include seminar-style discussion, quizzes, short essays, a research project and presentation, and the development of a career portfolio. Readings will include Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, and All’s Well that Ends Well; Bocaccio’s The Decameron; Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist; 20th and 21st century poetry on illness and healing; and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

Stacie McCormick

TR 3:30-4:50pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Global & Diasporic, American Literature

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Literature & Language, Elective

Our course will explore Toni Morrison’s work in various genres and forms. We will consider questions such as: How do we comprehend Morrison’s literary contributions from her 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye to today? In what ways does Morrison’s art inform not only artistic practice but also ways of understanding the world? 

Course themes: Black girlhood, motherhood, Afrofuturism, gender and sexuality, beauty, geography, etc.

Theresa Gaul

MW 4:00- 5:20pm

Core: HUM, LT, WEM

English Major: American Literature

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Literature & Language, Elective

Although you may know something about Texas’s history in the nineteenth century, have you ever read any of the writings produced during this century? While the state’s history has loomed large, its literature has not been included as part of the American literary canon. This course will explore the literature of Texas in the nineteenth century. As a multicultural, multilingual space of Indigenous and immigrant history, we will 
examine the writings that defined the region in the tumultuous nineteenth century, which saw Indigenous removal, genocide and resilience, colonization by several European imperial powers, enslavement and forced labor, immigration and settlement by Europeans of various nations, revolutions and wars, racial violence, annexation by the United States, and participation in the Confederacy. To ground our examination of the cultural expressions produced during these events, we will explore theories of regionalism and locality in the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies and give special attention to writings that have stood outside the dominant narrative of Texas’s history.

Heejoo Park

MWF 10:00-10:50am

Core: HUM, LT

English Major: American Literature, Global & Diasporic

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major:  Literature & Language, Elective

What comes to your mind when you think of the supernatural? Monsters, ghosts, deities, and changelings? In this class, we will explore what “Transnational” American literature is through the lens of the supernatural –beings, events, and forces that defy the laws of nature. From the shape-shifting aswang from Filipino folklore to La Llorona, a vengeful ghost in Mexican folklore, we will follow the trajectories of these supernatural beings as they cross or fly over borderlands and borderwaters (the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean) of the United States and back again. To that end, we will be reading selected works of 20th and 21st-century American writers who evoke the supernatural to situate America in transnational contexts, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Ken Liu, Nalo Hopkinson, Edwidge Danticat, Ana Castillo, Ernest Hogan, Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. Additionally, we will be gaining familiarity with a wide range of genres from magical realism to science fiction, fantasy, and horror, as well as forms from poetry to novel, to inquire how genres and forms are deeply connected to the stories that are being told. Requirements for this class will include readings, discussion boards, in-class activities, papers, and a creative multimedia project on supernatural beings.

Layne Craig

TR 12:30-1:50pm

Core: WEM

English Major: American Literature

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Literature & Language, Elective

In 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay "On Being Ill," Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature." One hundred years later, we'll take up Woolf's curiosity and pursue the themes of illness and disability through their appearance in life writing from the early through the late twentieth century. Has illness taken its place as a prime theme of literature? What kinds of tropes, metaphors, and images have memoir writers associated with their own and others' illness? How has the memoir genre become an arena for political activism connected with illness and disability? Assigned texts for this class will include scholarship from memoir studies, disability studies, and narrative medicine, as well as a selection of memoirs from 20th and 21st century writers about their own experiences with illness and disability. Students will also engage with graphic memoirs and self-published zines. Graded assignments will include short written responses to the readings, a zine project, presentations, and a researched final project.

Marcela Fuentes

R 12:30-3:20pm

Core: None

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Writing Seminar

Studies in Creative Writing is an intensive creative writing workshop open to graduate students who have a strong background in literature and imaginative writing. 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. 

Required Texts
1. Best American Short Stories 2024, eds Lauren Groff and Heidi Piltor

Mat Wenzel

MW 4:00pm - 5:00pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing and Publishing

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

What does it mean to write well? How can we discover new ways of inquiry, argument, expression, and composition that does not repeat or adhere to partial stories and oppressive frameworks? This class will explore such questions, and others, through various methods, conversations, and explorations. Students may choose to focus their studies on a particular contemporary genre/mode of composition or to build a portfolio of various types of compositions/creations. This course is designed for students interested 1. designing artifacts that circulate in the university and the communities surrounding it, 2. examining and reflecting on their positions in the larger political and language systems, and 3. investigating dominant language expectations and judgement practices (and creating alternatives).

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803 or 10833, ENGL 20803 or 20833. Writing workshop that builds on lower division composition courses by focusing on the analysis and production of texts written for specific rhetorical situations and discourse communities. Emphasis on new writing contexts and contemporary writing genres whether for academic, professional, creative, or personal purposes.

