Spring 2026 Courses
Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
| Course # | Time(s) | Location | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CRW 6130 | R 9-11 | MAT 0005 | Fiction Workshop | Akpan |
| CRW 6166 | M 9-11 | FLI 0101 | Forms: Creative Nonfiction | Leavitt |
| CRW 6331 | T 9-11 | TBA | Poetry Workshop | Logan |
| ENG 6016 | W 9-11 | FLI 0111 | Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Sexual Difference | Bianchi |
| ENG 6075 | T 3-5 | NORM 1001 | Theories of Rhetoric | Sanchez |
| ENG 6137 | R E1-E3 / SCR T E1-E3 | TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 | Issues and Innovations in Film Studies | Mowchun |
| ENG 6824 | R 3-5 | TUR 4112 | Proseminar: Self/Writing: Studies in Autobiography | Schorb |
| LIT 6856 | W 6-8 | Smathers TBA | Into the Archive: Reading in the Baldwin | Kidd |
| CRW 6130 | M 6-8 | MAT 0007 | Comics and/as Travel Narrative | Ulanowicz |
Course Descriptions
CRW 6130
Fiction Workshop
Uwem Akpan
CRW 6130 is a rigorous fiction writing workshop. The purpose is to make your writing better. It is also important that we build a community that supports this mode of storytelling. So, come ready to learn from each other. During the semester, we are expected to submit two or three short stories or novel excerpts. We are expected to write a critique of each submission, to help the class discuss the work in depth and to encourage the writer in the important work of rewrite. As Steven Gillis, author of Benchere in Wonderland says, “The art of writing is in the rewriting.” And since good writing or rewriting begins with good reading (or hearing of the story), we will be exposed to the works of celebrated writers and how they have dealt with key issues like craft, motivation, voice, suspense, characterization, etc. All first- and second-year fiction MFA students should enroll in the workshop. But it is also open to poetry MFAs and English PhDs if there is space.
CRW 6166
Forms: Creative Nonfiction
David Leavitt
WHAT MAKES CREATIVE NONFICTION CREATIVE?
The goal of this course is to clarify, through practice and reading, the parameters of creative—as opposed, one presumes, to non-creative—nonfiction. Most works designated as creative nonfiction are memoirs. Yet whatever it is that distinguishes the creative in creative nonfiction can also be found in travel writing (Bruce Chatwin, Mary McCarthy, Jan Morris), essays on literature (John Lanchester, Cynthia Ozick, Joy Williams), reportage (James Baldwin, Janet Flanner, Joseph Roth, George W. S. Trow), biography (Nicholson Baker, Geoff Dyer, Lytton Strachey), and even book reviewing (Michael Hofmann, Patricia Lockwood, Lorrie Moore). The goal of the course is to provide students with a broader sense of the genre’s range as well as a clearer idea of how to move forward in their own creative work. Although this course satisfies the fiction forms course requirement for MFA students in fiction, MFA candidates in poetry and PhD students are also welcome, should space be available.
CRW 6331
Poetry Workshop
William Logan
Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 Henri Cole, The Visible Man Donald Justice, Collected Poems [or] New and Selected Poems Robert Lowell, Selected Poems R. S. Gwynn, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology [5th edition or before] Other poems will be distributed, as well as a weekly worksheet.
We’ll discuss three or four poems a week from the books above, as well as some poems from the weekly worksheet. I’ll give you an assignment each week at the end of class, due the follow week. Please bring enough copies of your poems for the entire class. From these I’ll choose for or five for the weekly worksheet. I’ll let the books above, as well as your poems, direct discussion. Do buy them as cheaply as possible–you should be able to find most at under $10. Buy the 5th (or an earlier) edition of Gwynn unless you already have a copy of a later one. Learn to tax your imagination, which will never develop if you don’t. I’ll expect competent use of English grammar and spelling. Assignments are a task rendered toward a goal–the ability to write in poetic language without suffering. Most of the assignments will be in free verse, but I may throw in a metrical form or two to keep you awake. If I’m teaching the forms class next year, I may make the focus on writing in meter. It ain’t that hard. If we don’t laugh a few times in each class, I’m not doing my job.
The books have been chosen because they’ve long been in print, are widely available, and should not set you back more than a used Pontiac. I shouldn’t have to add this; but, if I detect signs that you’ve used AI to complete your assignment, you’ll fail the entire workshop. Late poems will be penalized. I grade only the revised version, which you will turn in with all the other poems at the final meeting of the workshop. The new worksheet will be distributed to your mailbox each week, a few days after the class meeting, beginning the second week. My office hours will be Monday, 5-6 periods, or other days by arrangement.
