Courses and Seminars


Below is a list of English graduate courses for current academic year. All students must receive permission from the instructor and/or the English Graduate Program in order to enroll.

Fall 2022 - Spring 2023 Seminars

Fall 2022


5100-01 Theory and Teaching of Writing

Blansett

5150-01 Advanced Research Methods: What Graduate Study Can Do

Smith

5182-01 Practicum in the Teaching of Writing

Blansett

6200-01 Small Wonders: Childhood and Scholarly Inquiry

Smith

6320-01 Shakespeare on Screen

Semenza

6750-01 The Politics and Poetics of Passing

Williams

6850 Keywords in American Studies: Nature

Menrisky

Spring 2023


5160-01 Professional Development

Somerset

5530-01 World Literature

Coundouriotis

6500-01 Lyric Theory

Mahoney

6500-02 African American Literary Theory

Salvant

6600-01 Environmental Writing

Pelizzon

6700-01 Darwin, Hardy, and Woolf

Winter

 6750-01 Medical Humanities

Cutter

Fall 2022 Calendar

Time Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
9:30 AM-12:00 PM ENGL 6320-01
Semenza
ENGL 5182-01
Blansett
9:30am - 10:45am
11:00am - 12:15am
ENGL 6200-01
Smith
1:00-3:30 PM ENGL 5150-01
Smith
ENGL 5100-01
Blansett
ENGL 6750-01
Williams
4:00-6:30 PM ENGL 6850
Menrisky
Spring 2023 Calendar

Spring 2023 Calendar

Time Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
9:30 AM-12:00 PM ENGL 6500-02
Salvant
African American Literary Theory
ENGL 5530
Coundouriotis
World Lit in English
ENGL 6700
Winter
Darwin, Hardy, and Woolf
1:00 PM-3:30 PM ENGL 5160
Somerset
Professional Development
ENGL 6500-01
Mahoney
Lyric Theory
ENGL 6750-01
Cutter
Medical Humanities
5:00 PM-7:30 PM ENGL 6600-01
Pelizzon
Environmental Writing
Projected 2023-2024 Seminars

Projected 2023–2024 Seminars

Fall 2023

ENGL 5100–01 Theory and Teaching of Writing

Blansett

ENGL 5150–01 Advanced Research Methods: What Graduate Study Can Do

Smith

ENGL 5182–01 Practicum in the Teaching of Writing

Blansett

ENGL 6270–01 Seminar in Modern Poetry: Contemporary Anglophone Poetries

Pelizzon

ENGL 6325–01 Seminar in Renaissance Literature: Literatures of Environmental and Racial Justice, 1500–1800

Sarkar

ENGL 6400–01 American Ethnic Literature: No Country for Black People: Black Revolution and Racial Dystopias in US Literature

Pierrot

ENGL 6750–01 Seminar in Language and Literature: Doing Disability Studies in the Humanities

Brueggemann

ENGL 6750–02 Seminar in Language and Literature: Once and Future: Adaptation, Mediation, and Popular Culture

Somerset

ENGL/AMST 6850–01 American Studies Keywords: Cultures of Political Reaction

Vials

Spring 2024

ENGL 5160–01 Professional Development

King’oo

ENGL 6400–01 American Ethnic Literature: Racism, Colonialism, and the Big House Novel/Plantation Novel

Burke

ENGL 6450–01 Seminar in American Literature: The Contemporary US Bildungsroman in Context

Knapp

ENGL 6500–01 Seminar in Literary Theory: Theory of Irony

Mahoney

ENGL 6530–01 Seminar in World Literature: African Life Writing

Coundouriotis

ENGL 6540–01 Seminar in Literature and Human Rights: Antislavery Literature and Human Rights in the Atlantic World, 1760–1870

Winter

ENGL 6550–01 Seminar in Rhetoric and Composition Theory: Researching and Teaching Second Language Reading and Writing

Jeon

ENGL 6600–01 Creative Writing Workshop: Hybrid Narratives

Litman

 

Course Descriptions

Fall 2022 Courses

ENGL 5100-01: Theory and Teaching of Writing

(Blansett, class #6490): [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 some basic methodologies used by composition researchers that you will assess and use in 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-presentation (10 minutes), and a description of the course inquiry and assignment architecture.