Brad Lucas

MWF 11:00 - 11:50am

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing and Publishing

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

Technical writers take on challenging work to make life easier for others. They strive to communicate complex information clearly. Technical writing builds on the fundamentals of rhetoric, with a focus on purpose, audience, content, and style, but it also [1] meets audience needs for navigating, understanding, and retaining information and [2] reflects an organization’s identity, ensuring its reliability and responsibility while meeting its ethical and professional standards. This course focuses on generating content through primary research, distilling it from secondary sources, arranging it for diverse genres and media, and presenting it with attention to visual design and verbal delivery. We edit text in conjunction with data for concision and clarity, revising our 
work to meet genre and style expectations while organizing content for multiple delivery systems. We use Richard Johnson-Sheehan’s Technical Communication Today to guide our learning about written and visual communication; reviewing and editing; project planning and analysis; content development and management; and organizational design and production delivery. We develop both individual and collaborative projects, ranging from traditional print reports to enhanced texts designed for a range of users and uses. In our increasingly complex world, technical communicators are needed almost everywhere. No matter what life path you pursue, this course will further develop your rhetorical skills, extend your engagement with digital media, and expand the range of your own writing to help meet those needs, whenever and wherever you might find them. 

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803 and either ENGL 20803 or WRIT 20113

Stephen Boakye

MWF 2:00pm-2:50pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Theory

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Digital Rhetorics and Design

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

Our lives are deeply intertwined with technology, but do we truly understand how it works and how to navigate it effectively? In this course, we'll explore cyberliteracy, uncovering the challenges of being both users and creators of online content. We'll develop the digital competencies needed for functional, critical, and rhetorical 
engagement with the internet.

We will analyze current articles, videos, and podcasts that address critical issues in cyberliteracy, such as online privacy, misinformation, and algorithms. Through individual and collaborative research projects, you'll investigate specific challenges related to technology use and propose innovative solutions. You will apply rhetorical principles to communicate effectively in a digital environment, culminating in the creation of digital projects.

Yingwen Yu

 

TR 9:30am-10:50am

 

Core: None

 

English Major: Theory

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetorics & Culture

 

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

 

In Why Indigenous Literatures Matter Daniel Heath Justice writes, “[…] Story helps us to recognize that other others beyond ourselves have identities, desire, loves, fears, and feelings… connect us with one another, and with the other-than-human world, and simultaneously remind us that we matter to the world but that` we’re not 
the centre of that world."

 

Non-human rhetoric challenges the traditional notion that rhetoric is exclusive to human language and cognition and explores how entities such as animals, objects, or environments shape meanings and create relationships--echoing the Native philosophy of “All My Relations.” Through the works of Indigenous authors, we will 
consider questions such as: How do Indigenous worldviews conceptualize the relationship between humans and the non-human world? How do stories featuring non-human beings convey ethical or environmental messages? How do these stories guide humans in becoming better relatives to the world around them? This interdisciplinary course draws on literature, films, and cultural studies to explore the deep connections between rhetoric, representation, and the natural world in Indigenous thought. Drawing from Indigenous written and visual texts, students will analyze themes such as kinship and survivance. Course materials may include Braiding Sweetgrass, Intimate Nature, People of the whale, Deer Woman, Revenge of the Windigo. Course assessments include journal writing assignments, a research paper and a presentation.

Chantel L. Carlson

TR 3:30pm-4:50pm

Core: None

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing & Publishing

Creative Writing Major: Internship

This 1.5 credit-hour course is for students with an interest in literary magazine publication and basic web design. Students in the course will work in every stage of the production of the semester’s print issue of eleven40seven, TCU’s undergraduate journal of the arts, and its web edition (www.1147.tcu.edu). Specifically, students will gain knowledge of and experience in (1) the history and purpose of the student literary magazine, (2) the selection, editing, and proofing of the semester’s submissions, (3) the journal’s print layout and the design of the issue’s web edition, and (4) the distribution and promotion of the completed issue. Students will also receive, as needed, practical software training. The course may be repeated for credit.

Chantel L. Carlson

TR 3:30pm-4:50pm

Core: None

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing & Publishing

Creative Writing Major: Internship

This 1.5 credit-hour service-learning course is intended for students with an interest in basic book publication, as well as community outreach. Students in the course will be working either with a nonprofit (which may require time “on site”) or focusing on a community-based social issue. Students will listen to and collect stories, which will then be compiled as a series of monologues in a chapbook. Students will gain knowledge of and experience in (1) the history and purpose of monologues as a form of dramatic storytelling, (2) the collection, selection, editing, and proofing of participants’ stories, (3) the design of the chapbook’s print layout, and (4) the distribution and promotion of published chapbook. Students will also receive, as needed, practical software training. The course may be repeated for credit.

Charlotte Hogg

TR 11:00am - 12:20pm

Core: CA, WEM

English Major: Theory

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetorics and Cultures

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

Throughout history, women* have used writing, speaking, and other means of communication to influence the world around them. In this course, we’ll engage women’s rhetorics by asking: What are women’s rhetorics and (how) do they differ from other rhetorics? In what historical, social, and political contexts has women’s 
writing/speech emerged and/or been suppressed? (To understand this most fully, we’ll also work on definitions of rhetoric and where are women in rhetorical traditions? How have non‐traditional rhetors found ways to make their voices heard in the public sphere? 

