Courses

Course Description

The role of the editor in technical and professional communication is complex. Historically, “editing” has focused on instrumental work: “correcting” grammar and “fixing” language. And while those elements are still important in the world of editing, we’re now increasingly aware of problems embedded in that traditional model: Is language ever really broken? How might our work as editors shift when we truly consider audience, purpose, and context?

In this course we examine what it means to be an “editor” and to “edit” another’s work. Over the course of the semester, we will consider the many roles of editors in document creation and production. Along the way, we’ll consider types of editing and levels of edit, editing conventions, writing styles and style guides, and the burdens (and challenges) of doing editing.

During the semester, the class will form two unique publication organizations. Assignments will be based on the work you do for those organizations, including writing submission guidelines, style guides, mission statements, and process documents for editing and review. As we create these publications, we will study existing organizations and processes. Finally, we will submit work to each other’s publications or solicit work from outside authors. Ultimately, our organizations will publish a finished, complex product. The class will culminate with a final paper on the process of editing shaped by your professional intent (industry, academia, or something else entirely).

Course Description

The field of Writing and Rhetoric Studies has long held a fascination with genre. It is a distinctive term of art that encapsulates broad categories of text “type” as well as the social action that texts perform. It is also a multidisciplinary object of study, incorporating insights from rhetoric and composition, literary theory, applied linguistics, and professional writing, among others. In this course, we will explore genre as an evolving concept and practice, with specific focus on the discipline of Rhetorical Genre Studies. We will read widely, examining theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches to the subject; building on that work, students will formulate research and writing projects that reflect their academic interests and take part in field- and community-specific conversations. Our shared commitment will be to defining the boundaries of genre, and in that spirit, we will seek both to expand our knowledge and refine our craft as writers, researchers, and teachers. The course welcomes all graduate students from across English Studies.

Anyone who would like to learn more about the course should feel free to email the instructor, Dr. Chad Wickman, for additional details: cwickman@auburn.edu.

Requirements

Reading for the course will include single-authored books, edited collections, and scholarly articles. Writing will emphasize rhetorical themes, focusing on different areas of research and application. Each student will have the opportunity to collaborate with their colleagues to lead discussion at different points throughout the semester.

Course Description

You’ll have an edge in many fields if you learn how good, ethically designed, original, accessible websites (and web content) come together, as well as how to maintain a site. The ability to be a vital part of the website creation process will open doors to a variety of writing and design jobs. So will being able to conduct user research—to work with real users to find out how to improve a design. You’ll learn all of that and more in this course. 

Most students will enter the course not knowing any coding; everyone will leave being able to use a web editor and HTML and CSS to develop, troubleshoot, and maintain sites. (“Many will enter; all will win.”) Once you know what’s going on “under the hood”—underneath the pretty display—you’ll complete a client project, most likely by using a site builder.  

In short, you'll learn how theory informs practice and how to apply best practices. These best practices will include how to create and edit ethical, web-appropriate content and work with content management systems. They’ll also include how to locate and use available resources, adopt a professional workflow for web development, adapt a site for diverse and global audiences, and create websites and web content accessible to users with disabilities.

Requirements

Students will work on web development projects and give short presentations to the class. Students also will complete a user research project and several short writing assignments. 

Readings

TBD

Course Description

In this class we’ll cover the basics of grant and proposal writing including the following: analyzing funding opportunities, responding to a request for proposal (RFP), writing the different sections of a proposal and constructing your overall argument, persuading your readers to accept (and fund) your ideas, and using effective document design.

At the beginning of the semester, students will propose non-profit clients that we might work for during the semester. We’ll then narrow our pool of clients and students will work in small groups on a full proposal for one of our clients and give a final presentation on the last day of class about their work. During the second half of the semester students should be prepared to hold regular meetings with their client as needed outside of class as well as be prepared to conduct research and work independently under the supervision of the professor.

Course Description

This course aims to familiarize students with the intricacies of the genre, with a primary focus on work that falls under the broad label of Narrative Nonfiction.  The course will look both at early practitioners of the genre and contemporary innovators to help establish a useful lineage for one’s own creative work. Narrative Nonfiction is commonly defined as fact-based writing that uses the techniques of fiction to bring its stories to life—including such craft elements as description, dialogue, character development and scene.  Our workshop will center on three sub-genres of Creative Nonfiction: literary journalism, creative criticism, and writing about place.  While writers in these forms often incorporate personal elements into their work, all strive to also transcend them, consistently turning to outside research and cultural meditations that extend far beyond the self.  Students will study a wide range of such professional work and attempt to emulate it in their own creative essays.  Craft-based discussion of readings will occupy about half of our class time, with the other half being devoted to workshop.  End-of-the-semester portfolios will consist of substantially revised essays for each sub-genre.  