ENGL 5150-01: Advanced Research Methods: What Graduate Study Can Do

(Smith, class #7563): This one-credit seminar provides incoming graduate students a structured opportunity to get to know the faculty and resources at UConn, both within and outside the English Department, and to begin engaging with the many ways graduate study in English can make meaning in scholarly, pedagogical, and other professional contexts. Students develop a set of learning goals and writing tasks at the start of the semester and, with those goals in mind, self-select and attend ten meetings or events. Those events may include (but are not limited to) talks and presentations, undergraduate courses, panel discussions, professionalization workshops, and informational interviews. We will meet frequently (although not every week) to discuss with one another and with guests your progress toward those goals alongside readings in professionalization, graduate study and academia, and other topics based on participants’ interests. The seminar is required for entering MA and MA/PhD students and open to PhD students with instructor permission.

ENGL 5182-01: Practicum in the Teaching of Writing

(Blansett, class #6551): [1 Credit] Guided development of teaching in the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program. As part of a Practicum, new graduate student instructors who are teaching FYW at UConn meet with the Director to implement the theories of teaching and writing introduced in ENGL 5100, which includes developing active-learning teaching strategies, instructional materials, and classroom activities that help their students meet program goals and learning objectives. Enrolled instructors provide weekly reflections on teaching and assemble an annotated portfolio of the materials and activities generated during the semester.

ENGL 6200-01: Small Wonders: Childhood and Scholarly Inquiry

(Smith, class #13213): Childhood studies might focus on small humans, but its reach is wide — across geographies, chronologies, and methodologies. This seminar invites participants to consider how their work might be enriched or complicated by a consideration of childhood as an area of inquiry. What does American, British, or world literature look like from the playground, the classroom, the abecedary, or the nursery? How do the critical conversations in queer theory, disability studies, ecocriticism, or gender and sexuality studies shift when we use age, and in particular youth, as a central term? While my expertise in literary studies will feature in the seminar, we also will explore together, and try on, methods that have been adopted by scholars in other fields. What does it look like when a philosopher does childhood studies? Or an art historian? Or a sociologist? What models are available to scholars across fields who are interested in pursuing research or teaching that addresses questions of childhood, and what projects might scholars new to these questions pursue? The reading list on our syllabus will be nearly entirely secondary. We will study theorizations of childhood (real and imagined) and children’s literature through shared texts. However, students will provide primary texts through their own research. Once the semester is underway, we will spend a portion of each seminar meeting engaging with those primary texts by brainstorming and workshopping individual projects. Students will develop projects in response to a flexible slate of assignments that allows them to pursue work that is meaningful to their intellectual and professional goals, whether that be traditional scholarly writing (such as conference and seminar papers), pedagogy-related material (such as syllabi), deep archival work, or public-facing writing.

Note that UConn is an ideal site for such exploration. Here, students enjoy the expertise of faculty in childhood studies in English, Education, HDFS, and other departments; rich archives both on campus (the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection and the Maurice Sendak Papers¬¬) and nearby (at the American Antiquarian Society, Pierpont Morgan, Beinecke, and Schomburg Center, among many other sites), and frequent events and programming in children’s literature and culture.

ENGL 6320-01: Shakespeare on Screen

(Semenza):

 

The course will combine the study of adaptation as a distinctive but widespread cultural phenomenon and of Shakespeare—the most-frequently-adapted author in the English language—as he appears on screens of various sorts, including in films, television shows, video games, YouTube videos, and so forth.

 

The course will be organized into three general sections: Introducing Shakespeare on Screen and Adaptation, Understanding Shakespeare on Screen, and Writing About Shakespeare on Screen—all of which are designed to help students navigate this increasingly complex subfield.  Part One introduces what counts as Shakespeare on screen (with a heavy focus on theories of adaptation, appropriation, and intertextuality); Part Two provides practical knowledge about both the mechanics of producing Shakespearean screen texts and those texts’ formal features, empowering students to pursue more in-depth explorations of primarily visual texts; the final Part presents students with different models for writing critically and imaginatively about screen Shakespeare.

 

Some works we’ll be studying: a range of Macbeth film adaptations, including Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021); the recent HBO limited series Station Eleven (2021); video game projects such as the failed launch of the MacArthur Foundation-sponsored Arden in 2007 (and of course some games that actually were released, such as Elsinore [2019]); and several forms of online and small-screen Shakespeareana.

 

This course fulfills the Theory distribution requirement.

