Fall 2026 Courses

(Blansett):[3 credits] Scholarship in the fields of writing studies, composition, and rhetoric often raises questions about how texts are made and the roles we play in teaching others to create texts. In response, compositionists have formulated a variety of theories for the assumptions, methods, and practices we rely on in the classroom. In ENGL 5100, we will engage with the theories, histories, research, and practices that inform our own First-Year Writing Program at UConn. Specifically, we will explore theories related to our writing program's approach to reading and writing, cognition and creativity, teaching and learning, language and meaning-making. We will build a greater understanding of the contexts that shape and are affected by our practices of teaching writing as you develop your own pedagogies and practices for our program.

In addition to being introduced to the theoretical approaches to writing and teaching writing, you will also be introduced to current methodologies used by composition researchers.  Work in the class includes weekly written engagements with assigned readings, a teaching-focused research project, and a description of your own course inquiry and assignment architecture for an ENGL 1007 course.

ENGL 5100 may be used to fulfill a requirement in the Graduate Certificate in College Instruction https://gcci.uconn.edu/additional-courses/

(Fisher) The Practicum in the Teaching of Writing is designed for entering graduate students teaching First-Year Writing at the University of Connecticut for the first time. Teaching Practicum is designed to help you implement the theories of teaching and writing introduced in ENGL 5100, serving as a bridge between your learning and your students’ experiences. We will work weekly on developing active-learning strategies, class activity plans, and other instructional materials that you will use immediately in your classes. Practicum also provides a sustained forum for reflecting on and assessing your own teaching in the context of the program. It is a deliberate teaching community where instructors regularly share experiences and learn from one another. For sessions, students generate teaching materials and a teaching journal.

(Hasenfratz) Long before steam engines and digital networks, literature in English was already obsessed with machines. This seminar explores how pre-1800 writers imagined technological power through four interlocking frames: machines, innovations in print and performance media, surveillance, and the technologies of embodiment (including talking heads and automatons). We begin with medieval manuscript culture and early mechanical marvels, pairing Arthur Bahr on textual materiality with The Book of Margery Kempe and manuscript culture. Turning to print as both machine and cultural force, we read Adrian Johns on the social construction of print alongside selections from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments and early news pamphlets. We'll view the seventeenth-century “mechanical turn”  through Jessica Riskin’s work on automata and Pamela H. Smith on artisanal knowledge in conversation with Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. As the body becomes mechanism and empire becomes harnesses technologies of surveillance and control, we pair Simone Browne’s theory of surveillance with Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism with Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Throughout, we will consider how literature did not merely reflect technological change but actively participated in redefining embodiment — what counted as human, artificial, or somewhere between, — in a world very much shaped by media systems, mechanical philosophy, and imperial governance. Coursework will consist of a research proposal, annotated working bibliography, seminar presentation, and final seminar paper.

(Deans) We will explore how students learn to write—and learn through writing—across academic contexts, and how such research can inform how we design and deliver courses in any discipline. We’ll also take up what happens as students travel beyond the curriculum through community-based projects keyed to writing.

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) emerged as a reform movement in higher education 50 years ago and has since developed into a diverse portfolio of research methods and agendas. We’ll together survey the history, key theories, and landmark studies of the movement, even as you’ll be invited to dive deeper into the disciplines, questions, and methods that interest you most. For example, if coming from psychology or biology or literature (or name your discipline), there is considerable scholarship to explore on writing and teaching writing in your particular field. There will likewise be opportunities to take up how WAC relates to critical pedagogy, writing centers, general education, multilingualism, AI, identify politics, reading practices, secondary schools, or various global contexts. As for methods, we’ll learn some basics of descriptive, historical, theory-driven, interview-based, auto-ethnographic, and case study approaches. In the latter half of the semester, we will extend these lines of inquiry into how, over the last 25 years, service-learning, community literacy, and social justice pedagogies have modelled exciting new ways to think about and teach writing. 

This seminar is designed for graduate students who teach in any discipline (and potentially for advanced undergraduates aspiring to graduate studies). It counts as an elective toward UConn’s Graduate Certificate in College Instruction. Expectations include weekly one-page reading reflections, spirited participation, an in-class presentation, a book review, and a final project that may take the form of a traditional seminar paper, a research proposal informed by a literature review, a research-informed course/curriculum plan or revision, or a community-based project.

(Anson) Not all humans have equally contributed to climate changes or the conditions that the “era of the human,” or Anthropocene, describes. And still it has become commonplace to express frustration with humanity writ large as a “virus” that kills the planet. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted even more analogies comparing humans to a cancer, channeling environmental concern into apologias for mass violence and death, casting these and other systemic harms as aspects of a “natural” order. This logic has a history—one that scholars increasingly describe as a tradition of ecofascism as part of a rapidly growing field of study on environmental extremism.

