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Current Semester’s Courses (Fall 2024)

DHUM 601: Introduction to Digital Humanities

DHUM 601: Mon. & Wed. 4:10 – 5:25 PM

Dr. Katayoun Torabi

Digital Humanities (DH) is a field with considerable breadth of research methodologies and platforms. This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the methods and technologies used in the field of Digital Humanities, focusing especially on the history of digital approaches to the humanities and the use of digital technologies for humanities research, publishing, teaching, and communication. The first part of the course is dedicated to introducing students to DH tools, platforms, and methods—digitizing and encoding texts, data mining, computational analysis, network analysis, mapping, and visualization–by completing guided digital assignments. The second part of the course will involve helping students develop a final project or paper focused on a topic of interest to the student. There is no disciplinary prerequisite, no extensive technical skills are required for the course, and no one disciplinary approach will be favored. DHUM 601 is cross listed with English 433 and History 433. DHUM 601 is a graduate-level course on the list of approved classes for the Digital Humanities Certificate.

ENGL 610: Topics in the History of the English Language: Old English I, Introductory Old English

English 610 Tues & Thurs 2:20 – 3:35 PM

Dr. Britt Mize 

Beginning study of the Old English language through instruction in phonology, morphology, and syntax, with attention to principles and methods of historical linguistics, and the reading of various texts in verse and prose.  The primary objective of the course is to bring students up to an intermediate level of reading ability in the English language as it existed prior to approximately 1100.  The grade is based on student success in learning the language and the principles of its study, as evidenced mainly by translation exercises.

This course can fulfill the graduate program’s distribution requirement for theory because of its substantial linguistics content.  If its sequel is taken in the spring semester (ENGL 610, Topics in the History of the English Language: Old English II, Beowulf), the pairing can also fulfill the distribution requirement for earlier literature, as well as the language/technical proficiency requirement.

ENGL 618: Readings in 18th-Century British Literature

English 618 Thurs. 1:00 -4:00 pm

Dr. Susan Egenolf

This course will examine works written by British, Irish, Colonial and Indigenous authors (as well as some influential Continental writers) during the eighteenth century. The emphasis of the course will be on how these texts relate to each other and to their sociopolitical contexts. Our objective is to understand the historical, cultural and literary contexts in which these authors produced their works. The works we will be reading represent several genres—poetry, drama, novel, periodical, political treatise—and we’ll be discussing the particular innovations in these genres during the eighteenth century. We will study visual and imperial culture during the period, attending to the ways that these writers and artists represented English and Continental cultures, as well as cultures of the Near East, the Pacific and the New World. The Industrial Revolution, the French and American Revolutions, the Irish rebellion and slavery and abolition will provide important contexts for the course. We will also attend to developments in contemporary scholarship concerned with the writings of the eighteenth century, focusing upon representations of race and gender, post-colonial and decolonial readings, aesthetics and ecological perspectives.


Readings may include Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764),Winkfield’s The Female American (1767), Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), Samson Occom’s autobiography, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798). Earle’s Obi or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800), poetry of Burns, Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

ENGL 653: What was Postmodernism? 

English 653 Fri. 1:00 – 4:00 pm

Dr. Sally Robinson 

In the first half of this class, we will explore postmodernism as a “cultural dominant,” to use Fredric Jameson’s term. For our purposes, that dominant is best understood as an often paranoid attempt to articulate and come to terms with the relationships between individuals and the large systems in which those individuals are enmeshed (including, for example, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, the state, information and technological systems). In the second half, we will consider what comes after postmodernism. Does it make sense to see early 21st century literary and cultural production as “post-postmodernist”? What do scholars speak about when they speak about the “neoliberal novel,” the “novel of globalization,” the “new realism,” and other categories that have popped up in recent years? We will read a selection of novels for each of the two halves of the class, but our focus will be equally on (meta)accounts of postmodernism and its aftermath. 

Theoretical/critical texts might include: 

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (selections)

Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (selections)

Andreas Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern”

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”

Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (selections)

Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (selections)

Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (selections)

Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millenium (selections)

Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (selections)

Mitchell Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, eds., Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture (selections)

 

Fictional texts will likely be drawn from this list:

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Diane Johnson, The Shadow Knows

Don DeLillo, Mao II 

E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel

Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

ENGL 655: CONTEMPORARY RHETORICAL THEORY

English 655 Tues. 1:00-4:00 pm

Dr. Andrew Pilsch

This seminar explores the last 50 years of rhetoric through two claims:

1) Reality is experienced through screens that function rhetorically.

2) The work of the rhetorician is one of determining timing.