ENGL 6750-01: The Politics and Poetics of Passing

(Williams, class #8563): In her novel Passing, Nella Larsen observes that "passing," traditionally defined as the act of claiming an identity that was neither assigned at birth nor ordained by convention, is a "hazardous business," since it often requires leaving family, tradition, and in some cases, even oneself, behind. In this course, we will unpack the depth of Larsen's claim and complicate the notion of "passing" by examining racial, gendered, sexual, and other forms of identity shifting in a variety of fictional and non-fictional narratives that span the genres of novel, film, and memoir essay.
Some theorists of passing believe that it is a phantom idea, since the concept of passing relies on both an essentialist identity politics that may reduce a subject to their perceived ethnicity, gender, or nationality, and an outmoded belief in a coherent self. Yet other critics working within the fields of critical race studies and gender and sexuality studies define passing as an opportunity to reimagine the social locations of one’s identity, constituting a kind of “code-switching” that also amounts to a “misapplication” of the socio-political and already established criteria for various cultural identities.
Taking for granted that passing is a contested term subject to political adjudication and philosophic interpretation and that passing literature is a dynamic product transformed by the eras, histories, and cultural beliefs that shape it, we will explore some key examples of passing literature and discourse from the modernist era of the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary, postmodern moment in order to theorize the elements, interpretations, and implications of identity passing.

Texts and figures to be studied will likely include Nella Larsen’s Passing, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and the lives and public interpretations of Pauli Murray, Anatole Broyard and Rachel Dolezal. We will also engage some texts that fall outside the parameters of African American literature and (strictly) racial passing by exploring other cultural representations of identity transformation such as Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land, Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, Kenji Yoshino’s Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, and Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

Our methodological practice will be drawn from interdisciplinary literary study consisting of critical race studies, gender studies, queer studies, philosophy, genre studies, and multicultural American studies. Requirements will include 1 shorter paper, 1 oral, researched presentation, and a longer seminar paper of 12-15 pages.

ENGL 6850-01: Keywords in American Studies: Nature

(Menrisky, class #9596): The critic Raymond Williams once wrote that “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language,” despite the fact that it is often presented as self-explanatory: something real rather than artificial, purely biophysical rather than cultural, a nonhuman sphere existing separately from the human “over there” instead of “right here.” But as Williams also suggests, “What is often being argued in the idea of nature is the idea of man; and this not only generally . . . but the idea of man in society.” This seminar will rigorously examine the shifting meanings of nature over the past two centuries, with specific attention to the fact that, despite the idea’s historical contingency and social construction, modern arguments pitting nature against culture are almost always about social identity as much as (or even more than) biology and environment, especially along vectors such as race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Drawing on a collection of historical documents as well as current work in queer and feminist theory, critical race and Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities, we will trace the concept of nature from the colonial era to the present (chiefly but not exclusively in the United States) in terms of how it has linked the human with the nonhuman rather than separated them, sometimes generatively and sometimes violently, and often in competing ways. Alongside these historical, theoretical, and critical texts, we will examine literary mobilizations of nature in works that grapple with rather than uncritically endorse the concept, dramatize the many sorts of identity work it performs or is made to perform, and clarify the extent to which it continues to organize social hierarchies in the present as well as the past.

Likely assessments:

  • Two oral presentations, one on weekly readings and the other focused

on teaching

  • Weekly informal reading responses in which students place seminar

texts and their own research areas into conversation

  • Short literature review essay on either a peer-reviewed article in the student’s research area or two public-facing articles that analyzes the article(s)’s rhetorical features and elaborates on connections to course

Themes

  • Final paper (two options): (1) seminar paper, 20–25 pages; or (2) two public-facing articles that “translate” course content for a general audience

Spring 2023 Courses

ENGL 5160-01: Professional Development

(Somerset): Required for all MA/PhD and PhD students before the end of coursework.

In this seminar we’ll investigate the different facets of academic life, from practical details such as composing CVs and syllabi through to larger issues such as the role of the humanities in the twenty-first university and the adjunctification of the profession. We will learn about the types of jobs within and beyond the academy that UCONN alumni have made their own, and consider how the various roles you are asked to play as graduate students and in your developing careers might complement one another to form a life worth having. Students will participate in selecting what we focus on: topics might include activism in a changing profession, diversity and difference in the academy, the academic job market and beyond, working in archives, presenting at conferences, balancing teaching and research, making time for your well-being, applying for grants and fellowships, and how to write in genres such as the book review, the CV, the reader’s report, the letter of recommendation, the teaching statement, the research description, the conference abstract, etc. You will be asked to blog about our readings on a weekly basis, and to complete small writing assignments and participate in class workshops leading to a class project developed to suit each student’s needs and goals. Options include a pedagogy assignment that would ask you to develop a syllabus and assignments for a course of your own design, an exercise in academic publishing (selecting possible journals, revising a course or conference paper into an article, responding to reader’s reports), or the development of a digital project or other public scholarship.

