Upcoming Course Offerings

This course involves participation in the CUWP’s summer institute (SI). The course dates are unique, and graduate students should contact Amber Jensen before March 1 with their intention to participate as the course begins with an evening session in March, a full day in May, and then three weeks in June of daily, all-day, attendance. The program encourages teachers to be writers and focuses on improving writing instruction in a highly collaborative environment with teachers of multiple grade levels and content areas.

Even if you’re a lover of the old-fashioned paper codex, you’ve probably listened to an audiobook or flicked through the skeuomorphic “pages” of an ebook. The advent of digital text production (by humans and AI) prompts questions about how changes in the technologies of communication affect authors, readership, intellectual property, and the business of publishing. By studying the long history of written forms—the history of the book—this course will provide you with historical, literary, and material context for grappling with these questions. We will consider major developments in the evolution of the book from the clay tablet to the screen, with an emphasis on Western print culture, reception, and publishing history. We’ll study theories of inscription, orality, and literacy, thinking about how we receive and understand information. We’ll also consider the economic and technical conditions governing book production and trade, the changing ideological and legal conditions of authorship, and the social and cultural contexts of reading. To accomplish this, we'll spend considerable time in the HBLL’s Special Collections this semester, and you'll have the opportunity to pursue a research project that aligns with your book-based interests.

Are translators traitors as the old Italian adage “Traduttore, traditore” would suggest? Or, are they “the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another” as Paul Auster once argued? Our course sets out to examine how authors and film makers have depicted translators in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What can we learn from these fictional portrayals of the translator?

We will begin the semester with a brief “crash course” in translation theory and translation studies scholarship that will take us from St. Jerome and Friedrich Schleiermacher through Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Pym, and Lawrence Venuti. We will pay particular attention to how Borges theorizes translation and the role of the translator in his literary criticism and fiction. We will spend the majority of the semester reading texts (both short fiction and novels) and watching films in which translators and translation play important roles. In some of these works (for example, Arrival) the plot revolves around translation, and the protagonist is a translator (or, um, well, a linguist who the government pulls into the action as a translator. But we’ll talk more about that later). At other times, a work depends on translation taking place almost simultaneously for the plot to even function (for example, any Star Wars film).

We will ask to what end literary and cinematic works center translation as theme and practice, and we will use key ideas from translation studies as jumping-off points for thinking about originality in both literature and film. We will also examine notions of authorship, translatability, fidelity, and the hierarchical relations between “original” texts and their translations.

Films Will Include                                                 
Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Stargate (dir. Roland Emmerich)
The Translators (dir. Régis Roinsard)

Fiction Will Include Works By
Jorge Luis Borges
Octavia Butler
Javier Castañeda de la Torre
Ted Chiang
Julio Cortázar
R. F. Kuang
Luis Fernando Verissimo

This course explores texts written by three major authors of the early modern period, with particular focus on the intersection of theology and gender. We will examine the poetry of Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Bradstreet with an eye toward understanding the cultural position of women in 16th and 17th century Anglophone culture. Our discussions will range through the literary and aesthetic strategies of these women’s writings, considering each author's works both as textual artifacts and for the evidences they provide about the political, religious, social, and generic developments of the period. We’ll also, perforce, consider the question of authority in literary writing and in society, and interrogate the means by which authority is conferred by cultural institutions in order to understand how women in this period conceived of, and negotiated, sanctions of and resistances to self-representation.

Disability theorists have called disability “the master trope of human disqualification.” Every person is born into a state of dependence on others, and every human life ends as the body breaks down, a fact disability theorists underscore by dubbing those who find themselves outside the world of disability the “temporarily able-bodied.” Given the omnipresence of disability, readers will find that any literary text–from the Bible to King Lear to The Old Man and the Sea and everything beyond–yields new and significant meanings under this theoretical lens. This seminar will survey the history of disability studies, from its inception as a political movement in the 1960s, through its introduction into academia in the 1980s-90s, and to its force in the present day. We will use foundational theoretical texts to study the medical models, social construction, literary representation, and embodied experience of disability. Throughout the seminar, we will discover the potential of these theories by applying them to primary texts including a novella, a play, a short story, children's literature, essays, and a film.

Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

• Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

• Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

• Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Current Techniques in Fiction Writing

• Students in English 668R will identify current techniques in the writing of fiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Workshopping

• Students in English 668R will evaluate and critique the fiction of their peers.

Writing and Revision of Fiction

• Students in English 668R write and revise fiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

• Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Workshopping

• Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

Writing and Revision of Poetry

• Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

In English 611R: Teaching Advanced Composition, you will complete semester-long internship in teaching advanced writing to college students. The bulk of your learning in this course will take place in an individual internship with an experienced advanced writing teacher, where you will observe and participate in the teaching of the class. We will also meet periodically for seminar sessions designed to support your experiential learning in the internship by giving you a space where you can reflect mindfully, contextualize your learning in the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and prepare to apply what you learn to future teaching. This course prepares you to practice thoughtful and researched-based teaching in your work during and after your MA. As part of this course, you'll develop a teaching portfolio that you can use on the academic job market. Applications required to enroll for this course.

All MA students are invited to take this seminar, which will help you become an informed, intentional, ethical researcher. This course surveys the full range of research design, including epistemological orientations, ethical considerations, and conceptual frameworks; research problems, questions, and methodologies; methods for selecting, gathering, and analyzing data; strategies for reporting, discussing, and situating research findings in scholarly and professional conversations. You’ll read textbook chapters that will orient you to all aspects of research design. You’ll sample and evaluate scholarship primarily in rhetoric and writing studies* that illustrates the application of various research methods. You’ll apply what you learn by experimenting with some of the methods we survey and designing research projects that match your own interests and area of specialization. You’ll have options for a final project that will help you make tangible progress on your MA thesis, prospectus, DH-PW proposal, or research-related academic or professional goals.

*the scholarship we’ll sample reflects a degree of methodological pluralism, which showcases how a variety of research methodologies, including those common in social scientific inquiry, can enrich humanistic inquiry.

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett highlights both the theory and praxis of this course: what we do to reinvent ourselves and our work. This pairs nicely with what Anne Sexton says: "Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem." In English 617, we’ll focus on the theories and techniques of fiction writers, essayists, and poets. With texts classic and contemporary, we’ll explore process, revision, hybridity, genre analysis, crucial tropes, broader professionalization in the field, etc. Expect spirited class discussion, exploratory assignments, in-class prompts, and oral presentations, culminating in a conference-length paper meant to double as an intro to your MFA thesis.

Literary geography combines interests from two major disciplines. Scholars in the field investigate (among other things) the representation of place in literature, the influence of place on literary imagination, the mapping of literary landscapes, the influence of travel and travel writing on literary canons, and the power of literary sites to shape personal and cultural memory. Transatlantic literary study also combines interests from distinct (though closely related) fields. And of course, Romanticism is a concept that transcends both national boundaries and traditional schemes of periodization. This seminar, therefore, deals in several overlapping collisions.

Nineteenth-century literature will be our playground for exploring this conceptual terrain. The British Romantics developed a literature uniquely grounded in place, to the point that reading and literary tourism became interwoven. North American writers undertook analogous (sometimes rival) efforts to create literary landscapes. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic aimed to theorize literary geography and catalog its prominent features. Consequently, studying landmark texts of Anglophone literature as well as scholarship on literary landscapes will convince us that literary geography, although redefined recently in (inter)disciplinary terms, is not in itself new; in fact, it was a major fascination of nineteenth-century culture. Indeed, some have said that “author-countries” or “landscapes of genius” such Burns Country, Scott-land, Wordsworthshire, and Thoreau’s Walden are among the most enduring legacies of Romanticism. From the nineteenth century, we have a rich archive on the interactions of places, books, and readers—an archive we can explore with tools both old and new. Students in this class will do just that and produce their own original scholarship. They will engage with primary texts as well as contemporary works of criticism and digital resources. The class is meant to appeal to British-lit. specialists (especially Romanticists and Victorianists), Americanists, and anyone else interested in the methodological frame.