Course Description

This graduate seminar explores the vibrant and evolving field of Early American Studies, foregrounding new methodologies, expanded geographic and temporal scopes, and emerging thematic concerns. We will consider texts and archives from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, spanning regions from the Caribbean and West Africa to New France, Spanish America, and the U.S. South. Topics include settler colonialism and resistance, forced migration and diaspora, empire and ecology, print and performance cultures, and the politics of memory and historiography.

In addition to working closely with primary sources, students will engage with scholarship that redefines the contours of Early American Studies through oceanic, hemispheric, Indigenous, and diasporic frameworks. The course also integrates critical perspectives from the environmental humanities, medical humanities, and disability studies and explores how digital tools and platforms are transforming archival access, textual analysis, and the production of public-facing scholarship.

Requirements

Students will lead and participate in seminar discussions, give a presentation, and develop a final research project that may take the form of a traditional paper or a digital humanities prototype. The course is designed to support graduate students in producing original scholarship that engages with the most current debates and tools in the field.

Course Description

In their introduction to Rhetoric Through Everyday Things, Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle write that in
“disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, the first decade of the twenty-first century has
been characterized by a return to things.” It does seem like “things” have been rather popular lately,
and Rhetoric and Composition has certainly been no exception to this larger (re)turn.

In scholarship under headings like “new materialisms,” “material culture,” “object-oriented
ontology” and others, scholars of writing and rhetoric have highlighted the active role that things—
broadly defined—play in our cultural and rhetorical lives. Things, this work argues, are more than
static, lifeless material objects. Rather, they are persuasive and active rhetorical agents producing,
and produced by, our social experiences.

In this seminar, we will consider a slice of rhetorical history through the lens of things, as well as
engage with contemporary scholarship specifically on the subject. Students will identify things of
professional, scholarly, or personal interest and engage in a sustained research project on their
rhetorical dimensions and histories.

Students can expect to leave this seminar with a robust understanding of key texts in rhetorical
history, as well as a particular understanding of this return to things in contemporary scholarship,
teaching, and work. Together, we will examine the major theories, debates, and pedagogies in the
field and extracurriculum, identify gaps or absences, and project a path forward through unique
research projects.

Course Description

An affect centered reading practice is as central of an analytic to the study of African American literature as the historical. According to Margo Crawford in What is African American Literature, reading African American literature through affect has the capacity to reinvigorate understanding of the African American literary tradition. In this vein, we will re-feel the tradition “as the sensuous, atmospheric experience of texts.”  Here African American literature is better understood as “the circulation of affective energy against and within the structures of history.” With Crawford's work in mind, this seminar will read the contemporary African American novel for its affective resonances across a mirid of texts. To lay the groundwork for this examination, we will engage the theories of the African American literary tradition and the novel from scholars such as Cheryl Wall, Henry Louis Gates, Truider Harris, and others before engaging the novels of writers like Percival Everett, James McBride, Jesmyn Ward, Leila Mottley, Colson Whitehead, and Akwaeke Emezi. Collectively we will pose and answer the question: What is happening in contemporary African American literature? Students will participate in weekly presentations and reflections which will culminate in a final research paper and presentation.

Course Description

The course will focus on novels and secondary readings about gender and especially masculinity. Many of these readings will be critical and historical, rather than theoretical in the strict sense, and so you should be prepared to do extra reading on your own. However, the class discussion will be tailored to (and by) the class members, so you if need to know more about something, please ask. I would also like to emphasize that, although the course will focus on the construction of masculinity in the period, that topic cannot be discussed without reference to female identity, class, and sexuality, among other issues. The use of the plural in the course title is not simply a convention; it reflects the imbrication of gender with other identity categories, despite the increasing sense of a widely shared masculine “essence” which marks the period and which it left as a legacy. In short, I expect seminar conversation to be rather wide-ranging.

Requirements

Requirements include regular attendance and participation, five short (1–2 page) responses to the reading, posted to the class email list, substantial contributions to discussion of response papers over email, one full length paper (21–25 pages), and possibly one formal oral presentation (based on outside reading).

