Graduate Courses Spring 2027

Reynolds, G—001--- "Contemporary Novel & History"

Aim:This course focuses on the ways contemporary novelists (from the US, Britain, and Canada) have fictionalized the past. What forms of research underlie historical novel? Why are certain eras/periods of history particularly significant when a novelist is approaching the past? Is the historical novel a form of escapism; or can it be a way to return to our current world? Has the historical novel achieved a prestige in literary culture – even as critical discussions of the form seem to lag behind? And underlying these points: how do we relate to, and ‘narrativize’, past times?

We’ll be looking at an array of selections from historical fiction from the past thirty years, as well as some of the key critical essays that serve to contextualize the novels. 

Many of these novels have been adapted into films and television shows, and you will be encouraged to view such works as part of our research. 

Teaching method: a mix of classroom discussion and short mini-lectures. 

Assignment: student presentations; short response papers, and longer essays. 

Novels will include: Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad; Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet; Ian McEwan, Atonement; Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace. 

Cross listed with ENGL 830

Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing and one of the following courses: ENGL 200, ENGL 205, ENGL 206, ENGL 208, ENGL 212, ENGL 215, ENGL 216, ENGL 230, ENGL 230A, ENGL 231, ENGL 242, ENGL 244, ENGL 260, or ENGL 261.

Description: The works of a particular major author, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton situated within literary, historical, biographical, and critical context.

Crosslisted with ENGL 845B, ETHN 445B

Prerequisites: Junior standing

Description: The study of a particular topic in African American poetry, fiction, and/or non-fiction prose.

Aim: In this class I will endeavor to introduce students to and allow them to meaningfully reflect upon critical race theory (CRT), an analytical mode useful for interrogating the narrative immanent in American Law. Fundamentally, this has meant the appropriation of Humanities methods—of storytelling and literary criticism—to expose the narratives of the law. We will push this even further, however, by taking the next logical step and seeing opinions, the judge-made law, as written texts. The close reading of these reveals “judicial irony,” the hidden motivations of “objective” legal minds contained in these opinions. African-American literature and its engagement with American jurisprudence will be the centerpiece, but select readings in Asian-American literature will enable us to explore international and contemporary implications. Thus, we will approach the law through the critical lenses pertinent to literature and the methodologies and terminology fundamental to the study of law. We will read a few select items over the course of the semester (or portions thereof), such as novels, landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, statutes, and law review articles. Our discussions and critical assignments will be calculated to introduce students to methods of researching, assaying, and presenting the law, critical legal/race theory, and the responses made to the law by writer-activists. If this is administratively possible, we will also visit the Nebraska State Penitentiary to close the vast divide between canonical scrutiny and the real-world stories proponents of CRT would have us apprehend.

Teaching Method: Largely discursive and student-driven, except in instances where instructor knowledge is essential. We will not read novels in their entirety, as the focus will be on critical, line-by-line close reading, vis-à-vis the customary approaches to stories that allows—like a cross-section of people who witness an accident—too many variations. You will be expected to read carefully, in installments.

Requirements: Primarily, a close reading papers (longer format for grad students) and perhaps (not likely, an exam). There will be an assortment of smaller projects that bridge the divide between literary criticism and the fundamentals of basic legal research and writing.

Note: As this is a 400-level English course focusing on the intersection of literature and legal texts, students are expected to have experience in and a good grasp of critical textual analysis and literary theory developed in previous coursework. This course is ideal for juniors and seniors in English as well as students on the pre-law track.

Tentative Reading List: Although this list is not finalized, it should give you some idea of the primary texts and the historical range they will cover (my goal is to pair one primary legal text with a landmark literary text): Gerald Horne’s introduction to The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014); Somerset v. Stewart (1772); Jeremy Bentham “A Short Review of the Declaration” (1776);  Johnson v. McIntosh (1823); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001); “On Being the Object of Property” from Patricia J. Williams’ Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991);  Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1976);  Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); Jeremy Waldron, “Custom Redeemed by Statute” (1998); Memoir of Henry Billings Brown (1915); Andrew Zimmerman’s “Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute, and the German Empire: Race and Cotton in the Black Atlantic” (2008); excerpts from W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition(1901); Korematsu v. U.S. (1944); John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957); Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Derrick A. Bell, Jr.’s “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma” (1980); Mary L. Dudziak’s “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative” (1988); Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963); Anthony E. Cook’s “Beyond Critical Legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” (1990); J. Edgar Hoover’s Memoranda to Special Agents (1919, 1967); poems from W. Mondo Eyen we Langa’s The Black Panther is an African Cat (2006); Loving v. Virginia (1967); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women” (1989); Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979); the Fugitive Slave Law (1850); (Fl.Stat.Annot.) Florida Statutes Annotated (1984); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2011); Paul Butler’s “Much Respect: Toward a Hip-Hop Theory of Punishment” (2004); Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (1993); and, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995).