The purpose of this course is to tackle these and additional questions that arise from our readings, writings, and discussions. We will consider how strategies and vocabulary from various rhetorical texts in a range of genres can inform our thinking and writing for a range of contexts, audiences, and practices. We’ll think about our 
gendered histories as composers, how we compose and speak, and how we use writing and rhetoric to take action in the world. We will examine rhetorical strategies in a variety of modes—from speeches, essays, social media, crafting, activism, and more—and how these strategies might inform our thinking about women’s roles,
identities, and contributions, as well as our own strategies for writing for diverse audiences and purposes. 

*As we’ll discuss in class, the “woman” in women’s rhetorics is not viewed as an isolated category or one that assumes whiteness. Instead, gender is always in interplay with other identities. For the course name, it currently remains “Women’s Rhetorics” as while the term “woman” may be interrogated, it still needs both representation and celebration, especially in an era when women’s rights are under siege. The term is used expansively and fluidly for those who identify as women.

Ashok Bhusal

MWF 8:00am-8:50am

Core: CA, WEM

English Major: Theory or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Digital Rhetorics & Design

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

This course examines connections and interconnections between digital authorship technologies and cultural identities. It investigates how human beings use digital authorship technologies to make meaning in and across rhetorical and cultural contexts and how digital authorship technologies are always cultural. By including 
readings written by Angela Haas, Adam Banks, Laura Gonzales and others, this course discusses how we can connect, theorize and build cultural identities and digital authorship technologies that recognize and value diverse cultures and communicative practices. 
Prerequisite: ENGL 20803

Carrie Leverenz

TR 3:30pm-4:50pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing & Publishing

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

WRIT 40233, Writing for Publication, focuses on both key terms in the phrase “writing for publication.” In addition to writing multiple pieces in publishable magazine genres such as features, profiles, and commentaries, students will also explore the cultural work that publication does—Who writes and publishes? What kind of writing gets published? What purposes do magazines serve? How does digital publication affect magazine writing and its circulation? 

Assignments:
Drafts and revisions of Feature, Profile, and Commentary; Why’s This So Good report. Editing and style exercises; Digital portfolio.

Reading:
All reading will be linked from the course website.

Ashok Bhusal

Time: Arranged

Core: None

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Internship

Creative Writing Major: Internship

Students with 60 credit hours and a Writing/English GPA of 3.0 or CUM GPA of 2.8 can receive workplace experience (and, depending on agency policy, sometimes a stipend) from companies or agencies in publishing, advertising, or other fields. Duties are arranged to fit each student’s schedule, and work opportunities may include research gathering, editing, report writing, social networking, web authoring, or document production. Students need to work a minimum of 8 hours a week during the semester to receive three hours of credit. The internship may help with career decisions; it may lead to full time employment; it answers questions about what certain jobs are like; helps to test writing abilities for various audiences in the workplace; provides on-the-job experience; and challenges certain personal assumptions or views a student may have about workplace behavior. Your work for WRIT 40273 is a space to demonstrate and reflect upon the kinds of written and oral communication done in a professional setting. 

Because this is, first and foremost, a writing internship rather than a more general career internship (a get-your-foot-in-the-door, networking experience that may involve more office work than intensive writing-related activity), it’s your responsibility to negotiate on-site assignments with your supervisor to ensure they meet course outcomes. You should not be doing office work or tasks that are basically typing (data entry, etc.).

NOTE: You should set up your internship before the semester begins so you’re ready to start work no later than the second week of the semester. 

Jason Helms

TR 9:30am-10:50am

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Digital Rhetorics and Design

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

In this course, we will examine the different efforts required to take an idea and make it into a comic. As such, students enrolled in this course will write, draw, letter, and render comics texts of their own creation informed by the assigned readings. Students will compose multimodally and are expected to produce comics texts, visual 
compositions, and traditional written essays and reflections. There is no prerequisite in terms of drawing experience or ability.

This course is grounded primarily within the context of rhetoric and composition, but also touches variously on studio arts, visual rhetoric, and comics studies. This multifaceted lens will provide students with a broad perspective on the production of the comic book as a cultural artifact. We will not sit comfortably with comics as the purveyor of superhero stories but will plumb the depths of the medium and examine potentials of the medium that are only just now being explored.

Curt Rode

TR 12:30pm-1:50pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Digital Rhetorics and Design

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

This section of WRIT 40363 will focus on the basics of web design to develop mobile-friendly web applications that support work in the humanities and social sciences. To this end, students should come prepared to study HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Students will also learn the basics of database management to provide relevant 
and timely content for the applications they develop.

NOTE: eBook production will likely NOT be part of the focus of the Fall 2025 offering of WRIT 40363.

This is an introductory course, but it is designed for students interested in computers and working thoughtfully and creatively in digital environments.

Ismael Quiñones 

TR 12:30pm-1:50pm

Core: GA

English Major: Theory or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetorics & Cultures

Creative Writing Major: Upper Division Writing & Rhetoric

What is revolution? How is rhetoric during and after revolution? How do war and democracy relate? How are the politics of decolonization? Why do revolutions create and destroy political orders? Our class will question how rhetorics of revolution change, maintain, and configure times of possibilities. Students in this class will  develop a multimodal project with the help of writing on a core feeling in times of revolution.