Graduate Courses Spring 2025
ENGL 590: Programming Digital Humanities
Instructor: Wen Xin
56598 | MW 11:00 - 12:15 PM | WES 4021 - LAWRENCE
New methods in Digital Humanities (or DH) have enabled us to engage with a far larger collection of texts and uncover more nuanced patterns than traditional approaches, such as closing reading and human analysis, typically permit. This course will introduce humanities students to the foundational skills of computational text analysis, a core component of DH, in the R programming language. We will begin by learning how to convert unstructured textual data into a structured format. Then, we will proceed to visualizing and analyzing structured data using various methods, such as TF-IDF, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. This course will expand your suite of skills as you pursue humanities questions. You will be expected to complete assignments that exercise in-class instructions and a group project where you work with your group members to plan, execute, and report your textual analysis. No prior technical skills are expected in this course. We will start with the very basics of programming. Bring your laptops!
ENGL 709: Theories of Reading
Instructor: Ann Rowland
55670 | MW 03:00 - 04:15 PM | WES 3001A - LAWRENCE
A seminar on recent theories of reading. Reading has emerged as an important site of inquiry in a variety of fields and methodologies across literary studies. We will explore a wide range of theoretical approaches to reading to give students the opportunity to discover the concepts and analytical tools that will be most useful to them in their own area of study. These will include the cultural and material history of reading and reading repertoires, theories of reception and remediation, cognitive literary theory and the reading brain, embodied reading and affect, gender and queer theories of reading, literary fandom and the sociology of reading. Students will do short written assignments, class presentations, a final paper that applies selected theories of reading to their own field of specialization.
ENGL 730: Topics Early Modern Literature – Epic Intertextuality
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
53540 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 3001A – Lawrence
No text is an island. All texts depend upon and respond to other texts, whether implicitly or explicitly. Intertextuality takes many forms, and a knowledge of theories of intertextuality is therefore a vital part of a reader’s equipment. But theories of intertextuality make little sense when studied in a vacuum. This course both explores theories of intertextuality and applies them to a genre that heavily thematizes intertextual relations: the European epic tradition. Epics remake and transform their predecessors for the present day while relying on close and sustained engagement with those predecessors to construct their own authority, legitimacy, and meaning.
We will focus on three great epics that continually foreground their conversations with their predecessors: Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532), an astonishing fusion of medieval Arthurian and Carolingian romance with classical epic and contemporary concerns of nation-building and religious conflict; Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), a narrative of the first Crusade composed at the height of the Counter-Reformation; and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which responds to the failure of the short-lived English republic by looking back to a greater Fall and imagining a final, triumphant recovery.
The epic tradition provides an ideal training ground to experiment with a range of intertextual theories. Teasing out the conversations between texts will enable us to interrogate the formation and conceptualization of tradition, genre, and canon; to understand how epic engages with contemporary literary and historical contexts – including early modern and contemporary constructs of race, gender, religion, and other means of identity formation, as well as nationality, conquest, and colonialism – and attempts to reshape its cultural and political environment; and to explore how those attempts to define and blur different formulations of "self" and "other" continue to reverberate today.
ENGL 751: Fiction Writing III
Instructor: Laura Moriarty
53541 | M 4:30-7:00 PM | Wescoe 3001A – Lawrence
This is an advanced course for students in the graduate creative writing program. Admission will be by permission of the instructor. The focus of this course will be on the criticism and discussion of student work. Each student will turn in two to three stories, personal essays, or chapters of a novel-in progress. Students will also write and present careful criticism of their peers' work. We will also discuss selections from the text and various websites.
