Dr. Amy Earhart
F 12:40-3:40

ENGL 604, Black Digital Humanities (Black DH), will explore the intersections of critical race  studies, African-American literature, editing and recovery, and digital humanities. Following the  concept of “juxtaposition,” what Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam see as the intersection “of disciplines, cultures, and methods” (Introduction, The Digital Black Atlantic 2021), the  course will consist of traditional class discussion and lab days that bridge theoretical with the  methodological and applied contents. 

We will examine a broad range of scholarship including traditional print scholarship, such as a  digital edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane or secondary scholarship such as The Digital Black  Atlantic, data/text repositories, such as those created by the History of Black Writing, digital  projects, such as the Black Gotham Archive, and multimedia sources such as Mark Anthony  Neal’s web series “Left of Black” or #ADPHDPROJECT, Jessica Marie Johnson’s Instagram  repository of Projects Highlighting Social Justice x Atlantic African Diaspora History. As we  learn about Black dh students will have a chance to work with a local Black dh project, the  Millican Massacre, 1868, a digital project that is recovering a local race massacre. Students will  learn to work with dh tools like voyant, omeka, TEI/XML, and databases. 

The course assumes no prior knowledge of Black Studies or digital humanities. Many of the  concepts that we engage with and tools we use are applicable to other fields. I am happy to  answer questions about the course.

Feel free to email me at aearhart@tamu.edu. 

The course will fulfill any of the following distribution requirements: 

• One course in any literature, 1800-the present 
• One course in theory (of any kind, including linguistics and rhetoric) 
• One course organized around concepts, issues, or themes (as opposed to courses  organized primarily according to chronological period)

Dr. Nancy Warren
W 12:40 - 3:40

(fulfills pre-1800 distribution requirement)

This class focuses primarily on texts written in Middle English, which we will read for the most part in the original language.   We will consider a wide range of genres, from religious didactic literature to saints' lives to lyric poetry to visionary texts to romance to drama.   Authors under consideration will include the Gawain-poet, Julian of Norwich, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Margery Kempe as well as many anonymous writers.  We will also read (in translation) some texts originally written in French or Anglo-Norman that continued to be influential in England after the rise of Middle English.

Dr. Marcela Fuentes
TR 3:55-5:10

This course is designed as a short fiction workshop. 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. 

The creative writing workshop will emphasize rigorous critique and discussion of the literary arts. We will read many published works; however, the primary texts for this course will be your own manuscripts. The ultimate function of a workshop is not just to polish any given piece of writing, but to prepare you to articulate your own aesthetic visions. Understanding the relationship between that vision and the work that you do—and being able to shape the work with intentionality and insight.

 Students will learn to read like writers by examining craft techniques and forms. They will have 2-3 opportunities to workshop during the semester. Additionally, students will keep an observation journal, provide formal weekly workshop critiques, present their work at a public reading, and develop a publishable piece of creative work for submission to a literary journal by the end of the semester.

Students who register for the course should submit a writing sample: one short story (5 to 10 pages) by email to Dr. Marcela Fuentes at mfuentes@tamu.edu by November 12, 2021.

Dr. Mary Ann O'Farrell
R 6 - 9

As a readings course in nineteenth-century British literature, this class will offer students the opportunity to read widely in such literature and to become acquainted with major issues in and important critical conversations about the period.  Ranging across years and genres, the readings will be held loosely together by their relation to the nineteenth-century interest in management (of workers, of households, of communities, of nations, of social forms, of feelings, of characters, of bodies).  Our class discussions will unite attention to literary and aesthetic concerns with attention to the social issues and intellectual questions with which nineteenth-century British literature so often engaged.  We will also be interested in nineteenth-century visual culture.  

The major course requirement will be a seminar-length paper, along with other shorter and/or oral assignments.  The course meets the distribution requirement of a class in literature, 1800-the present.

Feel free to email me (at maof@tamu.edu) or to request the zoom link for my office hours this semester (Tuesdays 2:30-5 p.m.) if you have any questions about the course.  

Dr. Anne Morey
T 12:45-3:45

This course examines children’s literature produced during a crucial 26-year period from the standpoint of the largest and most important American children’s book club of the first half of the twentieth century, the Junior Literary Guild. Investigating processes such as canon formation and prizing, we will focus on how institutions (such as publishers, libraries, child-study organizations, and the book club itself) function and affect the production of children’s literature.  The course will also offer students methods of reconstructing and recontextualizing the careers of now overlooked authors and illustrators of children’s literature such as Laura Adams Armer and Florence Crannell Means.  What kinds of analysis and what sorts of insights arise if we place a book club at the center of a history of twentieth-century American children’s literature?