Response papers are due each week 48 hours before class. You may choose which weeks you will turn something in, but please do not turn them in late. Response papers will be circulated and shared; that is why you must post them electronically at least 48 hours before class. (I will create an email list for the class, to which you may post papers, responses, questions, etc.) Response papers should be short (one to two pages), focused essays which engage the reading (primary, secondary or both) directly. You don’t have to have completed, say, the full novel to write about an aspect of it in the short paper.

You are also expected to contribute substantively to discussion on the list, as well as, of course, in class. The class will be conducted as a seminar; each member will be expected to speak during each class meeting and to discuss collegially with other class members. I will contribute as a discussion facilitator and resource person, but not, generally, as a lecturer. You should plan to use the class to explore and expand your own research interests wherever possible. If you would like to tailor your final project for a particular purpose (dissertation chapter, for example), please let me know.

Readings

Probable Primary Texts:

Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship

Gaskell, North and South

Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays

Meredith, Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Ouida, Under Two Flags

Collins, Man and Wife

Kingsley, Westward Ho

Pater, “Diapheneite” (1864) and “Winckelmann” (1867) [two short essays-handout]

Darwin, From Selection in Relation to Sex (VII, Part II, Chapters XIX–XXI: “Secondary Sexual Characters of Man” (two chapters) and “General Summary and Conclusion” 1871

Haggard, She 1886

*There will also be critical and theoretical and historical texts, tbd.*

Course Description

English 7940 is designed to prepare graduate students to teach core composition at Auburn University and the college-level more broadly. In this course, we will read and engage scholarship from Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies; explore the sociocultural and institutional dimensions of teaching at a land-grant university in the U.S. South; learn and apply strategies for designing syllabi, creating assignments, assessing student writing, and composing in different media; generate course materials within a framework provided by the Composition Program; observe experienced teachers in the classroom; and develop a philosophy of teaching that combines personal experience with field-specific knowledge. We will also spend time discussing and, generally, puzzling through old, new, and emerging issues relevant to the teaching of writing. By the end of the course, students should be (and feel) well-equipped to teach within the curriculum and deliver quality writing instruction across the first-year composition sequence.

Course Description

In this course, we will be reading fiction through the lens of the coming-of-age narrative. We will read a variety of short stories told from the perspective of young characters who are having an awakening, whether it relates to realizing their own parents are just people, discovering love for the first time, facing death head on, and more. We will use this subject to discuss the elements of the craft of fiction that include plot, character, setting, and dialogue, and will discuss how to believably write from the point of view of a young character, how to make the stakes of young life feel vital, and how to make your story feel original even if it is part of a long tradition of fictional characters coming into their own. 

Students will participate in workshops where they will share their work, which will include full-length stories and shorter pieces. Not all writing for the course will have to fall under the umbrella of a coming-of-age narrative. We will also discuss autobiographical fiction, as much of coming-of-age fiction falls under this umbrella

Requirements

Students will participate in workshops where they will share their work, which will include full-length stories and shorter pieces. Not all writing for the course will have to fall under the umbrella of a coming-of-age narrative. We will also discuss autobiographical fiction, as much of coming-of-age fiction falls under this umbrella. 

Course Description

This intensive six-week course will provide an in-depth introduction to the genres, forms, and modes of academic writing. We will discuss how to situate our work in an academic field and to contribute to a scholarly conversation. The course will seek to demystify the writing, editing, and publication process. How does peer review work? How does a seminar paper differ from a peer-reviewed article? How might we expand a conference paper into an article? A dissertation chapter? A book chapter? What makes for an effective scholarly argument? How do we identify a conceptual problem, articulate a claim, and marshal sources and supporting evidence? While all are welcome, this course is aimed primarily at students who are interested in pursuing an academic career. Projects might include a scholarly article, dissertation prospectus, or statement of purpose and writing sample. Using Wayne Booth et al.’s The Craft of Research (5^th ed.) as our guide, this course will include workshops, critical engagement with sample materials, and visits and contributions from guests from the world of academic publishing.

Course Description

What is this field we call technical and professional communication? Where did it come from, and how have its principles, practices, and research techniques developed over time? What do practitioners do and researchers study? How does the “user” fit into the picture? You’ll tackle these questions and more. You’ll also build an understanding of professional communication as ethical action and discover the meaning and value of core concepts such as culture, community, and technology.  Given the nature of the field, you’ll engage in both individual and collaborative work. 

