
Summer Section
Graduate students are eligible to enroll in the annual summer institutes, which alternate between the Caffyn Institute, taught by KU English faculty, and the Holmes Institute, taught by visiting faculty. Below you'll find the course description for the 2021 summer institute as well as past institute instructors.
2021 Caffyn Summer Institute
ENGL 790: Animals Studies and Literature
Instructor: Phillip Drake (pdrake@ku.edu)
This course examines animals in literature along with the emergence of animal studies as a field of inquiry. Embodying a complicated set of interdisciplinary tools and perspectives, animal studies scholarship prompts exploration into the lives of animals, focusing particularly on interactions between human and nonhuman animals.
These bodies and relationships provoke complicated and often uncomfortable questions that challenge conventional understandings of a host of issues, including kinship, care, embodiment, individuality, power, precarity, death, extinction, and living well. Furthermore, interactions between human and nonhuman animals often intersect with constructions of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sex, inviting consideration of justice and social awareness at various scales, from the body and household to the nation and globe.
In addition to covering a diverse range of literature, we will explore various disciplinary (literary, anthropological, biological, ethological, psychological, etc.) and theoretical (queer, postcolonial, feminist, existentialist, poststructural, posthuman, ecocritical, etc.) lineages that animate (and are animated by) multispecies studies.
This course is designed to appeal to graduate students with diverse interests and investments in animals and animal encounters (textual or otherwise). Beyond short written work and presentations/moderations, students will complete their choice of final project:
- a research article/paper
- a creative riff on a research paper
- a creative paper that engages rigorously with relevant theoretical issues/traditions.
Likely texts will include: Ackerley, We Think the World of You; Barclay, Melal; Coetzee, The Lives of Animals; Kang, The Vegetarian; Le Guin, Word for World is Forest; Schweblin, Fever Dream;Ward, Salvage the Bones; Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau;Woolf, Flush; and other literary and critical works that will be posted on Blackboard.
Past Summer Institutes
1991 Sharon O’Brien, Dickinson College
1992 Constance Penley, UCSB
1993 Eric Sundquist, UCLA
1994 Scott Russell Sanders, Indiana
1995 Nancy Armstrong, Brown
1996 Paul Fussell, Penn
1997 Valerie Wayne, Hawaii
1998 Myra Jehlen, Rutgers
1999 Mary Poovey, NYU
2000 Susan K. Harris, Penn State
2001 Frances Dolan, Miami of Ohio
2002 Dana Nelson, Kentucky
2003 Helena Michie, Rice
2004 Alan Golding, Louisville
2005 John P. Farrell, Texas
2006 Priscilla Ward, Duke
2007 Karma Lochrie, Indiana
2008 Susan Gubar, Indiana
2010 Lawrence Buell, Harvard
2012 Patrick Brantlinger, Indiana
2014 N. Katherine Hayles, Duke
2016 Wendy Wheeler, London Metropolitan
2018 Cary Wolfe, Rice
2020 Jeffrey Masten, Northwestern
2017 Giselle Anatol, KU
2019 Kij Johnson, KU
2021 Phil Drake, KU