COURSES TAUGHT

Graduate Seminars

Regarding Others: Perspective, Narrative, Empathy. Graduate-level “Seminar in Theory” examining techniques and ethics of representation, drawing from narratology, cognitive psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies.

Modernism, Modernity, Mobility. Graduate-level seminar on discourses of mobility in modernist studies, encompassing the circulation of people through migration and tourism; social mobility; technologies of movement; and mobile points of view in aesthetic production.

Foundations in Gender Studies. Transdisciplinary graduate-level introduction to major concepts in the field of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, focusing on key issues in feminist and queer research. Examines major figures in the development of the field and current theoretical debates and methodologies.

Habits of Modernity: Gender, Mobility, and the Everyday. Graduate-level seminar in English, cross-listed with Gender Studies, introducing students to the contours of two conversations animating gender studies approaches to modernism/modernity: discussions of the everyday and of modern mobility. Team taught with Prof. Barbara Green.

Upper-Level Undergraduate Literature Seminars

Senior Seminar: Moving with the Moderns: Mobility in Literature and Culture of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. Examines how writers have grappled with new forms of movement and the new perspectives they give rise to and how modern mobilities and perspectives have shaped the production of culture, culminating in an original researched essay.

Senior Seminar. Process-focused approach to the capstone course for English majors. Students design and execute original research projects on a topic of their choice.

Virginia Woolf. Seminar devoted to Woolf’s most significant novels, essays, and stories, examined in their original contexts and in how they’ve been interpreted and recycled today.

Literary Geographies of Gender: Computer-Assisted Study of Gender and Geography in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Introduction to the digital humanities through project-oriented collaborative research. Offered through English, Gender Studies, and Computing and Digital Technologies, in partnership with the Center for Digital Scholarship.

Gender, Space, and the City. Research seminar examining how British literature shaped and was shaped by two pivotal transformations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the growing dominance of the city in national life and rapidly changing roles for women.

Global London. Examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century London as encountered and represented by perceived “outsiders” in England, especially those with biographical connections to British colonies. Additional emphasis on insights gained through urban studies and critical geography, with students learning to create and analyze maps of named locations.

Literature and Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial British and Anglophone Literature. Investigates the role and representation of empire in British and Anglophone literature of the long twentieth century. Focuses on writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, supplemented by colonial discourse theory and postcolonial theory.

Writing India. Examines fictional representations of India, especially in the Indian Anglophone novel. Emphasizes the relationship between nation and narration, colonial discourse and postcolonial politics to probe how literature about the nation creates the nation.

Sex and Gender in the Victorian Novel. Upper-level course, cross-listed with Gender Studies, examining sex, sexuality, and gender in the Victorian novel from Jane Eyre to Dracula. Considers how “the Angel in the House,” “the New Woman,” and “the New Man” intertwined with ideas about race, nation, and empire and the role of the novel.

Honors Colloquium. A semester-long, 3-credit course guiding English majors through the process of conducting literary scholarship and writing an honors thesis.

Literary Modernism. Advanced seminar on transatlantic modernist literature organized in five units: I. Modernity and Decadence, Aestheticism and Realism; II. Theatres of War; III. Race, Nation, and Geomodernisms; IV. “High” Modernism, Difficulty, and the Everyday; V. Modernism’s Afterlives.

Gender, Race, and Empire in Victorian Fiction. Advanced seminar considering literary works (by such authors as Wilkie Collins, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde) alongside contemporary writing by scientists and social critics (including Darwin, Lankester, Mayhew, Renan, Ruskin) and colonial discourse analysis.

Nation and Empire in Twentieth-Century British and Anglophone Literature. Advanced seminar on literature by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and Marjane Satrapi read alongside postcolonial theory.

Lower-Division Undergraduate Courses in Literary Studies

Introduction to Digital Humanities. Introduces DH, its methods, theories, and applications, in humanistic research. Additional attention to ethics in big data. Cross-listed in History.

Survey of British Literature II (1700 to the Present).

Literatures in English II (1750 to the Present): Inventing Modern Literature. Survey of ideas of the self in anglophone world literature.

Novels of London. Introduction to literary study with focus on gender, technology, and London as they evolved in British fiction throughout the long twentieth century. Cross-listed in Gender Studies.

Contemporary British Fiction and Adaptation. Explores the state and role of British fiction today the context of literary traditions and contemporary culture. Attends to how a range of avant-garde, postcolonial, and popular novels find another life in film.

London, World City. Examines twentieth- and twenty first-century literary depictions of London with an emphasis on colonial and postcolonial perspectives.

Literature and Empire. Seminar on literature that grapples with the condition of empire, from Conrad and Achebe to Tayeb Salih and J.M. Coetzee.

Narrating the Nation: Literature, Nation, Representation. First-year seminar focused on meanings of nation and nationalism in twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature.

Imagining the Modern City. Seminar on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and America representations of the city.

Introduction to British Literature. Survey of British literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot and Jean Rhys.

What is Literature. Introduces students to methods and critical vocabularies employed in the study of literature in a variety of genres.

Women’s and Gender Studies

Foundations in Gender Studies. Described in Graduate-Level Seminars, above.

Women Writers: Writing About Texts. Intersectional analysis of literature by women published in the 20th and 21st centuries. Additional focus on developing skills in academic writing.

Twentieth-Century Literature by Women. Lecture format course with teaching assistants on multicultural literature by women. Cross-listed in English.

Women Writers. Introductory-level seminar on literature by women, 1792 to the present, from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Cross-listed in English. Held additional meetings with honors students.

Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies. Feminist and gender theory, team-taught. Required for students Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Windows on Women’s and Gender Studies. Students write analytically about diverse cultural and intellectual campus and community events bearing on women’s and gender studies. Team-taught, Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Writing and Rhetoric

Ways of Seeing: The Rhetoric of Identity. Introduces students to principles of academic discourse and ethical argumentation with an emphasis on the challenges and rewards of writing with an ethnographic eye/I.

Identity, Community, and Ethical Argumentation. Readings and assignments explore aspects of identity with an emphasis on multimodal composition.

Reading and Writing Culture. First-year composition focused on interpreting culture, particularly visual culture, and on developing competence in critical writing.

Rhetoric and Composition/First-Year Engagement. First-year composition taught through themes of identity and community. Introduces students to college-level writing and library research and facilitates engagement with the campus community.

Questions of Identity. Introduction to college writing through issues of identity (e.g., gender, race, class) in twentieth-century multicultural literature and film.

First-Year Composition. Analytical writing taught through readings on the semiotics of popular culture.