Courses

Course Description

Many will enter; few will win. 

Humans have a hard time processing numbers, so how can we communicate meaningfully about risk so people can make informed choices? How about harm, whether it’s physical, environmental, cultural, or something else? What affects our perceptions of each? What rhetorical strategies have been used to communicate more effectively, and what strategies have been used to skew perceptions and interpretations? We’ll explore these elements of the rhetoric(s) of risk and harm, examine cases of disproportionate harm, and look at how technical and professional communication is working toward advocacy and justice.

Course Description

In his 1994 book Bomb the Suburbs, William Upski Wimsatt discusses how his experiences as a graffiti
writer shaped his thinking on the relationship between writing and urban space. “Graffiti,” Wimsatt
writes, “taught me all I know about space.” For Wimsatt, the future success of graffiti—and, we
might say, all writing—“depends in part on whether we can continue to surprise with the use of
space.”
But what is writing? Says who? Who gets to theorize it? Who gets to teach it?
Who gets to write about writing?
This seminar will provide students an overview of some of the ways we in Rhetoric and
Composition have answered these questions, all while considering the potential for new voices and
new answers. That is, we will engage with theories and studies of writing from within Writing
Studies, but also from beyond it, looking to other writers, other spaces, other ideas about writing
(like Wimsatt’s) that might inform or push back on some of our long-held disciplinary assumptions.
By broadening our focus on what constitutes “composition theory,” the hope here is that we
broaden our own research and teaching of writing and writerly identity.
Students can expect to leave this seminar with a more robust understanding of where Composition
came from, where it has been, where it is, and where it might be going, as well as a familiarity with a
diverse range of approaches to teaching and research from within and beyond the academy.
Together, we will examine the major theories, histories, debates, and pedagogies in the field and the
extracurriculum, identify gaps or absences, and project a path forward.

Requirements

Weekly reading responses and comments; discussion facilitation for one class period; a pedagogy
prospectus; a series of writing assignments leading to an article-length seminar paper or comparable
scholarly project; and an in-class conference presentation on final project.

Course Description

This course will cover the design, implementation, and usability of websites. Students will learn how to use HTML5 and CSS to code, design, structure, and manage websites. Students will also learn about principles of site usability, localization, and accessibility for diverse and global audiences.

Requirements

Students will work on client-based web design projects and give short presentations to the class. Students will complete a usability report and several short writing assignments.

Readings

DuRocher, D. (2021). HTML and CSS QuickStart Guide. ClydeBank Media LLC. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1636100005, $24.49 on Amazon; Ritter, M. & Winterbottom, C. (2017). UX for the Web. Packt Publishing. ISBN-13: 978-1787128477, $42.27 on Amazon

Course Description

In 1572, when Montaigne was attempting to categorize the new shape his journal writing had begun to take on, he chose the Middle French word essai, meaning “trial,” “attempt,” “experiment.”  The word lyric, on the other hand, is primarily aligned with the realms of poetry and song, as well as the slippery, indeterminate concept of the “Lyric I.”  A lyric essay, then, as Kazim Ali writes, attempts “to bring the resources of poetry into prose, to allow new structures for the mind in its thinking.”  John D’Agata popularized the term “lyric essay” through his ongoing work as an editor for the Seneca Review, as well as his well-known 2003 anthology The Next American Essay.  There remains much debate, however, over what the label actually signifies, along with the respective merits of D’Agata’s work, both as an editor and as a writer.  This course will take a deep dive into the forms, origins, idiosyncrasies, and various controversies associated with this latest nonfiction sub-genre. 

The content of the essays we will focus on in class will traverse the familiar ground of literary journalism, creative criticism, and place-based writing, yet all will take on a markedly lyric or experimental approach. While the terms lyric and narrative in regard to the essay are not mutually exclusive, most of the creative work we will be studying looks to resist, complicate, or distract the reader from narrative, making use of such techniques as associative leaps, fragmentation, and/or other formal inventions to de-center a linear narrative structure. 

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 two substantially revised essays.  In-depth peer-review and an ongoing critical component are also required for the course.     

Course Description

Shakespeare and his queen have come to exemplify the brilliance of early modern England—one as a playwright and poet whose work transcends the constraints of time, geography, and national culture; the other, as the most successful female monarch in English history. In the recent decades, however, Elizabeth’s role as an accomplished writer has received an increased scholarly attention. In this class, we will listen to Elizabeth’s voice and examine her rhetoric, reading the queen’s poetry, speeches, and letters for the signs of their author’s ingenious hidden and overt messages, communicated in a rich metaphoric, symbolic, and allegorical imagery held together by the syntactical structures that communicate intricate messages of their own. We will read these monarchal writings against the backdrop of the political and cultural challenges faced by England and its queen. As our discussion moves back and forth between Elizabeth and Shakespeare, we will look for Shakespeare’s dramatic response to these political and cultural challenges. Drawing the connections between the two most luminous figures of the period, we will not limit the subject of our conversation to Shakespeare’s reflection of Elizabeth and her multi-gendered nature in his plays, but also question the extent to which the writing of both is integrated in the same web of cultural, political, and gender-specific concerns. The materials we’ll examine in this course will not be limited to literary texts, but will extend to the products of visual culture (such as prints, drawings, paintings), historical documents (such as treatises, letters, proclamations), and artifacts (such as needlework, clothing, and jewelry).

