Featured Topics Spring 2025
ENGL 203: Professional Communication
Instructor: Yee-Lum Mak
55690 | By Appointment | Online (8-week)
55691 | By Appointment | Online (8-week)
Communicating effectively in work and school settings is crucial to personal success. In order to accomplish your professional goals, you need to be able to develop and articulate your ideas clearly and appropriately for your communicative situation, no matter the circumstances or setting. ENGL 203: Professional Communication is designed to help you think critically about the way language is used in professional contexts. In this course, you will analyze and compose a range of written and face-to-face professional communication genres such as emails, reports, presentations, interviews, memos, and meetings. The assignments will include preparing reports on collaborative work, proposing ideas and projects for professional settings, presenting multiple perspectives and solutions for a workplace problem, and comparing rhetorical situations and strategies between oral, written, and visual materials.
ENGL 203: Literature of Sports
Instructor: Philip Wedge
46764 | By Appointment | Online (8-week)
46774 | By Appointment | Online (8-week)
In the Literature of Sports course students will study and write essays on a significant body of sport literature, examining such topics as sports as character-building, sports hero types, hero- worship in fans, violence in sports, corruption in sports, the translation of sport literature to film, and so on. Required coursework consists of 3 major Essays and a revision assignment (50%), and a comprehensive Final (20%). Homework (30%) includes group work and short writing assignments. Class participation is also of considerable importance. TEXTS: Eric Greenberg, 'The Celebrant;' Clifford Odets, 'Golden Boy;' Angie Abdou, 'The Bone Cage;' Anne Lamott, 'Crooked Little Heart;' August Wilson, 'Fences;' F.X. Toole, 'Million Dollar Baby;' H.G. Bissinger, 'Friday Night Lights.'
ENGL 203: BookTok & 21 Century Reading
Instructor: Abigail Breyer
55743 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 1009 - Lawrence
Since the rise of the modern novel, casual readers and literature scholars alike have debated when, where, why, and what people should be reading. This course asks students to consider these conversations in the context of the digital age, specifically looking at how book lovers use digital literary spaces. The course as a whole will draw on theories related to literature, affect, fan studies, and post-criticism to give students a scholarly foundation regarding reading in the 21st century. It will also ask students to examine public digital spaces like BookTok, GoodReads, and fanfiction sites like AO3, and read some of the most popular novels featured on these sites. Finally, students will practice reflecting and responding to these conversations in multimodal genres for both formal and informal audiences through 3 essays and a final project. By the end of the course, students will have a new understanding of what it means to read a book, what it means to love a book, and how digital spaces can change both.
ENGL 205: Ways of Seeing
Instructor: Mary Klayder
50855 | MWF 10:00-10:50 AM | Wescoe 4020 - Lawrence
55656 | MWF 11:00-11:50 AM | Wescoe 4020 - Lawrence
The course will focus on the concepts of perception, perspective, and vision in literature. How do we see things? How do we view the world? How does literature show our different ways of seeing? We will consider different perceptions of art, nature, gender, race, and culture; we will investigate various cultural and personal perspectives; and we will address the notion of vision as a metaphor in literature. In addition to literary texts, we will look at how other disciplines intersect with literature regarding these issues. There will be three critical papers, a final exam, a perception project, and assorted playful response assignments throughout the semester. Texts: Lakoff and Johnson, 'Metaphors We Live By;' Donne, 'Selected Poetry;' Dickinson, 'The Collected Poems;' Edson, 'Wit;' Joyce, 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;' Woolf, 'To The Lighthouse;' Haig, 'The Midnight Library;' and selected essays and poetry handouts.
ENGL 306: Global Environmental Literature
Instructor: Phillip Drake
53638 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4051 – Lawrence
This course surveys global perspectives of environments, environmental aesthetics, ecological dynamics, and environmental politics through literature. Coursework will draw on literature by authors in various geographical and cultural contexts, covering a broad time period to explore major historical movements and events that animate environmental literature, from the Enlightenment to the anthropocene. Theoretically, this course traces the emergence of ecocriticism as it evolves in conversation with feminism, postcolonialism, animal studies, and posthumanism. These theoretical movements will guide our discussions and inquiries into relevant issues that impact the environment, like colonialism, racism, patriarchy, industrialization, science, development, warfare, technological advancement, imperialism, conflict, and disaster. A broader goal of the course is to foster critical tools and perspectives to improve our conduct as social and ecological actors. Likely texts will include: Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Robert Barclay, Melal; Kang, The Vegetarian; Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide; Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream; and selected works that will be posted on the class Canvas page.