Crosslisted with ENGL 865

Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing and one of the following courses: ENGL 200, ENGL 205, ENGL 206, ENGL 208, ENGL 212, ENGL 215, ENGL 216, ENGL 230, ENGL 230A, ENGL 231, ENGL 242, ENGL 244, ENGL 260, or ENGL 261.

Description: Poetry and prose of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Their intellectual and cultural context.

AIM: This course will examine the darker side of British literature from roughly 1800 to the early twentieth century (the long nineteenth-century), surveying the Gothic tradition from the Romantics to the fin de siècle, primarily through the British novel and short fiction but with some attention to the darker British poetry and arguably even darker continental and American literature of the day, with opium use as frequent background, plot generator, and theme. The course will close by noting the sum of all fears in H. P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction and H. G. Wells’s The Croquet Player (1938). We will attend to pedagogical questions as they emerge, especially with the more commonly-taught texts such as Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and Dracula.

Tentative texts, in chronological order:

Lewis, The Monk (1796)

Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (1818)

Hoffmann, “The Sandman” (1816), with Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919) 

Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater (selections; 1821)

Poe, “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “The Purloined Letter” (1844), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846)

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Browning, “Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came” (1855)

Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1859)

Stevenson, R. L. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Kipling, The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales (1888), selected tales

Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)

Machen, “The Great God Pan” (1894)

Stoker, Dracula (1897)

James, “Count Magnus” (1904) 

Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) 

Wells, The Croquet Player (1938)

Requirements: one-page critical response papers (50%), research/seminar paper (30%), with a prospectus and annotated bibliography due earlier in the semester (10%); class participation (10%). 

Description: The shift from printed to digital texts and its implications for the humanities. Practice in digitally representing texts, archival design, and analysis of representative electronic projects dedicated to a variety of authors and genres.

AIM: This is an advanced, technical introduction to data modeling and analysis in the humanities. We will look at a variety of common data structures used by humanist scholars (including CSV, JSON, XML, and relational databases) with an eye toward learning to design and develop robust, computationally tractable representations of material commonly encountered in the humanities (ranging from government records to literary and historical documents). Along the way, we'll look at common, readily-available command-line tools that can be used to analyze, represent, and visualize data.

This course does not assume any prior knowledge of the technologies we are considering. However, you should be aware that this is an intensely technical course intended for people who are interested in creating scholarly websites and document repositories; conducting analysis of large text corpora; creating and analyzing large datasets; and similar sorts of digital humanities projects.

Please note that you must have a laptop computer and reliable access to the internet in order to take this course.

At once object and subject, material and symbolic, our bodies exist at the intersection of multiple competing discourses, including the philosophical, the juridical, the techno-scientific, and the biopolitical (to mention just a few!). In this Seminar, we will draw upon broad historical, philosophical, literary, sociological, anthropological and other interdisciplinary disciplinary literatures to consider some of the ways in which the body is constituted by such discourses, and how it itself serves as perhaps the material substratum for social and cultural life writ large. Among the key questions we will consider, study, discuss, and research are the following: What is “natural” about the body, and how much does that matter? What does a “socialized” body entail? How do historical and political-economic forces shape the perception and meaning of bodily existence (phenomenology of the body)? How are bodies “sexualized”? How are distinctions made between “normal” and “(dis)abled” or pathological bodies? What are the origins and implications surrounding the relationship between psychic and somatic experiences? Is language (and rhetoric) itself inherently bodily? What does body augmentation mean, and what are its consequences? How has the rapid emergence of AI affected our bodily relationships? And finally: how do bodies that are multiply constituted by competing logics of gender, race, and class offer up resistance to these and other categorizations?

Reading list includes: René Descartes, Michel Foucault, Edmund Husserl, Marcel Mauss, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, Pierre Bourdieu, Susan Bordo, Thomas Laquer, Judith/ Jack Halberstam, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Anne McClintock, Anthony Appiah, Sarah Ahmed, Lennard Davis, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, and more.

Requirements: weekly analytical posts; a presentation; and a final research exercise.