This is a course in British Modernism with a planetary scope. In traditional literary history, Modernism/Modernity are powerful ideas typically linked either narrowly to Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century or more broadly to Europe and its cultural diaspora from roughly 1500 on. More recently scholars such as Susan Stanford Friedman have argued that modernism is best understood as “a planetary phenomenon across the millennia.” Friedman insists that “We need to begin by abandoning the notion of modernity as a period, instead considering modernity as a loosely configured set of conditions that share a core meaning of accelerated change but articulate differently on the global map of human history.” This course will interrogate the value and applicability of Friedman’s ideas by briefly but deeply engaging modernity and transnationalism as theoretical concepts, and then juxtaposing the British modernist work of writers such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce with other work from around the English-speaking world during the same period, including the work of writers like Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Seepersad Naipaul, and Kate Roberts.

This graduate seminar will consider the experiences of love, loss, doubt, hope, and pain through the lenses of postsecular and postcritical theory. Our primary texts will be the works of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor (as well as their English contemporaries John Milton and John Donne), but this seminar will be relevant to anyone interested in creative writing, faith journeys, and the history of emotions. We will study prose and poetic works that wrestle with the complexities of being human as well as theory and scholarship that takes up the questions early modern poets asked of themselves, God, and their readers. We will consider the contexts in which Bradstreet and Taylor circulated their work and various receptions of that work as it became increasingly public in the centuries after their deaths. Throughout the seminar, we will consider how their works articulate, broaden, or reshape our understanding of what it means to be embodied humans, social creatures, and spiritual beings.

Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

• Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

• Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

• Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Current Techniques in Fiction Writing

• Students in English 668R will identify current techniques in the writing of fiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Workshopping

• Students in English 668R will evaluate and critique the fiction of their peers.

Writing and Revision of Fiction

• Students in English 668R write and revise fiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

• Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Workshopping

• Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

Writing and Revision of Poetry

• Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

This course will explore the history graphic novels and comic books and the current academic discourse surrounding the medium. Students will produce a conference-length paper that demonstrates familiarity with current theory, analysis, and significant texts related to graphic novels and comic books. Several genres of comics will be explored, including non-fiction, autobiography, comedy, and superhero.

This course involves participation in the CUWP’s summer institute (SI). The course dates are unique, and graduate students should contact Debbie Dean before March 1 with their intention to participate as the course begins with an evening session in March, a full day in May, and then three weeks in June of daily, all-day, attendance. The program encourages teachers to be writers and focuses on improving writing instruction in a highly collaborative environment with teachers of multiple grade levels and content areas.

Many recent sources have declared a loneliness epidemic, stating that lack of social connection harms, not just individual, but also societal physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. Meanwhile, up to 25% of Americans with a high school diploma or less report having zero close friends, and those who are lonely are more likely to die by suicide. While sobering, these sources provide a kairotic moment for the good person skilled in speaking—the rhetorician—who uses words and symbols to provide service to society.

In this course, participants will examine key texts by classical, medieval, early modern, and modern rhetoricians. We will seek to understand connections between friendship and rhetoric and implications that the concept of friendship provides for rhetoric. Participants will provide regular progress reports about their work on a semester-long project, and the course will culminate in an in-class conference about rhetoric and friendship.