We will be exploring these two claims through two bodies of work: canonical texts of 20th- and 21st-century rhetorical theory and media theory that shades and informs the rhetorical work. Participants will be expected to read thoroughly but will come away with an understanding of the shift in rhetorical thinking from linguistic to infrastructure during the period. Authors to be discussed include Kenneth Burke, Thomas Rickert, Richard Lanham, Raymond Williams, Jean Baudrillard, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Susan Leigh Star.

ENGL 672: Topics in American Literature and Culture to 1900: “Early Black Atlantic Literature

English 672  Wed. 1:00  -4:00 pm

Dr. Ira Dworkin

This course meets the distribution requirement as a course in pre-1800 literature. This course provides students with grounding in a critical area of research and teaching in the field of early Black Atlantic literature published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prior to the U.S. Civil War. By working within and beyond the most canonical authors of the period, they will expand their base of knowledge in terms of time, place, language, and genre. This course will introduce students to a range of works in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic (all in English translation) from a range of overlapping literary genres—essay, oratory, memoir, correspondence, poetry, fiction, pamphlet, journalism, and treatise. Writers may include Ayyub ibn Suleiman Diallo, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Mary Prince, Nancy Prince, Jarena Lee, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Venture Smith, John Marrant, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Frederick Douglass, Zilpha Elaw, Britton Hammon, Victor Séjour, Baron de Vastey, Omar ibn Said, Placido, Juan Francisco Manzana, David Dorr, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Sojourner Truth, William Wells Brown, Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, Mary Shadd Cary, Henry Highland Garnet, and Samuel Ringgold Ward. This diverse group of writers are writing from, publishing in, and describing events in North America, Europe, Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti. This course will provide grounding in many overlooked writers of the Black Atlantic as well as a survey of major critical literary scholarship Frances Smith Foster, Houston Baker, William Andrews, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, R.A. Judy, Sterling Stuckey, Sylvian Diouf, Michael Gomez, Christopher Hager, and others.

ENGL 680: THEORIES OF GENDER

English 680 Tue. & Thurs. 11:10 am  -12:25 pm

Dr. Vanita Reddy

This graduate-level course will examine theories of gender constitution and performance across a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines: literary studies, media studies, performance studies, feminist science studies, philosophy, porn studies, trans studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology.

Assigned readings will feature scholarship that has been published primarily, though not exclusively, in the last two decades. The seminar assignments and discussions will focus on contemporary debates about gender in relation to sex, sexuality, race, diaspora, the law, technology, film, performance, the state, and social movements.

The course is built around four primary units: Troubling Conventions of Sex and Gender; Visual and Performance Cultures; Gender, Violence, and the State; and the Transnational Feminist Politics of #MeToo.

ENGL 695: Publication and Professionalization

ENGL 695 Mon. 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Dr. Mary Ann O’Farrell

This course is designed to help advanced Ph.D. students transition from classwork to the independent research, writing, and professional activity that are central to a scholarly career, with a particular emphasis on producing a publishable scholarly work in English studies. 

We will consider such issues as the differences between articles and dissertation chapters and between the dissertation and the book; professional practices and standards informing the writing, reviewing, revising, placement, and publication of scholarship; and the writing of abstracts and book proposals. We will also think together about other issues involved in professionalization, as determined by student interest. 

A substantial portion of the course will be devoted to workshopping student articles, with an eye toward producing and submitting publishable, article-length work. 

ENGL: 697 Pedagogy 

ENGL 697 Mon. & Wed. 11:10 am -12:25 pm

Dr. Curry Kennedy

This course will help participants develop their teaching philosophy—not the two-page document but the thing itself. We will read from various pedagogical traditions and bring them into conversation with our own experiences in the classroom. We will strive to stay grounded in practice, answering questions about day-to-day classroom management and instructional design. But we will not treat pedagogy as a mere matter of technique. We will see how big questions and systemic historical forces inform teachers and students. We will discuss how to teach non scholae, sed vitae—not for school, but for life.

Assigned readings will focus—though not exclusively—on traditions of teaching in rhetoric and writing. To discuss rhetorical pedagogy is, we will see, to discuss the teaching of literature, ethics, politics, and many other things besides.

Here’s a sample of who we will be reading: Plato, Isocrates, Quintilian, Erasmus, Paolo Freire, John Dewey, bell hooks, Keith Gilyard, Peter Elbow. Students will also be invited to read and present on any book or collection of articles on pedagogy that interests them.

Students will write an academic essay on pedagogy, keep a teaching journal, and will be asked to practice teaching in class.

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