Asynchronous Courses
For students who need flexibility in their fall schedule, we are offering several online courses asynchronously, meaning that you won't need to be available at a particular class time each week.
*ENGL130: Race and the Cultural Politics of Blood (Kim Coles)
We live in a moment when we are reckoning with a racist past in both America and Britain. We are trying to redefine what our future will look like, so it’s important to consider how we got here.
This course explores “race”—as a term and a concept—at three different historical moments, using three highly influential works of literature to structure the conversation: William Shakespeare’s play Othello (1603), Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko (1688), and Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855). Once we examine how fictions of “race” have been written, we will consider how these fictions are repurposed for politics, past and present. Alongside literature, we will examine the rhetoric of politicians, protestors, and pundits. Writers such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois will be the counterposing voices to that of Melville; the rhetoric of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater will be juxtaposed against BLM, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah-Jones. The course concludes with “The Case for Reparations.” This course satisfies the Distributive Studies Humanities (DSHU) and I-series (SCIS) requirements for General Education.
*CMLT235: Black Diaspora Literature and Culture (Nancy Vera)
This course will examine the forced and voluntary migration of Africans in North America, Central America, South America, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. A global view of African people's dispersal and a comparative examination of world history, culture, and literature will allow us to uncover common threads of racial formations from the colonial period to the present. Moreover, we will examine the role African writers and activists had in shaping the societies and nations they inhabited, whether voluntarily or by force. After completing this course, students will understand how race, borders, and countries have been constructed from the colonial period to the present and the continuing role of writers in shaping history and society.
To demonstrate proficiency in these topics, students can choose to demonstrate their understanding through different communication forms: essays, poems, podcasts, illustrative cartoons, collaborative writing projects, book reviews, blog entries, social media posts, Wikipedia article edits, or other creative projects.
*CMLT277 - Literatures of the Americas (Nancy Vera)
In this course, we will examine the formation of North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, beginning from the colonial period to our present times. Since this is a course about the formation of America, we will also be covering the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to America and the Indian slave trade from Asia to the Caribbean.
We will learn the history of American countries and their Native American inhabitants by examining novels, travel logs, diaries, and letters from Native American writers and Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonists. All works will be available in English.
At the end of this course, we will understand how a national body—a "real" Mexican, Salvadoran, American, etc.—are wholly constructed concepts and not essential identities as they are presented to be.
To demonstrate proficiency in these topics, students can choose to demonstrate their understanding through different communication forms: essays, poems, podcasts, illustrative cartoons, collaborative writing projects, book reviews, blog entries, social media posts, Wikipedia article edits, or other creative projects.
*ENGL222: American Literature, 1865-Present (Kerishma Panigrahi)
"This Land is Whose Land? Nationalism and Borders"
From the resounding calls to abolish ICE, to the cry that Black Lives Matter, to the declaration that there is no justice on stolen land, the people are demanding that the U.S. confront its uncensored past like never before. This course seeks to contextualize our current moment within the longer history of U.S nation-building through an examination of literature from the Civil War to the present. We will read with an attentiveness to issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, immigration, environmentalism, and imperialism as central to understanding U.S. history. We will consider the questions: What is “America,” and what do we know as “American literature?” Where did these constructs come from, and have they remained stable throughout history?
Course texts will range in genre and medium, including novels, short stories, poetry, nonfiction, film, and music. Writers studied may include but are not limited to Zitkála-Šá, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Vine Deloria Jr, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Junot Diaz, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
*ENGL 291 (Joseph Good)
An opportunity to become a better communicator, a more engaged citizen, and a more capable writer.
Students will learn to construct (and de-struct) effective written arguments, including advanced tenets of writing style and how to adapt their style, format, and argument based on audience and genre. This course involves academic writing, but also recognizes the importance of professional and social communications.
Students will consider the place of visuals, data, creative writing, and casual writing formats. Students will enjoy the freedom, and the responsibility, of developing their own writing projects. In all, students will challenge themselves while growing together as a group, able to produce superior academic essays, erudite reports, and incisive social media content. This course satisfies the Distributive Studies Humanities (DSHU) or the Distributive Studies Scholarship in Practice (DSSP) requirement for General Education.
*ENGL 301, sections 0401 and 0501 This is English: Fields and Methods (Sharada Balachandran Orihuela)
"English" means a lot of things. Are you looking for literature, or linguistics? For writing--creative, critical, or professional? For theater, or debate? For film, or even videogames? This gateway course for the English major introduces you to all of these areas and more, as well as to our discipline's unique resources for studying and enjoying them. The English discipline includes three main interpretive fields: Literary and Cultural Studies; Language, Writing, and Rhetoric; and Media Studies. This course brings together the fundamental concepts and methods for reading, viewing, and researching practiced in these fields, launching you into English studies and and helping you to choose the major track that is right for you.
ENGL329C / CMLT398L Special Topics in Film Studies: Sexuality in the Cinema (Eugene Robinson)
This course adds several new elements to the study of sexuality in the cinema: a) the sacred narrative—a narrative that explores the depiction of sexual religious themes in the cinema; b) how cinema deals with the subject of sex as a human experience and incorporates it into the narrative structure of the film; c) the shift away from mere content analysis to other means of analysis with the concentration on the screen-spectator relationship. The mythology of sexuality in the cinema will be explored as part of the psychosexual journey shown in films of different directors. It will be shown how cinema has responded to changes in the culture and how those changes have shaped the sexual representations on the screen. This course will examine how cinemas from other cultures incorporate themes of sexuality into their narratives; concomitantly, issues of politics, gender, domination, and exploitation will be explored.
ENGL379V / CMLT398N Special Topics in Literature: Gypsy Culture (Eugene Robinson)
The focus of this course is the demystification of a people who have managed to survive in the Diaspora since the tenth century.
They have relied on their wits, their energy, creativity, and the ability to adapt in worlds of hostility, discrimination, and persecution. This course will examine the culture of the Romany/Rom and the impact of that culture on the rest of the world. A major question that will be addressed is how the Rom have managed to appear in so many countries all over the world and how they have been received. Where and whenever possible this course will examine those works in cinema that use or make reference to the Rom in order to determine accuracy or bias in how the Rom are portrayed and to determine whether they serve or function as important measures in the process of demystifying Rom and Romany culture. Through the analysis and discussions of the content of these films, the course will seek answers to reasons for the negative stereotypes and the myths that have influenced the almost universal perception of a people who have survived and continue to survive under difficult circumstances by hanging on to their culture and their cultural roots.
*ENGL410: Edmund Spenser (Kim Coles)
“Spenser, Race, and Colonialism”
Edmund Spenser was a politician and poet. He was also one of the chief architects of 16th-century race-thinking, and proponents of English colonial policy. We like to pretend that art is not tied to politics. But culture is not neutral.
In this class, we will explore Spenser’s political interventions, and how we can use him for our own. Contemporary artists like Kehinde Wiley show us through painting and sculpture one way to address our past: to show the art that should have been, to intervene in what was, and to fill in its blank spaces. Spenser was at the center of some of the most controversial political and cultural moments of the English Renaissance. We will examine his politics in such short(er) poems as The Shepheardes Calender, prose pieces such as A View of the Present State of Ireland, and selected books from Spenser’s long poem, The Faerie Queene. Throughout, we will consider how Spenser can be turned to our political purposes: how he has been used, and can be used, as rhetoric for resistance.