Requirements

• Assignments: Individual research project, collaborative user research project, and discussion leading

Readings

• Johnson-Eilola, Johndan & Selber, Stuart A., eds. Central Works in Technical Communication.  Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Johnson, Robert R. User-Centered Technology. SUNY NY, 1998.
• Barnum, Carol M. Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set . . . Test. Morgan Kaufmann, 2011.
• Buley, Leah, & Natoli, Joe. (2024). The user experience team of one: A research and design survival guide. Rosenfeld Media.

Course Description

Do you plan to teach at the college level after you complete your degree? Do you plan to go on to a PhD program in English? Do you plan to teach secondary English Language Arts? Then Pedagogy in Writing Studies is the course for you! Pedagogy remains the beating heart of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies and a site of theorizing and enacting social justice in both that field and Technical and Professional Communication. This seminar features major foundational and contemporary pedagogical currents: critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy, linguistic justice, threshold concepts, teaching for transfer, and writing with generative AI. You will gain a solid foundation in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies pedagogies that will inform your teaching across a variety of courses and contexts. Further, since research typically has a pedagogical dimension in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies, you’ll also gain insight into potential research projects that could grow from your pedagogical commitments.

Course Description

A document conveys meaning in many ways. In most cases, the extra-textual components are as important, or even more important, than the written words. Picture a round, green sign with the word STOP on it, for example. Would you be confused? Design matters, particularly when there are cultural associations attached to shapes, colors, and more.

This course will approach document design as a rhetorical practice with the understanding that a document is any place where one agent may mark information for later use. This situates a document broadly as a container for meaning in a variety of media. Here, we will focus on physical and non-web-page design. We will consider a variety of material and cultural artifacts over our studies, and engage with scholarship on ethics, visual and cultural rhetorics, perception, and accessibility, among others. You will study real-world scenarios and users and produce documents under a variety of use constraints. You will work with a client.

This course will entail both hands-on and analytic work. By the end of the course, you should be able to apply and discuss principles of design; apply and discuss theories of design; discuss how differences in design shape your message; and use tools in document design to create rhetorically savvy documents.

Course Description

This course offers an introduction to some of the most widely used research methods and methodologies across the field (and varied subfields) of Writing Studies and prepares you to conduct research that contributes to critical disciplinary conversations. We will survey methods for conducting qualitative research such as ethnographies and archival work, as well as quantitative and mixed methods approaches. Along the way, we will also discuss the many ethical issues that arise from working with human participants, coding data, and representing your findings. Our work in this class will invite you to not just learn how knowledge is made in the broad field of Writing Studies but will also give you the opportunity to build and contribute knowledge of your own. 

In this class, you can expect to:

• Recognize and demonstrate familiarity with the research methods and methodologies commonly used in the broad field of Writing Studies 
• Identify the specific epistemologies that underlie the many methodologies of Writing Studies 
• Conceptualize a research project that enacts and contributes to the methodological and disciplinary work of Writing Studies 
• Reflect on the varied ethical challenges that doing research in Writing Studies presents

Course Description

This course will focus on contemporary fiction. We will read and analyze the five 2024 National Book Award in Fiction shortlist novels, with an eye toward craft, and then you will write your own short pieces in a style based on a specific author. The class will be divided between critical assessment of fiction and then writing and revising your own work. You should have a basic knowledge of craft in fiction in preparation for this course, and be prepared to read, and write, a great deal. Be prepared to write and workshop five three-to-four page pieces and one twelve-to-fifteen page short story. 

Course Description

The natural, social, or personal—from which angle to write about the world? We will consider questions such as this as we discuss collections of contemporary poetry and write and extensively revise our own poems.  About half of class time will focus on generating drafts in different poetic styles and workshopping them. The other half will be devoted to critical engagement with exemplary poems that can teach us about craft. We will learn from Auburn’s 2025 Poet in Residence Nicole Sealey—her creative process as she composes original work for the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art’s “Radical Naturalism” series, her editorial sensibility as she selects the winner of our annual Witness Prize for Poetry, and her publications, as we read her debut book Ordinary Beast. We will also explore a range of artistic possibilities presented in texts by writers such as Carl Phillips, Maurice Manning, Cecily Parks, Ross Gay, Donika Kelly, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly.  Participation in events outside of the classroom and during evening hours in required.