In this course we will examine stories written in medieval England by and about peoples of the Book – Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The concept of a “People of the Book” originates in the Qur’an and refers to communities oriented around reveled scripture – the Gospels, the Torah, and Qur’an. These communities and books intersected in complex ways during the Middle Ages. We will trace the differing visions of pluralistic communities through Jewish, Christian, and Islamic narratives. Texts will include translations of Old and Middle English, Arabic, and Hebrew poetry, fables, travelogues, chronicles, romances, and saints’ lives as well as contextual scholarship.

Following the Puritan Interregnum, during which time London playhouses were effectively shut down, the English theater had to essentially reinvent itself. This process resulted in new plays and new dramatic types, but theater managers likewise tapped plays from England’s not-to-distant past, including those by Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare became the most celebrated playwright of his day, it was during the Long Eighteenth Century that he was canonized—and immortalized—not merely through the reproduction of his plays, which were sometimes revised for eighteenth-century tastes—but through literary criticism as Samuel Johnson and others submitted the bard’s works to serious literary criticism for the first time. It was also during this period that we can talk about literary tourism as Shakespeare’s birthplace became a site of pilgrimage for Shakespeare enthusiasts. This section will examine the process of canonizing Shakespeare—as well as issues of canonization more broadly conceived—and explore how Shakespeare became Shakespeare while reflecting on what this process tells us about literary and cultural sensibilities during the period.

“Happy are they who understand the words of Jesus, but happier still are they who listen to His silence.” So remarks a contemporary French theologian, evoking silence of a peculiar kind – what scripture describes as the still, small voice. Such a thought attests to how divine silence may be revelatory as well as opaque, peaceful as well as disapproving, anxiety-inducing as well as blissful. Approaching divine silence as a vital feature of spiritual life, our seminar will trace how its themes and resonances are taken up in literary criticism and theory, theology, poetry, and fiction.

Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

• Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

• Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

• Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

• Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Workshopping

• Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

Writing and Revision of Poetry

• Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Workshopping

• Students in English 670R will evaluate and critique the young adult novels of their peers.

Current Techniques in Writing Young Adult Novels

• Students in English 670R will identify current techniques in the writing of young adult novels through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Writing and Revision of Young Adult Novels

• Students in English 670R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication by a recognized publisher of young adult novels.

This course prepares you for a career in technical and professional communication by giving you hands-on experience in writing for real-world professional environments. You’ll work on projects like proposals, technical documentation, website content, and client deliverables, all designed to simulate the writing tasks you’ll encounter in industries such as technology, business, healthcare, and public relations. This graduate course also introduces you to the scholarship behind professional writing, helping you understand how communication theories influence practical writing strategies in the workplace.

By the end of the course, you’ll have a polished digital portfolio that showcases your best work, including a brief self-reflection on your development as a writer. The portfolio is designed to help you move forward in your career, whether you’re aiming for positions in technical writing, corporate communication, grant writing, or any other field where clear, effective writing is important. You’ll also have the chance to explore research opportunities in the field, setting a foundation for advanced work in technical communication or digital humanities.

In an 1835 letter to an editor who found one of his pieces a bit too disturbing, Edgar Allan Poe responded, “To be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.” Both literary scholarship and popular culture demonstrate that Poe has been read consistently from the mid-1800s until now, although the appreciation came a bit later. In this course, we will read a lot of Poe. The “now” will become apparent in at least five ways. First, why has there been a renaissance of serious Poe biographies during the last 5-8 years? How do these biographies treat Poe in different ways? (Each student will read 1 major Poe biography at the beginning of the semester.) Second, what do Poe’s works say, for better and for worse, about pressing issues of our times, including pandemics, race relations, gender, climate change, and populism? We will read works by Poe that address each of these subjects and many others. Third, what can Poe tell us about fear, terror, horror, and other emotions that many of us are experiencing in 2027? When it comes to creating and maintaining these feelings in a piece of literature, Poe’s “theory of effect” is as relevant now as ever. We will examine this theory, see how Poe put it into practice, and discuss how other authors and artists still use his techniques today. Fourth, what are scholars saying about Poe in current Poe scholarship? The scholarship is vast and varied and comes from multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Students will occasionally choose and read contemporary Poe scholarship that fits their own interests while the class will explore several pieces of current and historical Poe scholarship as a group. Fifth, what is Poe’s influence on world literature and global popular culture? It is ubiquitous. We will read selected works by a few authors who are responding to Poe, and students will have the opportunity to examine Poe in a medium of their choice—e.g. Poe in film, Poe on the internet, Poe paraphernalia, Poe on Netflix, Poe and comics, Poe and (video)games, Poe and memes, Poe and popular music. The list could go on and on. In short, we will read a large amount of Poe’s fictional corpus (while dabbling in his poetry and his literary criticism), and we will spend significant time and energy discovering how scholars and artists have responded to (and continue to respond to) Poe.