ENGL 5530-01: World Literature in English

(Coundouriotis):

This course is an opportunity to study key texts in the postcolonial field. The course gains coherence from its focus on the novel and the syllabus’s historical organization. Each week, we will place a text in a “topic” central to the postcolonial field. Our discussion will broaden beyond the given novel to key theoretical concepts that tackle the historical, social, and political challenges of decolonization. This is a good course not only for students who want to anchor their research in world literature but also for students more broadly interested in the novel as form. We will read African, Caribbean and South Asian Anglophone writers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zakes Mda, Nurrudin Farah, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, Arundhati Roy, and Michael Ondaatje. Assignments include oral presentations and a research paper. An alternative to the research paper will be offered in the form of a take-home essay exam similar to the PhD qualifying exams.

ENGL 6500-01: Lyric Theory

(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 many of our 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).

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”); New Criticism; formalism and the “New Formalism”; rhetorical reading; close reading; lyric ideology; “lyricization”; anti-lyric; historical poetics; and “New Lyric Studies.”  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, Simon Jarvis, 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 determined 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 may appeal to students interested in poetry and poetics, genre theory, literary and critical 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).

ENGL 6500-02: African American Literary Theory

(Salvant):

We will read selected texts of 20th- and 21st-century African American literary criticism and theory, ranging roughly from the 1920s to today. Rather than providing a chronological overview, readings in the course will focus on 2-3 particular movements within the critical tradition (such as the vernacular theory, the blues aesthetic, Black feminist criticism). We’ll examine the central claims and projects of each movement and try to attend to linkages between them. Classic texts will often be paired with their (sometimes rebellious) scholarly or intellectual progeny. We’ll become familiar with past movements in order to better understand current trends and debates in African American literary criticism. Assignments will include regular participation, fairly frequent discussion questions, and a 20-25 page seminar paper.

ENGL 6600-01: Environmental Writing

(Pelizzon):

This class is an imaginative exploration of ecologies and environments through poetry and narrative prose. Beginning as well as experienced creative writers are welcome. Our readings will prompt many questions: How might our practice as creative writers make us more conscious co-habitants of our ecosystems? How can writing deepen our understanding of local places and of those who lived here before us? How can we, as creative writers, engage meaningfully with crucial environmental issues? We’ll study a variety of works offering possible models for our own original writings. Sample texts we might read include C.D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Camille Dungy’s Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days, Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, Hiromo Ito’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank, and Darcie Dennigan’s Slater Orchard, as well as selected shorter works

Participants will compose and workshop five original projects exploring different poetic and narrative techniques. Participants will also keep a field log using a local ecosystem of their choice as the center of a semester-long series of reflective/ observational/ historical/ speculative “ramblings.” We’ll divide our class time between participant-led discussion of the readings and constructive critique of workshop members’ own writing. Participants should expect to read avidly, lead seminar discussions on the readings, share writing from their field log at most meetings, provide detailed commentary on colleague’s work, compose/discuss five longer creative projects, and get their feet wet—figuratively and literally—with their field log research. Options for a final project include a portfolio of revised creative work, a syllabus and teaching plans for an environmental writing course you’d like to lead, or a critical article engaging issues relevant to the class.

ENGL 6700-01: Darwin, Hardy, and Woolf

(Winter):

This course will focus on three major writers whose work will enable us to chart a trajectory from late-Victorian to modernist developments in literature, science, and the modern disciplines. In addition to studying Darwin’s evolutionary theory, we will be particularly interested in these writers’ representations of human psychology, biology, sexuality, the emotions, language, art, and embodiment, particularly insofar as they are viewed as sources of aggression and even war. Texts will include: Charles Darwin: travel writings, excerpts from The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; Thomas Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and selected poetry; Virginia Woolf: selected autobiographical writings, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts; essays and shorter works by Freud, Bergson, and Bertrand Russell; selected criticism.