Course Description

Late medieval England began to be awash in things. These things were both domestically produced, such as grain, tin, and wool, but they increasingly came from imports, such as wine, spices, and cloth. People began to learn that there was a correct good to buy that would make one popular among the right sort of people and an incorrect thing to buy that would make one look silly. One’s status was clearly seen by what one bought. And one wished to be prized by the things one had rather than embarrassed by them. But how did one know what goods to buy? In this course, we will explore how late medieval people learned about the world through the commercial objects that now appeared in their shops, how the desire for these objects created a vocabulary of taste, and how social inclusion began to be based on what one had rather than what one did. Essentially, we will see England in its international trade system as a home shopping network.

Readings

Our readings will come from the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, and others.

Course Description

“Imagine a Black world.” – Quashie

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois posed the unasked question that would penetrate Black life – “How does it feel to be a problem?” Du Bois’s question was at once a sobering inquiry into the existential articulations of Blackness and Black folk, as well as an invitation to consider a more probing question of Black feeling or the capacity for Black feeling or what Blackness feels like. Nearly a century later, Deangelo, the neo-soul artist, released “Untitled (How does it feel?)”. Deangelo’s sonic inquiry, while seemingly reducible to the sexual and the sensual, echoed that Du Boisian unasked question. Perhaps in a way that signals the morphing of the haunting question of Black feeling, Deangelo’s refrain re-situates the provocation in a way that not only speaks to Black folks’ capacity to feel, but also their capacity to cause feeling. “How Does It Feel: Black Sentience in a Black World” is an attempt to read and language the depths and dynamics of Black feeling. It is a course about aliveness. Even closer, it is a “course” that takes serious Quashie’s call for us to “imagine a Black world.” Those imaginings might take us into the riddled spaces of Ellison’s Invisible Man, will have us consider complexly crafted socialities in Wilson, will encourage us to wonder and wander with Morrison and Ward, or find us sitting quietly-still under the Moonlight in P-Valley. Wherever they beckon, we will go. And throughout our journey, we will continually ask one seemingly simple question – “How does it feel…?” 

Course Description

This graduate seminar examines a major phenomenon in early modern literary culture – the rise of the fictional prose narrative. Sometimes referred to as proto-novels, these highly popular fictions were distinctively hybrid in their form, often mingling prose, poetry, and epistolary genres within a single narrative framework. Yet, despite their popularity (or perhaps because of it), these works were also culturally suspect and often censured as purveyors of vices, especially of idleness and lewd passions. In fact, concerns over the mass availability of these texts often appeared alongside he rather alarming notion that what you read could change who you were, both physically and emotionally. As Thomas Wilson, a well-known Elizabethan humanist puts it in his Arte of Rhetoric (1553), “thei that wil reade this, or soche like Bookes, shall in the ende, bee as the Bookes are.” Throughout the course of the semester, we will examine a range of these “newfangled” fictions, from novellas to book-length narratives, focusing in particular on the ways in which their hybridity affords a rich site through which to chart matters of form, gender, reading practice, social satire, and material book culture. Why were these strangely hybrid texts so alluring and what can they tell us about this period’s blurring of boundaries between pleasure and goal-oriented reading, coterie and print cultures, the oral and the written, the public and the private? Seminar participants will find that – although our discussions together may revolve largely around recent scholarship on the materialities of print culture – the hybrid nature of the fictions themselves will accommodate a wide variety of individual approaches and methodologies for the seminar’s major research project.

Requirements

discussion leading; conference-style presentation; research project (c. 20 pages); class participation

Readings

Our readings may include Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F. J., Lyly’s Eupues, Munday’s Zelauto, Greene’s Menaphon, Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler, Lodge’s A Marguerite of America, and selections from Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, along with a number of secondary readings.

Course Description

This course explores the theory and practice of teaching literature in a college setting. Designed for new graduate students and GTAs, it provides an in-depth examination of pedagogical strategies while also helping you to develop practical skills for effective classroom management, assessment, and student engagement. You will learn all about lesson planning, tools and activities that facilitate literature instruction, the art of giving and receiving feedback, time management, grading, and navigating difficult student interactions.

As a “practicum,” this course is designed to provide hands-on training, guidance, support, and, most of all, a space to figure things out, ask questions, look for answers, and share your insights. The course will be conducted through a combination of group discussions, workshops, and peer teaching/observation exercises. You will also have opportunities to design and present your own lesson plans, receive feedback, and engage in reflective practice as you understand and develop your emerging teaching persona.