Objectives for this course include the enrichment of your understanding of early modern British literature and culture through analysis of some of the major texts by Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare; exploring how the centrality of court culture shapes and affects the writing of the period; providing you with opportunities for original research and writing of your own.

This course is cross-listed with Women’s and Gender Studies. This course fulfills the requirement for Major Author(s) and Pre-1800 Literature. 

Requirements

Lively participation, leading one discussion, scaffolded article-length research project, research presentation.

Readings

Provisional primary reading list includes Elizabeth’s poems, speeches, and letters; Shakespeare's Midsummer’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Richard II. We will read other primary texts to understand the cultural and political forces at play in early modern England. Relevant scholarship will be also included.

Course Description

What is “rhetoric,” and who gets to theorize, practice, and teach it? What cultural, intellectual, and material forces shape rhetorical theories and instruction? In this class, “Histories of Rhetoric and Rhetorical Education,” we will attempt to answer these questions through close study of rhetoric over time, both in terms of various theoretical approaches as well as the pedagogies that emerged alongside them. Beginning with classical Greek rhetoric and ending with contemporary rhetorical scholarship like digital and posthuman rhetoric, this course will expand your perspective of rhetorical history and education, and will introduce you to rhetorical historiography, or the writing of rhetorical histories. 

While we’ll engage with the “traditional” canon of Western rhetoric, we’ll also work to disrupt that canon, questioning how and why it came into existence, and what its limitations are. Through our readings, we will not only gain a sense of the evolution of rhetorical theory and education, but will also be able to articulate the role of rhetoric and rhetorical education in making knowledge, building communities, and shaping the future.

In this class, you can expect to: 

• Critically read and respond to a broad range of rhetorical theories and pedagogies beginning in the classical period and extending into the twenty-first century. 
• Articulate various scholarly perspectives on rhetorical theory and rhetorical pedagogies, and begin to define your own.
• Define and practice rhetorical historiography, questioning whose rhetorical theory “counts,” and how texts become canonized.  
• Communicate your arguments/expertise to an audience of scholarly professionals in appropriate genres and mediums (writing, oral, and/or multimodal).

Course Description

What counts as an archive? To whom does an archive belong? And how does archival research help us read African American literature? This course provides a survey of Black archival thought by examining various theories, methods, and literary texts engaged with the idea of the archive. We will engage “the Black archive” as a philosophical and practical framework for literary analysis. Through in-class discussion and visits to Special Collections and Archives, we will study how Black writers, scholars, librarians, and artists have imagined the relationship between cultural, institutional, and personal memory. Though nineteenth-century African American life and culture––and literature and scholarship about the same––will be our focus, students are encouraged to bring questions, interests, and expertise in other periods and regions to our collective study. This course will investigate how Black archives and literatures demand we reimagine our critical, ethical, and readerly relationship to historical and documentary evidence. Authors studied in this course will likely include Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, David Walker, Charles W. Chesnutt, Arthur Schomburg, Margaret Walker Alexander, W.E.B. DuBois, Saidiya Hartman, and Dorothy Porter Wesley.

Course Description

Reading theory is a bit like reading a foreign language, the language of advanced literary and cultural analysis. In this course, we will discuss readings from a broad (though far from exhaustive) range of theoretical schools. We will practice explicating theory in clear and accurate terms, applying it as a framework for textual analysis, and considering which approaches make sense when. No prior knowledge of literary theory is necessary.

Course Objectives - By the time you finish this course, you should be able to:

• Explicate critical theory essays from a number of theoretical schools
• Apply a theoretical framework in the reading of a literary text
• Synthesize the ideas from multiple critics in service of your own argument

Readings

• Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction 9780199691340
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric    9781555-97690-3
• Ling Ma, Severance 9780374261597
• The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 9780393602951
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 9780151009985

Course Description

For this course in American literature, we will consider what the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has called the "wisdom of the novel ... the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood.”  Our readings will help us to trace important stylistic and thematic developments in the American novel and short story at approximately 50-year intervals: (1) the antebellum decades of national churn just before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery (1820-1855); (2) a turn of century that witnessed increasing United States urbanization and industrial power (1890--1905); and (3) an era that gave birth to a complex American civil rights movement (1945-1955).  We will pay particular attention to the historical context in which these works were produced, including the issues of national expansion, racial and gender formations, technological change, and regional differences.

Primary goals of the seminar are to read extensively in American fiction, considered in the light of advanced scholarship on 19^th and 20^th century writers, while developing the research and writing skills necessary to complete an original seminar paper approximately 20 pp. in length.

Requirements

assigned discussion leadership, research prospectus, research paper, final exam.

Readings

will likely include works such as Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824); Herman Melville, Typee; or, A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly (1852); Frances E.W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Lifted (1892); Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905); Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)

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

In her foundational essay, “The Race for Theory,” Black Feminist critic Barbara Christian writes that “people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic.” Black writers, Christian continues, theorize through “narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.” Taking Christian’s insight as our jumping off point, this class will explore how Black authors in the 18^th and 19^th-century United States theorized through literary form. We will read poetry by writers such as Phillis Wheatley (Peters) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, fiction by Julia Collins and Frank Webb, and selected other works. Alongside these primary works we will read a carefully curated selection of foundational and recent secondary works from writers including Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, and Christina Sharpe. Throughout the semester, we will focus on teasing out and exploring the theories that early Black writers offered through their literature, and use contemporary writers to help us better understand some of those theories.

Requirements

Students will complete a series of short writing assignments including a paper abstract and two annotated bibliographies, as well as a longer research essay.

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.