ENG 6016
Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Sexual Difference
Pietro Bianchi
Since the early twentieth century, first with psychoanalysis and later with feminist theory, sexuality has been disentangled from reproductive biology and from the primacy of genitality. Recast in terms of sexual drives and the libidinal economy, sex has come to signify something transversal – cutting across the entire spectrum of human experience and shaping every dimension of the body, pleasure, and desire. For Alenka Zupančič and the Freudo-Lacanian tradition, sex is above all a concept that names a persistent contradiction at the heart of reality. For Luce Irigaray and second-wave feminism, sexual difference is not simply the biological or social distinction between “man” and “woman,” but the fundamental and irreducible alterity between two sexes that cannot be collapsed into sameness. By contrast, Judith Butler and many feminist thinkers of recent decades have defined gender not as a fixed identity or natural attribute, but as something performed, enacted, and continually reiterated through social practices.
This seminar investigates sex, gender, and sexual difference through the combined perspectives of psychoanalysis and feminist theory. We begin with Zupančič’s provocative claim in her book What Is Sex? that sex constitutes a structural impasse – a non-relation that organizes desire and thought. Following Freud and Lacan (and Žižek and Copjec), we will then examine how sexuality in psychoanalysis refers to a real that resists symbolic closure. The second part of the seminar turns to second-wave feminism (Irigaray, Muraro, de Lauretis), which reinscribed sexual difference as an irreducible category. The final part traces how third-wave and queer theory (Butler, Edelman, Haraway) disrupted this framework, challenging the binary and emphasizing performativity, multiplicity, fluidity, and the rethinking of the human. Alongside theoretical readings, we will also study films that probe these questions in different registers, including Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman), Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier), The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke), and Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman).
The course will be discussion-based, with each session opening with a 45-minute lecture by the instructor followed by collective discussion. Students will be expected to read approximately 100–120 pages per week, introduce the assigned readings once during the semester, and complete a final paper of 15–18 pages, which may take the form of a draft scholarly article, a conference presentation, or an extended book review.
ENG 6075
Theories of Rhetoric
Raúl Sánchez
In humanities scholarship, the term “rhetoric” is sometimes used generally, without reference to at least some aspect of the discipline that bears the name. This seminar introduces you to that discipline in some of its contemporary expressions, and, within this contemporary context, it examines the generative tension that exists between rhetorical practice and rhetorical theory. Specifically, the seminar explores this tension in two closely related areas of contemporary rhetorical research: comparative rhetoric (the study of rhetoric across cultures) and cultural rhetorics (the study of rhetoric as cultural production).
These areas shed current light on a methodological question that has likely existed since the fourth century BCE, when Plato and Aristotle codified existing rhetorical practice into rhetorical theory: how does the necessary flux of practice (e.g., changes in and differences between cultures and technologies) inform the necessary permanence of theory (i.e., the ability to explain events and phenomena across contexts), and vice versa? More to the point, how can scholars and students keep this tension in productive balance as they pursue their own inquiries? With these questions in mind, we will read and discuss works in comparative rhetoric and cultural rhetorics, assessing the affordances each area might make available for your own scholarship, whether you identify it as rhetorical or not. Accordingly, the work you do for this seminar will be determined by your specific needs and by your progress in the graduate program.
Readings may include, but not be limited to, selections from the following journals:
…and from the following edited collections:
• Global Rhetorical Traditions (eds. Hui Wu and Tarez Samra Graban)
• The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics: Studies in the History, Application, and Teaching of Rhetoric Beyond Traditional Greco-Roman Contexts (ed. Lloyd Keith)
…in addition to other key articles as needed.
All materials will be available for free online, or via the library, or on our Canvas page.
ENG 6137
Issues and Innovations in Film Studies
Trevor Mowchun
This graduate seminar in film studies will address a number of key theoretical, historical, and aesthetic issues that both define and complicate the field. The seminar places high value on interdisciplinary methods and exploratory exemplars of scholarly innovation which have been vital to the growth of film studies, placing it in dynamic proximity to the complex object that is film and in unpredictable conversation with other fields of knowledge in the humanities that might further unlock its meanings and potential. As a multifaceted and continually evolving artform (the youngest and so the most influenced), film gets underway at the start of what is arguably the most complex century: the 20th. Therefore, one of the more persistent issues we will face is how to situate film in a broader history of art and ideas. Amongst other things, this “long view” of the medium will help us to consider film’s rapid technological development over a relatively short period of time and what the present digital moment affords both the film scholar and filmmaker’s interventionist imaginations, for example the opportunity for enhanced close reading, videographic criticism, or the acrobatic analysis of film fragments. Special attention will also be paid to the handling of certain films which register psychological and/or social instability and become, in the process, fascinatingly unstable or grotesque texts in of themselves with near-limitless interpretive potential.
