This course teaches students how to report and write hard news and feature stories for newspapers and online. Students learn to gather and organize material, develop interviewing techniques, and hone their writing skills – all while facing the deadlines of journalism. The first half of the semester focuses on “hard" news: issues, crime, government, and courts. The second half is devoted to features, profiles, and narrative story telling. Writing sample required. Class list will be reduced to 17 after writing samples are reviewed in first week of classes. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.

How can writing support and further change? In this course students will practice grant applications, budget narratives, mission and strategy statements, press releases, position papers, op-eds, and other writing strategies with practical application in activist work. We’ll read examples and theoretical grounding, and guest speakers will introduce us to writings and needs specific to a range of fields. Prerequisite: ENGL 0930 or any 1000-level nonfiction writing course. Class list will be reduced to 17 after writing samples are reviewed during the first week of classes. Preference will be given to English concentrators. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

This seminar will consider how contemporary writers and critics respond to art that directly addresses race and challenges institutional power. We will discuss past and recent controversies involving race and representation in exhibitions and examine the relationships between artists, museums and other art institutions, and public audiences. We will consider how writing about arts and culture can advance public discourse about race, equity, and justice. Enrollment limited to 17. No pre-requisites. Writing sample required. Instructor permission required.

An introduction to university-level writing. Students produce and revise multiple drafts of essays, practice essential skills of paragraph organization, and develop techniques of critical analysis and research. Readings from a wide range of texts in literature, the media, and academic disciplines. Assignments move from personal response papers to formal academic essays. Enrollment limited to 17. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.

Designed to familiarize students with the techniques and narrative structures of creative nonfiction. Reading and writing focus on personal essays, memoir, science writing, travel writing, and other related subgenres. May serve as preparation for any 1000-level nonfiction writing course. Writing sample may be required. Enrollment limited. Banner registrations after classes begin require instructor approval. S/NC.

A survey of the major novels of Austen and Eliot. Readings will also include contemporary reviews and responses, letters, and Eliot's critical prose, as well as literary theory and criticism addressing questions such as novelistic form, realism and narrativity, the problem of the subject, the politics of aesthetics, and the changing status of the woman writer in the 19th century. Enrollment limited to 20 seniors and juniors. Instructor permission required.

What are the political effects of representing a person, thing, or event? Is representation itself a useful political goal? With an emphasis on racial politics, this class examines how poetry plays with representability and irrepresentability to call attention to and perhaps change how we see each other and the world. Readings include works by Gertrude Stein, Claudia Rankine, Mercedes Eng, and Layli Long Soldier. Materials may also include popular music by artists like Bob Dylan and Solange. Enrollment limited to 17.

This course explores poverty as a political and aesthetic problem for American writers. Examines the ways that writers have imagined the poor as dangerous others, agents of urban decay, bearers of folk culture, and engines of class revolt. Authors include Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright.

Do adaptations of Shakespeare “kill” his texts? In this course, we will explore three plays—Othello, The Tempest, and Hamlet—with some of their most prominent adaptations. We will focus on how these adaptations consider important political questions of their times in relation to Shakespeare. Authors/directors include: Lawrence Olivier, Aime Cesaire, Jawad Al-Asadi, Vishal Bharadwaj, and Julie Taymor. Enrollment limited to 17.

A study of serial and serialized fictional narratives from the nineteenth century the present-- dime novels, serial genre fictions, literary novels comprised of chapters initially published as short stories, radio and film serials, television programs old (The Naked City, Hawaii-Five 0), newer (The Wire, Sex in the City), and new (Americans), podcasts, and video games (Legend of Zelda).

What insights can literature provide into the complicated workings of race in America? What role can the invention of a literary tradition play in illuminating and rectifying past and present injustices? We explore these questions by examining how the idea of an Asian American literary tradition came into being and by reading influential works that have become part of its canon. Students should register for ENGL 0100V S01 and may be assigned to conference sections by the instructor during the first week of class.

We will read a representative selection of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances, considering their historical contexts and their cultural afterlife in terms of belief, doubt, language, feeling, politics, and form. Students should register for ENGL 0310A S01 and may be assigned to conference sections by the instructor during the first week of class.

This course examines a crucial tradition in American letters and culture: the literature of self-examination and the spiritual quest. Each work focuses in some way on questions of identity and identification: We will be reading a wide range of authors and genres-- spiritual autobiography, short fiction, the novel, conversion narratives, confessions, and lyric and epic poetry. Limited to 30 students.

This course will explore how and why certain texts and films represent states of non-productivity or non-desire. Beginning with writings from the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, we will move into contemporary theoretical and aesthetic reflections on the links between art and worklessness: narratives with neither progress nor plot, characters that resist characterization, as well as poems and films that resist emphatic assertion and revelation. Enrollment limited to 20.

A seminar on recent road films, gross-out comedies, “bromances,” war films, sports films, superhero movies, sex films, and coming-of-age stories particularly concerned with men and masculinity in unusual, often extreme circumstances. Films may include: The Hangover and The Hangover 2, Magic Mike, Moonlight, Bridesmaids, American Sniper, Deadpool, Neighbors, Everybody Wants Some, Foxcatcher, The D-Train, The Change-Up, and Shame. Enrollment limited to 19 first-year students. Instructor permission required.