Graduate Course Offerings: Fall 2026

Long believed to be before the advent of the concept of “race,” the early modern period was in fact pervaded by racial discourse. In the past decade, the field of premodern critical race studies has definitively shown how race—in forms both very different from and uncannily similar to its modern manifestations—affected the day-to-day social, political, and literary and cultural worlds of the early modern English as well as the ethnically and racially diverse peoples with whom they came into contact. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century see England expand its empire beyond the British Isles and begin to participate in the transatlantic slave trade, both of which indelibly shape English (and thus, eventually, American), race and racism to the present.

Race is of course not a biological fact, though its consequences are often emphatically material; rather, race is produced through power. In this course, we will explore how early modern English literature makes race—that is, the power relations and the discursive as well as material exploitation and violence these texts produce and imply. Race is never an isolated phenomenon; we will also explore how it intersects with ideas of gender, sexuality, “the human,” ability, and class. We will examine not only drama, poetry, and fiction but also travel writing and natural philosophy to see how race is produced across a variety of domains. This will not add up to a coherent picture of “race”—indeed, race is always an internally contradictory fiction, adapting to the immediate demands of power. What we will see, though, is a variety of ways of understanding race and human difference, some of which will die out across the centuries and others of which will bear remarkable parallels to—and consequences for—what we see in our own social worlds.

The graduate fiction writing workshop will explore a range of contemporary fiction and give students the opportunity to share their own stories with others and to receive feedback.  Since we will have a variety of levels of proficiency in the class, we’ll approach craft from a pedagogical point of view that should be useful to everyone, including those who might one day like to teach fiction writing, those who want to write better fiction, and those writing fiction for the first time. We’ll also investigate how contemporary literary fiction has co-opted elements from genres such as YA, sci-fi, fantasy, etc.

This course is designed to help you rhetorically examine pedagogical theories and practices. Together, we will explore one big question all semester: How does a rhetorical approach for studying pedagogy shape how we conceptualize and enact pedagogical theories and practices? We will ground this study in an explicit focus on agency— the capacity to act—to examine how the actions of teachers, students, and curricula are conceptualized in pedagogical theories and practices. While our collective study will focus on scholarship from the field of composition, the rhetorical insights we reach can be applied to teaching writing in a variety of contexts, including creative writing and literature classrooms. Throughout the course, you will have the opportunity to design and develop a scholarly project that applies your rhetorical understanding of pedagogy. You can design a project to strengthen your own teaching or a project to strengthen your field’s understanding of teaching. This course privileges your questions about the rhetorics of pedagogy because it is designed to foster your current and future development as a scholar. This course is a great fit for people who care about the teaching/learning of writing practices and would like a context to examine pedagogy from a rhetorical perspective.