ENGL 776: American Literature to 1900 – Archives in Scholarship
Instructor: Laura Mielke
55671 | Tu 1:00-3:30 PM | Wescoe 3001A - Lawrence
What are archives, and what is their relationship to English Studies? How do collecting, preservation, citational, and editing practices shape our understanding of literary production and histories of reading and writing? What methods do English Studies scholars bring to archives? What critical frameworks inspire scholars and archivists to remedy material practices that have produced gaps and biases in accounts of the past? In this course, we will approach these questions through recent work in Critical Archive Studies, scholarship on early and nineteenth-century American writing, and selected primary readings. Students will read deeply, explore collections at the Spencer Research Library, practice writing professional genres, and learn how to apply for funding to support work in special collections libraries. Readings to include work by Saidiya Hartman, Elizabeth McHenry, Jill Lepore, Tara Bynum, Kelly Wisecup, and Derrick Spires, as well as primary texts by Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and contributors to the Anglo-African Magazine.
ENGL 800: Methods, Theory & Professionalism
Instructor: Kathryn Conrad
44765 | Th 1:00-3:30 PM | Wescoe 3001A - Lawrence | JAN-21/APR-18
English 800 prepares students for graduate coursework and exams, the writing of a scholarly thesis or dissertation, and the submission of work to the larger scholarly community. Assignments facilitate the acquisition of skills and tools essential to these activities. Across the Fall and Spring semesters, students will acquire strategies for reading scholarly writing; produce a range of professional genres, including conference proposals; learn more about their selected areas of study and the best venues for sharing work in those areas; and develop a comprehensive plan for their graduate studies. In the Spring semester, in addition to continuing our exploration of methods, we will learn about research resources in English Studies, practice writing conference abstracts, conduct more research on areas of scholarly focus, and further develop individual academic plans.
ENGL 801: Study and Teaching of Writing
Instructor: Sonya Lancaster
52077 | Th 10:00-10:50 AM | Wescoe 4020 - Lawrence
This one-hour practicum is designed to support your teaching of English 102 at KU and to provide a space for discussing and sharing pedagogical approaches with your fellow teachers. The course builds upon your first semester 801 experience, emphasizing “best practices” for teaching inquiry, research, analysis and synthesis. We will work together to address issues that arise as you teach, developing a community of colleagues with whom to share teaching materials and support. Class sessions (once per week) will focus on discussion of pedagogical topics related to your teaching of 102 and incorporating DEIJB principles into the class, as well as workshops in which you will collaboratively create individual assignments and time to work through issues that arise in your classes.
You will continue to develop the teaching portfolio you designed in 801, in addition to completing two short projects, each of which is directly related to your teaching (one based on peer class visits and the other based on creating and revising activities and the writing project assignments for the next time you teach).
ENGL 904: Seminar in Composition Theory - Critical University Studies
Instructor: Pritha Prasad
55673 | MW 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 3001A – Lawrence
The post-Trump political and cultural landscape in the U.S. is characterized by an economy and culture that at once commodifies and (paradoxically) condemns “diversity,” cultural difference, and political “progressivism.” Although versions of such “culture wars” have existed for a long time, popular and academic publics have focused heavily over the past decade on responding to—and theorizing about—student organizing and activism, the meanings of social justice and equity in educational institutions, and the politics of “free speech” and academic freedom in relation to antiracist and decolonial liberation movements both on and off-campus. How have institutions profited from diverse bodies, literacies, and social movements, simultaneously politicizing and depoliticizing identity and difference from the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements into the 2010s and 2020s? What role have English studies—and English departments writ large—played in establishing rhetorical frameworks and imaginaries through which state universities forward U.S. geopolitical interests? And finally, what implications do these contexts have for how we as teachers and scholars approach diversity and identity in our pedagogical, administrative, and research initiatives, especially in the wake of ongoing legislative initiatives to limit or ban diversity programming and critical race and ethnic studies? In this course, we will consider these questions using interdisciplinary frameworks of rhetoric and writing studies, critical university studies, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, and abolition studies, focusing in particular on the works of scholars like Sara Ahmed, Carmen Kynard, Jennifer C. Nash, Jodi Melamed, Geneva Smitherman, Fred Moten, Karma Chávez, and Roderick A. Ferguson, to name a few. Assignments in the course include regular reading assignments, discussion posts, and a final seminar paper.
