Fall 2025 Courses
Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
| Course # | Time(s) | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|
| CRW 6130 | T 9-11 | Fiction Workshop | Leavitt |
| CRW 6331 | M 9-11 | Poetry Workshop | Mlinko |
| ENG 6824 | W E1-E3 | Proseminar: Multiraciality and Narrative Form in the Victorian Novel | Grass |
| LIT 6138 | F 6-8, SCR W 9-11 | Feminist Theory in the Visual Field | Mennel |
| LIT 6236 | R 6-8 | African Literature and Colonial Anthropology | Amoko |
| LIT 6934 | T 6-8 | Digital Research Methods | Del Hierro |
| LIT 6934 | R 9-11 | Medical Humanities | Gilbert |
| LIT 6934 | M 6-8 | Comics and/as Travel Narratives | Ulanowicz |
Course Descriptions
CRW 6130
Fiction Workshop
David Leavitt
This is an intensive fiction writing workshop for graduate students in the MFA program in Creative Writing. Reading will consist of short novels, stories, and essays by a variety of writers, including (probably and among others) John Cheever, Penelope Fitzgerald, Grace Paley, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Glenway Wescott. All first-year fiction MFA students will be automatically enrolled in this workshop, which is also open to poetry MFAs and English PhDs if space is available. If you are not a fiction MFA and are interested in taking the course, please contact me.
CRW 6331
Poetry Workshop
Ange Mlinko
This is a graduate workshop for poetry students in the MFA program. We will combine readings with prompts to explore rhetorical and prosodic techniques for writing verse. The readings will generally focus on twentieth-century American, British, and Irish poets. Students will be graded on presence and participation in the classroom, as well as an end-of-semester portfolio.
ENG 6824
Proseminar: Multiraciality and Narrative Form in the Victorian Novel
Sean Grass
In her important 2015 book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Caroline Levine argues for a new and more expansive definition of form, urging us to consider the term as having not just aesthetic but also sociopolitical significance. As she explains, the idea of form “does not originate in the aesthetic”; rather, it has always indicated more broadly “an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (2-3). And, she suggests, whenever we encounter such forms, we should consider their affordances, by which she means their implied or latent potential uses, what might be gained or achieved or enabled by a form’s presence.
Beginning from Levine and from nineteenth-century journalistic, political, and sociological writings about race, this course explores multiraciality as a crucial form in the Victorian novel and considers its key affordances, particularly its provocation of several other kinds of multifariousness and hybridity: of narrative voice and structure, of material format, of generic convention. What I am particularly (though not exclusively) interested in, in other words, is the way in which the form of multiraciality seems, in its biological and conceptual collapse of boundaries and binaries, to have provided the imaginative space required to instigate narrative and discursive innovations of several kinds. In pursuit of that interest, after the early selections from Levine and others, we will read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. We will also, throughout the semester, continue to engage with relevant and recent scholarship on these novels, on race, on narration, and on form.
Since this is a proseminar, we will also pay particular attention to your development as an advanced student and budding professional. Assignments will include a review of journals in your field, an oral presentation / opportunity to lead discussion, a conference abstract, and both a conference-length and article-length version of your research paper for the course. We will use opportunities throughout the semester to discuss strategies for this work in terms of both programmatic and professional expectations.
LIT 6138
Feminist Theory in the Visual Field
Barbara Mennel
This graduate seminar is animated by two interlocking questions. One, the seminar asks about the relationship among feminist approaches across different disciplines concerned with visual culture, from art history, film studies, television studies, and photography to visual digital media. What are commonalities that result from a centering of gender and sexuality as categories of analysis? What are media-specific differences and divergencies? Two, the seminar also explores the relationship between canonical feminist texts that initiated a concern with visual culture and contemporary explorations in the different visual fields. The seminar explores the productivity of early texts for the current moment. How can we think the development of feminist theory together with the transformation of visual media?
Foundational text will include canonical titles, such as Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Contemporary case studies might include current books, such as Maggie Hennefeld’s Death by Laughter: Hysteria and Early Cinema (2024), Yiman Wang’s To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World (2024), Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look At Art and Performance Today (2024), Genevieve Yue’s Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (2021), and excerpts from The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-based Animation and Cultural Value (2019), and other current scholarly texts that develop feminist approaches to contemporary visual culture.
The seminar includes a screening block and will be accompanied by regular film screenings with some exceptions throughout the semester.