This seminar will investigate the rhetorical imprecision of the term “ecofascism,” its specific pasts, and possible futures. Through a genealogical approach to the study of ecofascism, we will work backward from the contemporary emergence of climate fascism to uncover the multiple origin points and inflection moments in the history of ecofascist ideas. We will trace the semantic “squishiness” of ecofascist rhetoric from its identification across the spectrum of modern American environmental politics, through earlier origins in the Green Nazis, back to nineteenth-century American “survival of the fittest” fantasies. We will explore ecofascism’s “geographies of white supremacy” (Bond and Inwood), the “white geology” of the Anthropocene (Yusoff), its diffuse atomization into “settler atmospherics” (Simmons), and the connections between different constrictions of breath due to climate change, Covid-19, and police violence (Mbembe), among other routes of inquiry. We will ground and augment our readings of contemporary critical scholarship with readings of novels, short story, literary nonfiction, poetry, and film.

Spring 2027 Courses

(Menrisky): This practicum will give you the opportunity to begin shaping your career in the discipline of English. Our primary objective will be to assist you in developing your publishing skills. To that end, each participant will transform a seminar paper or conference presentation into an article-length submission to a professional journal. But we will also read about and discuss the most important aspects of the theory and practice of “professing English” today, including negotiating the demands of the corporate university, attending conferences and networking, securing grants, writing dissertations and books, making your teaching matter, and explicating the value of the humanities to the public at large. Participants will be expected to contribute to writing workshops, complete several assignments on the way to producing a publishable article, and engage energetically (and positively) in class discussion.

(King'oo): Courses on “The Bible as Literature” have become commonplace in higher education, especially in English departments. Yet the title itself raises a set of difficult questions. What is “the Bible”? Under what historical and disciplinary conditions might it be classified as “literature”? What interpretive possibilities does the conjunction of “the Bible” and “literature” motivate? Alternatively, what ways of reading does it foreclose or obscure?

This seminar explores such questions by placing biblical texts in conversation with influential works of literary and cultural criticism. Rather than taking the Bible’s literary status for granted, we will ask how and why it has come to be read as literature, and what may be gained (or lost) by doing so. Readings from both the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament will be paired with essays by scholars such as Auerbach, Bal, Eagleton, Frye, Kermode, Said, and others working in a range of critical traditions.

Alongside questions of form, rhetoric, and narrative, we will consider issues of canon formation, textual transmission, and translation—as well as the Bible’s complex representations of alterity, power, violence, and sacrifice. As befits a graduate seminar, discussion and research projects will be shaped in part by students’ own scholarly interests. Ultimately, we will consider how bringing the Bible into conversation with contemporary literary criticism may alter the ways we conceive of (and therefore read, write about, and teach) this highly canonical set of writings, while also asking how biblical texts themselves might contribute to, complicate, or even reshape broader debates about literature and interpretation.

(Kim): This graduate seminar explores critical themes and debates in Asian American literary and cultural theory. Since the mid-1990s, a proliferation of Asian American literary theories has emerged, now forming a major thrust of the interdisciplinary field of Asian American Studies. This course charts these recent innovations as they shape Asian American literary theory and define its place within the broader American literary theoretical canon.

Moving beyond earlier paradigms of self-representation and identity formation, we will analyze how recent scholarship redefines the field through critiques of racial capitalism, war, empire, and displacement.

Key questions include: How do contemporary Asian American texts negotiate form, aesthetics, and sociopolitical critique? In what ways does Asian American theory disrupt foundational assumptions within broader American literary studies? And what are new directions for imagining Asian America?

(Mahoney): As Jonathan Culler and others continue to ask us, “Why lyric?” At the same time as poetry plays a vibrant role in our culture at large, it is increasingly marginalized in literary studies in the academy. Yet “lyric” in some ways remains (nearly) synonymous with “poetry,” and criticism of the lyric is indispensable to any understanding of the history of literature and literary studies. (Is it conceivable to think about Romanticism without the lyric? Or contemporary poetry?) This seminar will examine the history, practice, and theorization of the lyric since the late eighteenth century, with particular attention to such issues as the generic status of the lyric (is the lyric in the final analysis a genre? when was it first recognized as such?) and the “lyricization” of criticism (whether or not of the lyric), especially since the middle of the twentieth century. We will take some of our initial bearings from two important recent publications: The Lyric Theory Reader, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Johns Hopkins 2014), and Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (Harvard 2015), at the same time as we will address writing from the early modern period (e.g., Sidney, Puttenham, Milton) through the Romantics (German as well as English) to the American twentieth and twenty-first century (see below).