This course will fulfill either these two distribution requirements:

• Any course in literature, 1800 to the present
• Any course organized around a topic or theme

Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya
T 6 - 9

Students can use this course to fulfill any of the following requirements

• One course in any literature, 1800-the present
• One course in theory (of any kind, including linguistics and rhetoric)
• One course organized around concepts, issues, or themes (as opposed to courses organized primarily according to chronological period)

As social critique and conversation move away from 'rights' to 'justice' discourses regarding the individual and society, scholarly approaches to nations and national subjects similarly take a turn toward the 'affective' as opposed to the 'juridical' or 'disciplinary.' In Affecting Asia, we will look at the present and past discourses of mass affect, political affect and individual affect across the vast Asian subcontinent, by studying selected texts and scholarly critiques. Beginning from a history of late Empire and ending somewhere near a world where diverse voices (including those of women, transgender people, and goats [yes, goats]) now finds expression, this course will explore the interpenetrating effects of affect, genre, aesthetics, and politics in a rising new world that is now being called the China-Pakistan axis by some. Ranging from 'empathy' and 'love' to 'fear,' 'risk' and 'securitization,' discourses of affect in Asia will be studied through a selection of texts from the reading list below: 

Bhuvaneswar, Chaya. White Dancing Elephants (Dzanc Books, 2018)

Ghosh, Amitav, River of Smoke (Picador, 2012)

Kilcullen, David.The Dragon and the Snake. How the Rest Learned to Fight the

West. (Oxford UP, 2020)

Kurosawa, Akira. The Bad Sleep Well.

Majumdar, Megha. A Burning (Knopf, 2020)

Mirza, Fatima Farheen. A Place for Us (SJP for Hoogarth Books, 2019)

Mishra, Pankaj. From the Ruins of Empire (Picador, 2013)

Mukhopadhyay, Suman. Herbert

Patterson, Christopher B. Open World Empire Postmillenial Pop 26)) (NYU, 2020)

Pernau, Margrit, et al. Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-century Asia and Europe. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Pernau, Margrit. Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Pernau, Margrit.. “Emotions, senses, and the perception of the self,” Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia, 2021, 424-435.

Pernau, Margrit. “Studying emotions in South Asia,” South Asian History and Culture 12: 2-3 (2021): 111-128.

Perumal. The Story of a Goat (Black Cat, 2019)

Rashid, Maria. Dying to Serve (Stanford, 2020)

Ray, Satyajit. Pather Panchali

Small, Andrew. China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wang and Goh, ed. Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (Asian Cultural Studies: Transnational and Dialogic Approaches) (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017

Wook, Park-Chan. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Yang, Jie, ed. Political Economy of Affect in Asia (Routledge, 2016)

Zakaria, Rafia. The Upstairs Wife: an Intimate History of Pakistan (Beacon Press, 2016)

Dr. Sara DiCaglio
TR 11:10 - 12:25

 Rhetorical scholars have increasingly grappled with the materiality of the body— its processes, its environmental connections, its movements, its senses, its stuff. In this course,  we will examine questions of the rhetorical nature of that materiality through an examination of  the growing field of rhetoric of health and medicine. We will ask a variety of questions about  how rhetoric, materiality, and health intermingle: How are technologies—fitness trackers,  ostomy bags, mobile health apps, home health tests—figured into our sense of embodiment, and  what do our interactions with those technologies and conversations about those interactions  impact our larger discourse about health? How does the interaction between scientific history,  cultural understandings of gender, and bodily material itself influence our understanding of the  rhetorical power of something like the hormone? How do different discourse communities— online patient forums, doctor groups, scientific communities—affect the enactment (Mol) of  different kinds of embodied states and evidence? And whose bodies are we talking about—how  do race, gender identity, (dis)ability, sexuality, and other aspects of identity affect the  construction of what health and medicine are and should be? And how--given our political and  cultural moment--might we possibly come to understand all the pieces that have come to shape  the various and competing rhetorics of our current pandemic? Throughout, we will attend to how  rhetorics of health and medicine operate at different scales and in different kinds of communities,  both human and non. Writing in the course will include brief response papers, a book review,  and a longer paper that can take the form of a conference paper or a similarly scaled multi-modal  or public project to be designed with instructor input and permission. 