The secularization thesis is one of the most powerful progress narratives to develop in the modern era. It suggests that with increasing scientific knowledge, industrialization, and technological advancements, religion and religious practice declines. In recent decades, however, it has become increasingly clear that such is not the case. In spite of secularization’s attempts to marginalize and even eradicate it, religion remains as present as it ever was—it has only changed shape. Literature, in particular, has remained a repository for what we might call postsecular concerns, and many contemporary poets and novelists continue to articulate a specific ethical and moral vision as they seek to reconnect spiritual and secular virtues. That vision is not an atavistic return to pre-modern religious paradigms, but rather a uniquely postsecular sensibility developed in light of both the scientific advancements and the tumultuous cultural upheavals of the past century.

In this course we will take what Paul Ricœur calls an “affirmative” approach to a selection of American literary texts published in the last half-century that demonstrate a postsecular sensibility. Our goal, in part, is to practice a mode of scholarship that remains open and responsive to what a text has to offer, and one that accepts what it reveals as of equal importance to what it might conceal.

Disability theorists have called disability “the master trope of human disqualification.” Every person is born into a state of dependence on others, and every human life ends as the body breaks down, a fact disability theorists underscore by dubbing those who find themselves outside the world of disability the “temporarily able-bodied.” Given the omnipresence of disability, readers will find that any literary text–from the Bible to King Lear to The Old Man and the Sea and everything beyond–yields new and significant meanings under this theoretical lens. This seminar will survey the history of disability studies, from its inception as a political movement in the 1960s, through its introduction into academia in the 1980s-90s, and to its force in the present day. We will use foundational theoretical texts to study the medical models, social construction, literary representation, and embodied experience of disability. Throughout the seminar, we will discover the potential of these theories by applying them to primary texts including a novella, a play, a short story, children's literature, essays, and a film.

Workshopping of Creative Nonfiction Drafts

• Students in English 667R will evaluate and critique the creative nonfiction of their peers.

Current Techniques in Creative Nonfiction Writing

• Students in English 667R will identify current techniques in the writing of creative nonfiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Writing and Revision of Creative Nonfiction

• Students in English 667R write and revise creative nonfiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Current Techniques in Fiction Writing

• Students in English 668R will identify current techniques in the writing of fiction through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Workshopping

• Students in English 668R will evaluate and critique the fiction of their peers.

Writing and Revision of Fiction

• Students in English 668R write and revise fiction suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

Current Techniques in Poetry Writing

• Students in English 669R will identify current techniques in the writing of poetry through the study and written assessment of published examples.

Workshopping

• Students in English 669R will evaluate and critique the poetry of their peers.

Writing and Revision of Poetry

• Students in English 669R write and revise poetry suitable for publication in a literary journal of national reputation.

This course involves participation in the CUWP’s summer institute (SI). The course dates are unique, and graduate students should contact Amber Jensen before March 1 with their intention to participate as the course begins with an evening session in March, a full day in May, and then three weeks in June of daily, all-day, attendance. The program encourages teachers to be writers and focuses on improving writing instruction in a highly collaborative environment with teachers of multiple grade levels and content areas.