Readings will emphasize such topics as the genesis and transformation of lyric modes; the status of lyric as both a trans-historical category and an historically-determined genre; the idea and ideals of the lyric; poetics and prosody; the relation between form, genre, and mode; lyric temporality (e.g., the “lyric present” or the “lyric now”); New Criticism; formalism and the “New Formalism”; rhetorical reading; close reading; lyric ideology; “lyricization”; anti-lyric; historical poetics; “New Lyric Studies,” and the precarious status of voice, of the “I,” in literary utterance.

Criticism is likely to include selections from M.H. Abrams, Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Cleanth Brooks, Reuben Brower, Jonathan Culler, Jacques Derrida, Northrup Frye, Gerard Genette, Geoffrey Hartman, Virginia Jackson, Caroline Levine, Marjorie Levinson, Paul de Man, Meredith Martin, Maureen McLane, Marjorie Perloff, Jopie Prins, I.A. Richards, Susan Stewart, Rei Terada, Herbert Tucker, Helen Vendler, René Wellek, William Wimsatt, and Susan Wolfson. Readings in lyric poetry will be determined as we proceed, as influenced by the (teaching and research) interests of the seminar participants.

This seminar is in no way bound to one literary-historical period: while the critical texts emphasize twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglo-American and continental criticism, the poetic texts rage from the sixteenth century through the twenty-first century. The seminar will hopefully appeal to students interested in literary theory, poetry, poetics, genre theory, critical theory, queer theory, and the history of criticism.

Requirements: short weekly writing assignments (500 words), seminar presentation, midterm “conference paper” (10 pg.), and final project (traditional seminar paper of app. 7500 words or a DH project).

(Litman): In this seminar we will explore and create the works that merge the creative/autobiographical (e.g., fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, photography, drawings, cartooning, video, and more) and the critical/theoretical (such as art, literary, feminist, or cultural criticism). Specifically, we’ll delve into the concept of autotheory, a term popularized by the author Maggie Nelson and her award-winning book Argonauts.  In the words of Arianne Zwarjes, autotheory “seeks to explore, test, and converse with theory through investigations of the lived-body experience.” In addition to looking closely at the works of prominent practitioners of autotheory, students will create their own narratives, weaving together their creative (and likely autobiographical) work with critical explorations of philosophy, psychology, literature, art, feminism, and other fields of knowledge. It is my hope that the students’ narrative projects will grow organically from their existing creative and/or scholarly interests or areas of specialization. While some students may know from the start the narrative project they will pursue, others will arrive at their project idea via a series of weekly exercises, each closely linked to or inspired by the creative, theoretical, or craft readings we’ll be focusing on in class that week.

(Igarashi): “Studying Literary Studies: Theories, Histories, Methods,” a new graduate seminar co-developed with Debapriya Sarkar, invites students to consider the most current accounts, theories, and interventions in literary studies concerning close reading, the value of literary criticism, the role of teaching, and broader questions about the place of literary studies among other disciplines and in the world—in other words, to consider what Elaine Auyoung has called “our discipline’s ongoing period of metacritical reflection.” Open to students working in any field and with any approach, the course aims to equip students with the ability to articulate the significance of their research in relation to the conversations that presently animate literary studies and the longer history of the profession.

Readings include a few touchstone primary texts, some of them pre-1800; parts or the entirety of secondary works such as Auyoung’s “A Language for Literary Expertise: Epistemic Resources and Perceptual Transformation” (2024) and “What We Mean by Reading” (2020), Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive (2021), Merve Emre’s Paraliterary (2017), Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), John Guillory’s Professing Criticism (2022) and On Close Reading (2025), Chris Haupf’s Do the Humanities Create Knowledge? (2023), Andy Hines’s Outside Literary Studies (2022), Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth (2023), Deidre Lynch’s Loving Literature (2014), Simone Murray’s The Digital Future of English (2025), Christopher Rovee’s New Critical Nostalgia (2024), and Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper’s “Publication, Power, and Patronage” (2017); older works, both well-known and now obscure, from the disciplinary-historical archive; and works from philosophy, sociology, and science and technology studies that give us terms with which to talk about why disciplines do what they do in the quirky ways that they do. The plan is for guest speakers to visit a few of our class meetings.

Assignments are organized into different tracks (borrowed from Victoria Ford Smith’s graduate seminar syllabi), including research and teaching-oriented tracks, from which students can choose. All seminar participants will however have certain shorter assignments in common. This seminar satisfies the pre-1800 and theory requirements.

Interested students can email me at igarashi@uconn.edu