Readings will be drawn from rhetorical studies as well as allied fields such as feminist science  studies, graphic medicine, disability studies, and the health humanities; readings may include  work by authors such as Jay Dolmage, Eli Clare, Melanie Yergeau, Dorothy Roberts, Jenell  Johnson, Blake Scott, Annemarie Mol, Olivia Banner, and more. 

Distribution Requirements: 

• One course in theory (of any kind, including linguistics and rhetoric) 
• One course organized around concepts, issues, or themes (as opposed to courses organized  primarily according to chronological period)

Dr. Regina Mills
M 6 - 9

First-person narratives are a staple of Latinx literature. Many of the foundational works of Latina/o/x literature are about constructing a story of the self. These stories of the self are also acts of theorization that define Latinx communities, creating an explicit or implicit definition of Latinidad, what Claudia Milian has called “Latinities” and Agustín Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila have termed “Latinization.” These Latinidades negotiate capitalism and the marketing of identity, social and cultural norms and expectations throughout the Americas, nationalism, perceived race and ethnicity, and any number of ideological constructs. In doing so, Latinx life writing has also necessitated experimentation with the genre itself, as authors attempt to navigate the ways that categories of social difference—race/skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, religion/spirituality—have influenced or determined their conception of self and community. In this course, we will read Latinx life writing as well as scholarly works to determine how Latinx people have represented their lives, their communities, and how they have (or have not) found belonging in their own lives and American literary history. The course will particularly focus on AfroLatinx and queer Latinx writers as well as texts that acts as theorizations in themselves.

Students will lead class discussion through a presentation and class activity; create an annotated bibliography for a future article; present a conference paper version of that article to their classmates; and create a plan for revision and submission to an academic journal. The course is organized around concepts, issues, or themes (and thus, fits that distribution requirement).

Dr. Mikko Tuhkanen
W 6-9

This course looks at the work of James Baldwin (1924-1987), an African American, gay writer and a keen observer of American and European life in the context of postcolonial modernity. One of the most prominent American authors of the past century, Baldwin was also an active commentator on and participant in U.S. and world politics. As an African American writer, he critiqued contemporary political and cultural trends in the U.S., many of which he traced to the global histories of racism and slavery. His place in the African American cultural and political scene was further complicated by his being an openly gay man (a moniker that he nevertheless sought to complicate—we will explore his reservations about such identity categories in class). Throughout his work from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, he developed his own form of ethics—of moving in a world while mindful of, and sensitive to, its perhaps irreconcilable differences. In this class, we will explore what such “Baldwinian ethics” consists of and how it may be relevant to our lives in the twenty-first century.

Apart from Baldwin’s work, the class also includes works by some of the following: Henry James, Charles Dickens, Ingmar Bergman, Richard Wright, ABBA, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Malcolm X, as well as scholarly texts.

Distribution requirements:

• One course in any literature, 1800-the present
• One course organized around concepts, issues, or themes (as opposed to courses organized primarily according to chronological period)

Dr. Michael Collins
R 12:45 - 3:45

FORGING THE AMERICAN IDENTITY

This course will track key developments and major figures in the formation and rise to prominence of American literature, American culture and the various and competing American identities. Keeping one eye on their long-term impact on U.S. literature, culture and thought, we will read works by writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley (in America’s revolutionary era); Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Beecher Stowe (in the era of what has been called the American renaissance), and Henry James and W.E.B. DuBois (in the period of transition between the 19th and 20th centuries). In the process, we will discuss issues of genre, race, gender and region.

Dr. Emily Johansen
W 4 - 5

Dr. Vanita Reddy
M 12:40 - 3:40

This course is designed to help advanced Ph.D. students transition from classwork to the independent research, writing, and other professional activities that are central to a scholarly career in the professoriate and the academy. The course will also include professionalization for careers outside the academy (sometimes referred to as “alt-ac” or “post-ac”) for which a PhD in English is well-suited.

We will examine the differences between articles and dissertation chapters and between the dissertation and the book. We will also examine the professional standards informing the writing, reviewing, revising, placement, and publication of scholarship; and the writing of abstracts and book proposals. A substantial portion of the course will be devoted to workshopping student articles (ideally--though not exclusively--works related to the dissertation), with an eye toward producing and submitting publishable, article-length work. 

We will also consider other issues involved in professionalization, particularly alt-ac/post-ac careers. 

For third or fourth year PhD students in English only. 695 does not count toward the 36 hours of coursework required for the PhD.