Critical rationale and methods: This course enables students to gain familiarity with major works by Darwin, Hardy, and Woolf and exposes them to literary criticism and critical theory focused on interrogating a Darwinian evolutionary understanding of species life and what counts as nature, the human, the emotions and affects, sex and gender, the animal, and the biological. Approaches considered will include animal studies, affect studies, modernism and media studies, feminist studies, biosemiotics, queer theory and gender/sexuality studies, and the critical theory of biopolitics. The course will also be interested historically in how these literary texts interact with developments in the modern disciplines, such as anthropology, philology and linguistics, ethology (the study of animal behavior), and psychology, as well as with pseudo-sciences of race and eugenics, biologized theories that provided ideological support for aggressive European imperial expansion. Hardy’s and Woolf’s confrontation with the devastating violence and mass casualties of World War I and its psychological impacts will form a central concern, as will Woolf’s anti-patriarchal pacifism. Consideration of photography and film as used in early twentieth-century studies of emotional expression and other kinds of scientific documentation is also likely.

 

Requirements: Two oral presentations; a 1-2 page critical analysis on the assigned readings due at each class meeting, to form the basis of class discussion and possible research topics; class discussion participation; a book review; an annotated bibliography; a final 20-25 page seminar paper, or two shorter papers: a 10-12 page critical analysis paper or a paper focused on pedagogy, and a research/conference style paper of 12-15 pages.

ENGL 6750-01: Medical Humanities

(Cutter):

“Becoming seriously ill is a call for stories . . . Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going.”

—Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller

This class will be a seminar on literature and medicine, with a special focus on race and gender. Although there will be some older texts dealing with medicine and literature, the focus will be contemporary memoirs, films, graphic novels, short stories, and poems concerning not only doctors and patients but also medical humanities as a field, science, health disparities, cloning, eugenics, and alternative modes of healing (folk, Native, or Asian, or Africanist). Due to its interdisciplinary focus, this class is relevant to students in diverse fields such as British and American literature or history, American Studies, and Rhetoric and Composition. Important methodologies will include developing an understanding of cultural constructions of “the body” (Foucault, Washington); understanding alternative constructions of the body by non-dominant individuals (Menakem, Villarosa, etc.); and thinking about what the humanities brings to the study of such questions that other forms of writing might not (Frank, Altschuler).

Possible List of Primary Texts: Mitchell, S. Weir, Fat and Blood: And How to Make Them, (1878) (Chapter Four, “Rest”); Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (1892-1915); Hemingway, Ernest, “Indian Camp” and “Soldier’s Home” (1925); Schuyler, George, Black No More (1931); Silko, Leslie Marmon, Ceremony (1977); Sontag, Susan, “The Way We Live Now” (1986);  Morrison, Toni, Home (2002); Ishiguro, Kazuo,  Never Let Me Go (2005); Czerwiec, MK., Taking Turns (graphic novel) (2017); Krans, Kim, Blossoms and Bones: Drawing a Life Back Together (2020) (graphic novel); MariNaomi, Turning Japanese; Ozeki, Ruth, The Book of Form and Emptiness; Maples, Kwoya Fagin, Mend  (poems) (2018); Ruffin, Maurice Carlos, We Cast a Shadow (2019); Ward, Jesmyn, Men We Reaped (2013); Boyer, Anne, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (2019); Greenidge, Kaitlyn, Libertie (2021).

Films: Red Corn, Princella, Medicine Woman (2016); Rotberg, Dana, White Lies (2016);  Niccol, Andrew: Gattaca (1993); Peele, Jordan, Get Out (2017)

Excerpts from Secondary Scholarship: Foucault, Michel, Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973); Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor  (1977); Menakem, Resmaa, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017); Altschuler, Sari, The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (2018); Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2006); Charon, Rita, Narrative Medicine (2006); Frank, Arthur, At the Will of the Body  (1991) or The Wounded Storyteller (1995); Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017); Linda Villarosa, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation (2022).

 

Requirements: 1) Oral Presentation on a primary source (15%). 2) Husky CT postings (15%) (open topic). 3) Illness Narrative (15%); 4) Long paper or final project (55%): You may write a traditional seminar paper or choose a creative project (create your own poetry, fiction, or graphic novel related to course themes, for example), a pedagogical project (syllabus and lesson plans for teaching medical  humanities or a related field such as disability studies), or a DH project (such as a website, twine, zine, or blog). Other options are possible with the instructor’s consent.