The requirement consists of one scholarly research paper of minimum 12 pages. Depending on the graduate student’s area of expertise and progress in their respective program, they may instead complete a final digital, art, film, video, or creative writing project of the same intellectual rigor and demand on academic or creative labor. All final projects must be discussed and approved by the instructor and relate to the seminar’s thematic.
LIT 6236
African Literature and Colonial Anthropology
Apollo Amoko
This addresses the complex relationship between works of arts and the politics of everyday life by highlighting late 20th century and early 21st century African fiction. In a complicated and vexing dynamic, aesthetics reflects, reproduces and critiques cultural, political, and economic realities. Modern African literature emerged as colonial rule gradually faded in volatile but hopeful 1950s and 60s. Beginning in the 19th Century, imperial powers, most notably, England and France, fundamentally remapped and remade the beleaguered Africa African continent in the image of Europe. In an irreversible transformation, colonial sovereignty disrupted longstanding communities to create incoherent nation states and transnational linguistic communities. Writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa came of age in optimistic late colonial contexts. Their realist fiction reproduced the anti-colonial nationalism that defined a continent on the cusp of freedom, self-determination, and prosperity. In stark contrast, successive generations of post-realist writers came of age in postcolonial contexts variously marred by disillusionment, disappointment, and pessimism. Against this backdrop, we will examine the work of art in of the era of globalization amid enduring neo-colonial relation between disempowered Africa and West.
LIT 6934
Digital Research Methods
Victor Del Hierro
This course will be a broad survey of Digital Research Methods in Writing Studies. The course will examine current discussions in Writing Studies on the continually evolving field of digital rhetoric and writing researching including scholarship from related fields in digital humanities and user experience design. Throughout the semester, students will produce ideas and deliverables related to all facets of research including understanding and implementing theories of conducting research and developing an understanding of the research process from start to finish. Over the course of the semester, students will learn about the various types of research done in Writing Studies. Other related social science and humanities fields will also contribute to the classes understanding of Digital Research including but not limited to Education, History, Queer studies, Black Studies, and Indigenous Studies. Students in the course will spend time designing a research project of their choosing while learning about and experimenting with different research approaches.
LIT 6934
Medical Humanities
Pamela Gilbert
An introduction to and survey of the field of medical humanities as it now stands, including some of the more important texts that led us to where we are now.
Recognizing the limitations of a purely scientific lens on health and disease, we will explore how humanistic perspectives from enrich our understanding of the human condition in relation to medicine. We will examine the development of the so-called two-culture divide between science and humanities and the vexed relationship between medicine as an art and interpersonal practice and emergent scientism within the development of medical training. We will discuss various interdisciplinary approaches to several key themes, including but not limited to dying, caregiving, pain, disability, body image, drugs, ethical issues in medical research, and more. Literature and narrative will be a principal focus, as well as communications, graphic representation and art, as well as history and ethnography. Readings/materials will include literature, other media, and medical humanities scholarship.
Students will have an opportunity to tailor their projects to their own interests. We will work toward understanding the publishing and career context of the field, and of its relationship to the student’s career goals. Graded course requirements include researching publication venues, moderating seminar discussions, and a final long writing project, which will be either a draft of a scholarly article or, for MFA students, a creative work. There will also be a more public-facing component, which might include blog posts or interviews or other resources depending on the student’s goals.
LIT 6934
Comics and/as Travel Narratives
Anastasia Ulanowicz
The central premise of this course is that the graphic narrative, insofar as it is formally constituted by its spatialization of time, is consonant with the travel narrative, which involves a subjective or otherwise ideologically constrained depiction of (geo-political) spaces produced within a delimited period of time. We will begin our study with a brief survey of both canonical and non-canonical travel narratives, paying close attention to those that are supplemented by visual materials such as maps and sketches. In turn, we will consider how contemporary comics/graphic narratives – for instance, those produced by Guy Delisle, Kate Evans, Igort, Joe Sacco, and Marjane Satrapi – at once draw on and subvert (primarily Western) conventions of travel narratives. Ultimately, we will map a constellation of critical terms – e.g., archives, cartography, diaspora, history, migration, memory, nostalgia, Orientalism, reportage, tourism, translation – which might guide us as we engage in close analyses of assigned literary and theoretical texts that address various forms of travel.
Please note that, although this course will focus primarily on contemporary comics/graphic narratives, it is open to any students working within the broader field of cultural/critical studies – and especially to those with particular interests in visual rhetoric, post-colonial studies, and/or comparative literature.