The instructor is a film scholar/practitioner who recognizes that the backgrounds and levels of experience of students with respect to film studies can be varied and piecemeal. We will work towards building a shared foundation of concerns about film and the intellectual climate surrounding it to help facilitate meaningful dialogue. Students will be encouraged to find new pathways into film studies and to regard the research and writing process as inherently creative, whose challenges are worth taking on in the discovery of our voices as thinkers.
As a film studies course there will be a weekly in-class film screening session in addition to the class meetings. For coursework students can expect a class presentation, regular journaling on the texts and films, and a final paper or video essay with a substantial written component.
ENG 6824
Proseminar: Self/Writing, Studies in Autobiography
Jodi Schorb
This proseminar on autobiography is designed to deepen seminar participants’ understanding of the literary history of autobiography and cultural and theoretical contexts for studying a diverse range of self-writing.
In the first weeks, you will gain familiarity with canonical works that modern autobiography is particularly indebted to: Augustine’s Confessiones (400 CE), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions (1782-1789), Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1771-1790), along with the cultural and intellectual developments that led to changing understandings of what constitutes the “self” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Subsequent weeks explore interrogate Western notions of the autonomous or representative self: Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); Maria Cambell (Métis) Halfbreed (1973); Jamaica Kincaid Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Across the weeks, we will continue analysis of common themes (such as confession, conversion, testimony, collective witness, etc.)
The last eight weeks will be determined in consultation with seminar members’ ahead of the semester about their particular fields of research and/or MFA creative writing projects. Possible topics could include graphic memoir, prison memoir, biomythology (i.e. Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), queer memoir (i.e. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House: A Memoir (2019), Paul Preciado’s Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts (2021), autotheory (i.e. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), experimental autobiography, i.e., Lyn Hejinian, My Life (1980-); posthuman autoethnography (i.e. Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’Intrus” 2002), autofiction.
Since this is a proseminar, we will devote attention to your development as a budding professional. Assignments will include 1) leading a portion of seminar, 2) creating an “overview & resources for further study” guide on a subgenre of life writing, 3) short journal overview assignment, 4) periodic reading responses, and a 5) final project (abstract and conference presentation, a standard seminar paper, a creative project informed by course content). Regular attendance and active, engaged participation are expected.
LIT 6856
Into the Archive: Reading in the Baldwin
Kenneth Kidd
Collaboratively taught with Curator Dr. Fiona Hartley-Kroger, this course will introduce you to the treasures of UF’s Baldwin Historical Library of Children’s Literature, one of the largest such collections in the world. The Baldwin is an extraordinary resource even for those not specializing in children’s literature, and a major aim for the course is to encourage exploration and use of the collection. Students in previous iterations of this course – as well as researchers across fields and subfields — have published their Baldwin-based research as articles, book chapters, databases, even a documentary. We’ll read scholarship on children’s literary and material culture as well as on the archive, library, collection, and canon. Meanwhile, everyone will develop one or more research projects in the Baldwin and will give regular reports on such. We’ll experiment with methods of encounter and analysis, such as browsing, textual criticism, and distant reading. The course will function as part-seminar, part-workshop, with presentations scheduled every other meeting on findings. We’ll also tour the Conservation and Preservation unit and interact with other library experts, including the Literary Manuscripts Archivist, Flo Turcotte.
Possible readings include Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge, Lissa Paul’s The Children’s Book Business, Rod Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things, Matthew J. Jockers’ Macroanalysis, Melissa Adler’s Cruising the Library, and Laura E. Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things. Plus, essays by Walter Benjamin, Susan Stewart, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Suzan Alteri, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Noah Mullens, many more! Course assignments will include informal presentations, plus some combination of experiments in browsing and distant reading, digital projects focused on subcollections and/or pedagogy, Baldwin title abstracts (metadata aids), grant proposals, and conference abstracts/papers.
LIT 6934
Comics and/as Travel Narrative
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.