ENGL 318: American Modernist Poetry
Instructor: Paul Outka
55664| MW 12:30 - 1:45 PM | Wescoe 4076 – Lawrence
This seminar will focus on one of the richest periods in American poetry. Emerging from the collapse of Victorian ideals in and around the First World War, Modernism expressed both cynicism, despair, and a shattering loss of cultural and religious authority for many, as well as a new freedom, acceptance, and quest for new forms of literary and personal expression for others. We will examine the different responses of a variety of poets to this charged moment in America’s cultural self-definition, especially with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, and aesthetic philosophy. We will discuss roughly a poet a week, including the high Anglo-American Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; the canonical local American versions of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Williams, and Hart Crane; Langston Hughes’ voice from the Harlem Renaissance; and women modernists Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore.
ENGL 360: Writing About Science
Instructor: Doug Crawford-Parker
53534 | MW 3-4:15 PM | Wescoe 4023 - Lawrence
ENGL 360 is a course for anyone who wants to write about science in creative, engaging, and original ways. It’s for creative writers who have an interest in science, for scientists who want to discover distinctive ways to share their understanding, and anyone else who wants to explore the intersection of writing creatively and science. The course will emphasize nonfiction and spend some time engaging with the creative genre of the essay along with reading an assortment of science essays for inspiration and examination. Students will write three essays and read the work of their classmates. Course work will also include a revision assignment and a short presentation on a topic of interest to the class.
ENGL 362: Foundations of Technical Writing
Instructor: Sean Kamperman
46760 | APPT | ONLINE
46773 | APPT | ONLINE
This course is designed to give you an introduction to the fundamentals of technical writing. Technical writing has many uses and is a common form of communication for many jobs across many fields. In this class you will learn about the rhetoric and ethics of technical communication, with particular attention paid to accessibility. We will discuss readings and real-world applications and scenarios together via Canvas, and will practice several common tech writing genres. Through reading and writing these genres, you will not only receive practice that will aid you in your future coursework and career, but you will be learning broader skills of rhetorical flexibility and audience awareness that can be applied to any writing situation.
ENGL 382: Composing Cultures
Instructor: Mary Jo Reiff
55665 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4076 - Lawrence
In this course, we will explore how texts are culturally situated and will carry out our own investigations of a culture/subculture, community, group, or organization. Through analysis of the rhetorical and sociocultural situations that motivate writing and ethnographic investigation of a culture's discursive interactions, we will explore how a group's purposes and actions are shaped by cultural contexts for writing, with a focus on cultural affordances and constraints. We will complete a range of related writing projects (an observation of a place/setting for a culture's interactions; an analysis of a culture's language or cultural artifacts; interviews with participants in a culture or oral histories), culminating in a descriptive and analytical account of a culture or subculture. We will also critically read and respond to multiple interdisciplinary texts and genres, including ethnographies and overviews of ethnographic research methods and other related methods, such as critical participatory action research, community-engaged research, and feminist activist methods. As we explore the cultural embeddedness of writing through our own research, we will focus, in particular, on the positioning of the researcher and the ethics of conducting cultural research.
ENGL 390: Reading Novels as a Writer
Instructor: Laura Moriarty
51927 | TuTh 1:00-2:15 AM | Wescoe 4020 – Lawrence
In this course, we’ll read several literary novels, mostly contemporary, that have enjoyed critical and/or commercial success, and we’ll try to analyze what made them successful. We’ll read these novels as novelists, paying attention to their structures, narrative devices, and story arcs–considering models that might be useful in our own work. We’ll look at what a first chapter accomplishes, and what techniques are used to keep the reader engaged through a novel’s middle and end. We’ll take novel-writing axioms (e.g. “The protagonist has to want something, and want it badly.”) and see if they hold up against real novels. Each student will write several short papers and give presentations over the course of the semester.
ENGL 390: Christianity in Fantasy Lit
Instructor: David Woodington
56168 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Bailey Hall 301 – Lawrence
This course explores connections between Christianity and popular culture by examining four of the most prominent modern fantasy series: The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Through reading, discussing, and writing about these series, we will analyze the role played by Christianity in fantasy literature and discover how various theological themes are addressed in fantasy books. We will also reflect upon the difficulties inherent in determining what makes a text “religious” and explore how the author’s intentions, the audience’s interpretations, and other factors figure into this determination.
ENGL 479: The Literature of Contemporary Drama
Instructor: Mark Luce
55666 | Th 7:10-10:00 PM | REGN 150 – Edwards
In Tony Kushner’s groundbreaking play Angels in America, the character Mr. Lies says, “Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.” The imaginary character’s admonition could have well been speaking of the larger issues of contemporary drama. From the horrific dreamscapes of McDonagh to the pharmaceuticals of Letts, the self-indulgent elites of Ayad to the working class grit of Nottage, contemporary drama often rests on an uneasy balance between the dreams we have and the actual dramas we must enact in the real world, especially as they relate to family and self. We will trace such themes through several plays and critical readings, while playing attention to the rhythms of language (we will read the plays in class), thematic concerns, and performance. Students will read from a variety of dramatic voices, with special focus on gender, class, and race dynamics.