*The Final Research Exercise is aimed at encouraging students to research any aspect of the body from within their own subfield (Literary and Cultural Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, Creative Writing, and other Humanities Departments), in any substantial way that will help with their course of study.

Description: The course has three elements: workshop, seminar, and discussion of the teaching of creative writing.

Schaffert, T -001

This graduate class in prose writing and publishing will feature multiple guest authors and publishing professionals throughout the semester, in addition to sessions led by English faculty Timothy Schaffert and Joy Castro. A combination of in-person and synchronous Zoom sessions, the course will engage students with editors, agents, and book marketers, as well as visiting authors leading sessions in craft and creativity. Among the guests: Micah Dean Hicks (winner of the 2026 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction); Cynthia Leitich Smith (NY Times bestselling YA author and author-curator of Heartdrum, a Harpers imprint for Indigenous authors); Lola Akinmade Åkerström (author of the Good Morning America Book Club pick In Every Mirror She’s Black), and others TBD.

Dzukogi, S - 101

"Ideally for me, poems are nothing special…poems “are pieces of talks. Poems “are just the language without mistakes. I like this reminder by William Stafford. It will save us from the sacredness that we, poets, impose on poetry and poems. This is the freedom you; the student will bestow upon your practice during the semester. In this immersive writing seminar, you will write to savor these sustained talks that transcripts the wonderful and challenging experiences of our daily existence. This class is structured around the reminder that writing is pleasurable despite the rigor that comes with it. Through craft talks, generative exercises, this studio styled workshop will incorporate activities that will embrace the nourishing goal of growth through constant practice. The course will emphasize expanding the limits of personal voice and knowledge through curated reading lists that challenges a student’s reading limitations. Students will curate portfolios of original works, annotated bibliographies and reviews of texts. During the semester students will begin conceptualizing a draft of a critical introduction to a creative dissertation, in hope they will continue to work on this document as they progressed through the program. "

This seminar examines the emergence of psychology and psychiatry as scientific disciplines in the nineteenth century. How did the mind and its suffering come to be viewed as objects of science? What effects did this have on how we organize society and view our interiority? How were these changes reflected in literature?

This course is a critical historical examination of the rise of the mental sciences (not a psychology course). Readings will include historical scientific works, poetry, fiction, and secondary scholarship. Class is discussion-based and in-person only, and print copies of the readings are required. The course will also address primary source and archival research methods. Likely authors include: Emily Dickinson, John Clare, Edgar Allen Poe, Matthew Arnold, William James, Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Rush, Silas Weir Mitchell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and William Benjamin Carpenter.

Overview

This course explores rhetorics of social activism across cultural moments, issues, and rhetorical strategies and tactics. Our inquiry will be organized around rhetorical acts, from sit-ins and marches to craftivism and social media posts. Each week, we’ll consider the affordances and constraints of these rhetorical practices and how they have enabled social movements including civil rights, feminism, queer rights, Black Lives Matter, disability justice, body inclusivity, and much more.

As we explore activism in its particular social and historical contexts, we’ll ask: What made a particular activist practice potent in its historical and social context? How did activists create urgency, mobilize audiences, and build coalitions? What were the rhetorical reverberations—expected and unexpected—of activism? Who was visible and invisible in these movements, and what people or perspectives did their activism overlook?

Through these questions, we will consider not only how activist rhetoric produces social change, but also how rhetoric operates within structures of power, shapes who can participate and be heard, and sometimes produces consequences its creators did not anticipate.

Course Activities

For the first half of the class, you’ll write informal responses to the readings, which will serve as springboards for course discussions. We’ll build a collective digital archive--with two people sharing each week--that features examples of activists, movements, or artifacts. At midterm, you’ll do a short presentation on the rhetorical choices of an activist or movement of interest to you. The culminating project will allow you to develop a project that intersects with your interests in both form and focus.

Waite, S - 101 - "Critical & Creative Writing Pedagogies"

This seminar will focus on a wide-range of writing pedagogies, drawing from creative writing, composition, English Education, and community writing. While the course will provide some history of pedagogies in these fields, it will also heavily focus on pedagogical issues in writing studies in our current contemporary moment. The course will engage pedagogical scholarship in queer, anti-racist, feminist, decolonial, environmentalist, and disability studies as well as provide contextual histories for the development of these areas. Students will read theory, of course, but will also develop their own pedagogical projects and materials that will be useful both in the classroom and in other professional contexts.

Further information unavailable at this time.