Fall 2025 Courses

(Blansett/Doran): [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.
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 to undertake a research project on teaching, learning, and writing (Scholarship of Teaching & Learning [SoTL]). Your classroom-based research will culminate in a project that contributes to our understanding of how undergraduate students learn to write and compose. You will share what you have learned in the classroom in a brief teaching presentation. The research will also provide the groundwork upon which you develop a course inquiry and assignment architecture in preparation for teaching your own version of UConn's FYW course. Work includes weekly written engagements with assigned readings, a teaching-focused research project, and a description of the course inquiry and assignment architecture.

(Fisher): Fridays 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm, 1:45 am – 3:00 pm, or 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm, depending on your schedule [1 Credit] The Practicum in the Teaching of Writing is designed for 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.

(Codr): Loneliness has been a key term in social scientific research and public health arenas for the better part of our young century. Culminating in a 2023 advisory on an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” commissioned by then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the rise of loneliness as an optic for examining society and culture today has been remarkable not because it is new, but because loneliness and the conditions of solitude or solitariness with which it is usually (though not always) associated has been a central feature of narrative representation since, at least, The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Odyssey.

In this seminar we will explore the long and deep history of loneliness in the West, paying particular attention to literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, which witnessed 1) the ascent of the individual as the operative unit of liberalism, 2) the centering of solitude as a spiritual condition in the literatures of Protestantism, 3) the emergence of the literature of the castaway colonist, 4) the emergence of a literature recording the experience of forced servitude and escape, and 5) the rise of a celebratory (or at least appreciative) attitude towards loneliness in the literature of Romanticism. As we explore these various loneliness formations our eyes will constantly be on the question of how the humanities can be used to shed light on both the current loneliness crisis as well as the current discourse surrounding loneliness, in which it is pathology, rather than pathos, and public health rather than art, that dictates the terms we use to think about being alone.

Authors and texts to be covered include the following: Primary works of literature: Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719), Ashton’s Memorial (castaway narrative, 1726), The Female American (Winkfield, 1767), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Equiano, 1789), The History of Mary Prince (Prince, 1833), Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Rousseau, 1776), and Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818) as well as selected poems by writers such as Anne Finch, Thomas Gray, and William Wordsworth. Important contextualizing texts may include: Two Treatises of Government (Locke), The Social Contract (Rousseau), theological works on devotion, privacy, and solitariness, and Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. A variety of contemporary and theoretical works on loneliness and individualism will accompany these major readings.

Requirements for this course include one public-facing piece of writing on a topic relating to loneliness, leadership of a guided discussion of one or two course texts, and a research paper treating loneliness in one of the course texts or in a text or tradition of the student’s choosing.

(Smith): Tuesdays, 9:00-11:30 - This seminar investigates the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a moment of cultural and historical border-crossing — a moment that crystallizes ideas and debates that both look back to the social changes that marked the Victorian period and carry forward into modernism. In particular, we will examine some of this period’s richest conversations in science, art, industrialization, race, class, and gender. Our readings will consider theories of degeneration, sexology, racial science, and psychical research; examine movements in literature and culture such as decadence and aestheticism, the New Woman, and “slum” literature; and interrogate anxieties surrounding empire and national identity. Through a range of genres (including novels, short stories, essays, poetry, art, and photography) we’ll dissect how authors and artists responded to, reinforced, and challenged the rapidly shifting cultural climate at the end of the nineteenth century.

While much of our material will focus on British literature and culture, the seminar necessitates wrangling with three methodological concerns. First, we'll consider the challenges and advantages of transatlantic and transimperial texts and scholarship. A number of the authors, intellectual movements, and cultural shifts we will trace are enriched by considering the movement of ideas, people, and creative works between England and the United States and throughout the British empire. How do we engage in such work as scholars who, often, specialize geographically as well as chronologically? What strategies can we use as thinkers and researchers to approach such work? Also, as the title of the seminar implies, we’ll be considering questions of periodization. How do we understand liminal moments such as the fin-de-siècle, both in our scholarship and in our profession? And lastly, the seminar will provide you with opportunities to consider the relationship between canonical and lesser known texts, the ethical and political machinery behind such designations, and how to navigate different assignations of literary value and relevance as researchers, writers, and teachers.

In addition to weekly reading and active engagement in seminar, you'll complete a series of self-designed writing projects of different lengths and purposes. I’ll offer suggestions of potential assignments — some that lead to writing a “traditional” seinar paper and others focused public-facing scholarship, pedagogical materials, or archival studies.

Our primary reading list might include the following, but it will change and adapt in response to student interests and as I further develop the syllabus.

• Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science (1882)
• Olive Schreiner, Story of an African Farm (1883), paired with visual representations of empire
• Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours (1884)
• Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop (1888)
• Oscar Wilde, Salome (1893), with Aubrey Beardsley illustrations
• Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) and Okakura Kakuzo, selections from Ideals of the East (1903) and The Awakening of Japan (1904), paired with J. M. W. Whistler
• G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
• Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1896), paired with “street urchin” and “street Arab” print and visual materials
• Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897)
• Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897), paired with Child Study materials
• Paramaswaram Pillai, excerpts from London and Paris through Indian Spectacles (1897) and Behramji Malabari, The Indian Eye on English Life (1893), paired with images from the City of London Asylum archive
• Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901), paired with excerpts from Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1899)
• Selections of WWI poetry, prose, paintings, and photography
• Short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Egerton, Vernon Lee, Constance Fenimore Woolson, L. T. Meade, Victoria Cross, Radclyffe Hall, and E. Nesbit
• Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History (2000)
• Lisa Rodensky (ed.), Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu (2007)

(Williams): This course will examine the literary, cultural, and political debates that structured the Harlem Renaissance by centering it as an aesthetic and political movement marked by queer subjectivities, practices, and epistemologies. While the Harlem Renaissance launched several famous queer artists including the writers Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Richard Bruce Nugent and the musicians Ma Rainey and Gladys Bentley, the movement has, until rather recently, been regarded chiefly for its formative influence on Black nationalist and Black arts movements, to the exclusion of recognizing its contributions to explorations and expressions of gender and sexuality.

Exploring the Harlem Renaissance and its complex literary and political histories enacts the challenge of historical and literary periodization; highlights the complexity of archival work; foregrounds the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class; and illuminates the role of LGBTQIA experiences, theories, and practices in shaping Africana, U.S. and transnational aesthetics and politics.

Artists to be studied will include some of the following: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gladys Bentley, Nora Holt, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin. Theorists to be studied will include Farah Griffin, C. Riley Snorton, Mason Stokes, Deborah McDowell, Dwight McBride, Judith Butler, Sharon Holland and Rod Ferguson. We will also supplement our readings with select documentaries and films.

The methodological approaches of the course will be drawn from literary theory, queer theory, queer of color critique, archival theory, biography, historiography, and cultural criticism. Assignments will include short responses, an oral group presentation, a seminar, conference-style paper (at midterm and with an opportunity to revise), and a final, researched paper or project.

(Jeon): The field of Second Language (L2) writing aims at exploring the nature of multilingual students’ (students who use English as a Second or Foreign Language) engagement with writing practices in school and out-of-school contexts. With the increasing number of multilingual students in U.S. higher education, the University of Connecticut (UConn) is not exceptional given that many international undergraduate and graduate students join diverse programs every academic year. With that trend, Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) also released statement on Second Language Writing and Multilingual Writers, and one of the statements explicitly emphasizes the importance of offering “teacher preparation based on evidence-based scholarship and best practices for multilingual writers in the forms of graduate courses, faculty workshops, relevant conference travel, and when possible, require such coursework or other similar preparation for instructors working with writers in a higher-education context” (CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Multilingual Writers). However, at UConn, opportunities to delve into the field of L2 writing are “very” limited. Despite graduate teaching assistants’ requests for the course of multilingual writing pedagogy and the increasing enrollment of international and multilingual students in First-Year Writing (FYW) courses, the current graduate programs—both within the English department and beyond—offer “no” courses focused on L2 writing. 

Responding to the lack of opportunities to learn the field of L2 writing, students in this course will explore various topics in L2 writing (i.e. task representation, reading-writing connections, assessment, pedagogy etc.) from research and teaching perspectives since the two go hand in hand in the L2 context. That is, L2 writing research is generally conducted with an eye toward implications for instruction and takes place in instructional settings. At the end of this course, students will be able to achieve the following learning objectives: 

1. Students will be able to obtain expertise in L2 writing instruction that they can use in their working contexts with multilingual students. 
2. Students will be able to identify a range of potential research topics in L2 writing that they can further develop for their dissertation or independent research projects.
3. From a methodological perspective, students will be able to design qualitative research in a structured and systematic manner.

(Booten): “Care,” along with its closely related counterpart “attention,” is a key concept in the study of digital media, which are routinely accused of carelessly soliciting and abusing our attention. At the same time, digital media may be too caring; everywhere, algorithms are paying close attention to us, surveilling our activities and inscriptions to model our behavior and predict our desires. This seminar will primarily serve as a broad introduction to how “care” (as well as, to a lesser extent, “attention” and its disquieting twin, “surveillance”) has been theorized in 20th- and 21st-century critical philosophy, particularly in relation to media—especially digital media. Adopting the approach of an experimental digital humanities lab, we will also explore ways to repurpose or rework digital media to care for our own minds—or at least to open new avenues for understanding and critiquing both the carelessness and the excessive attentiveness that characterize the contemporary digital milieu. Though this class has a contemporary/digital emphasis, many of the readings will address care in a broader sense (e.g., Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Michel Foucault’s late lectures on the care of the self). Students working on other historical periods are welcome to apply theories of care to different contexts and/or regimes of media. Coursework will consist of a seminar paper, presentations on readings, and several hands-on activities.