Below are sample course descriptions, syllabi, and assignments. For more detailed information about each class, go to the course website to see readings, assignments, and other material. For more course topics, descriptions, and syllabi, see the full list of courses taught.
Syllabi
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- ENGL 106 001: African American Literature: “African American Science Fiction”
- ENGL 110 G: Introduction to Media Studies
- ENGL 466 A: Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Studies: “Queer Inquiries”
- CHID 480 F: Special Topics in Comparative History of Ideas: “Mediating Identities”
- ENGL 207 B: Introduction to Cultural Studies: “Virtual Worlds & Video Games”
- ENGL 242 A: Reading Prose Fiction: “Not Your Average High School Novel Class”
- ENGL 250 B: Introduction to American Literature: “The American Imagination”
- ENGL 111 Q: Composition with Literature: “Imagining Cyberspace”
- CHID 496 I: Focus Group: “Close Playing, Or, Bioshock as Practicum”
- CHID 496 G: Focus Group: “‘Serious Research Mode’: Critical Approaches to Buffy (and Stuff)”
Assignments
- Play Logs, or Plogs: Keep a weekly “plog” or “play log” about the games that you play and the texts that you read. Plog entries will be short reactions, responses, meditations, and provocations that engage the game and your play on a critical, analytical, or theoretical level. Plogs will be posted each week to the class LMS.
- Harry Potter Autobiography: Write a 2-to-3-page autobiography of yourself relating a particular experience with the Harry Potter series. Use this experience as a way to articulate something crucial, intellectual, or profound about your relationship to the novels (and films). Think of this as a personal essay, a piece that might appear in a school yearbook or school newsletter.
“African American Science Fiction” (PDF)
ENGL 106-001: African American Literature
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to “study of the writers in the African American literary tradition…in light of their historical time and place, major themes, conclusions about the nature of black experience in the United States and their contributions to this literary tradition and to the American literary canon?” And even more difficult, how might we consider the fields, formations, and possibilities of “African American Literature” through science fiction or speculative fiction? Sheree Thomas, editor of the 2000 collection Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, said, “The science fiction and fantasy genres have always offered readers, bold, extraordinary ways by which to examine society. The results have often been visionary, with writers acting as unflinching voyeurs who deliver engaging, sometimes scathing critiques of our traditions, values, nightmares, and dreams.” This class, then, will explore the intersections of literature, genre, media, race, gender, sexuality, class, and technology. Texts may include W.E.B Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler, Ralph Ellison, Samuel Delany, Steven Barnes, Octavia Butler, Derrick Bell, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nisi Shawl.
“Introduction to Media Studies” (PDF)
ENGL 110 G: Introduction to Media Studies
HENRY JENKINS, media scholar and professor, argues, “Most often, when people are asked to describe the current media landscape, they respond by making an inventory of tools and technologies. Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices. Rather than listing tools, we need to understand the underlying logic shaping our current moment of media in transition.” In other words, to better understand media–from writing to gaming–is to understand not only the mediums themselves but our relationship to and with those mediums. This course then offers an overview of the history, technological changes, and cultural and critical significance of contemporary media, including print, electronic media (radio, television, film), and digital (“new”) media (internet, social media, mobile media, digital games). We will explore the forms and function of media, media and its relationship to information and communication, and the intersections of media and culture.
“Queer Inquiries: Introduction to LGBT Studies” (PDF)
ENGL 466 A: Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Studies
DRAWING INSPIRATION from Raymond William’s influential Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler’s Keywords for American Cultural Studies, this class will identify and explore some of the key concepts, moves, and key terms of the interdisciplinary fields that make up lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies. Topics, themes, methods, and lines of inquiry will include:
- histories of sexuality and sexual identity;
- the politics of identity, embodiment, and desire;
- heterosexism, homophobia, transphobia, normativity, and other forms of oppression;
- queer resistance, activism, liberation, and worldmaking;
- intersectionality with race, gender, class, family, religion, ability, and nation;
- and finally, queer temporalities, spaces, and technologies.
THROUGH THE LENSES of literature, scholarship, new and old media, and popular culture, our class will trace and trouble theoretical and everyday understandings of LGBT and Q terms, figures, bodies, and experiences. Williams argued, “I have emphasized this process of the development of Keywords because it seems to me to indicate its dimension and purpose. It is not a dictionary or glossary of a particular academic subject. It is not a series of footnotes to dictionary histories or definitions of a number of words. It is, rather, the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings…” This class therefore is all about reading, thinking, writing, and contributing to LGBT studies’ shared body of words, ideas, and theories.
THEORETICAL TEXTS will include in whole or in part: Michel Foucault, Sandy Stone, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, Jose Esteban Munoz, Judith Halberstam, Gayle S. Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Adrienne Rich, Kobena Mercer, John D’Emilio, Monique Wittig, Lee Edelman, Sigmund Freud, Samuel Delany, Havelock Ellis, Susan Stryker, Roderick A. Ferguson, Donna Haraway, Alan Turing, Nina Wakeford, and others. Literary texts will include Nella Larsen’s Passing, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites.
“Mediating Identities: Technologies of the Self” (PDF)
CHID 480 F: Special Topics in Comparative History of Ideas
“The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition of being a single individual; the fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.”
“Who or what a person or thing is; a distinct impression of a single person or thing presented to or perceived by others; a set of characteristics or a description that distinguishes a person or thing from others.”
–“Identity,” Oxford English Dictionary
CARLA KAPLAN, in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, frames the difficulty of defining “identity,” saying, “One of our most common terms, ‘identity’ is rarely defined” (123). Rather, in everyday language, we have a “personal identity” and have, depending on situation, multiple “social identities.” Kaplan continues, “Personal identity is often assumed to mediate between social identities and make sense of them. Whereas our social identities shift throughout the day, what allows us to move coherently from one to another is often imagined to be our personal identity, or ‘who we are’–our constant” (123). Outlined by the above definitions of identity is a tension, even contradiction: one the one hand, identity is seemingly fixed, intelligible, innate to an individual, or on the other, something that is performed, constructed, contextual, and perhaps changeable. Our class will take up this unsettledness of identity and investigate its intersections with and co-constitution by technology. In other words, in a world of increasing technological ubiquity, how might we imagine and define a “technological identity?” What are the relationships between identity and technology? How does technology shape our identity or identities and vice versa?
WE WILL EXPLORE everyday technologies like fashion and consumer culture, cyberspace technologies like video games and social networking sites, and body modification technologies like cosmetic surgery and bioengineering. Through literature, scholarship, digital media, video games, and real world examples, our class will trace and trouble theoretical and vernacular understandings of identity and technology. We will engage critical questions about subjectivity, embodiment, race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, post- and transhumanism, and how these things link up to discourses and ideologies about individuality, personhood, and power. Texts may include in whole or in part: Michel Foucault, Dick Hebdige, John Perry Barlow, Sherry Turkle, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Howard Rheingold, William Gibson, Maureen McHugh, Alan Turing, Julian Dibbell, Donna Haraway, Thomas Foster, Lisa Nakamura, Paul Gilroy, Judith Butler, Octavia Butler, N. Katherine Hayles, and others.
“Virtual Worlds & Video Games” (PDF)
ENGL 207 B: Introduction to Cultural Studies
ALEXANDER GALLOWAY in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture argues that play “is a symbolic action for larger issues in culture” (16) and that video games “render social realities into playable form” (17). Using a broad archive of “imagined worlds”–drawing on literature, video games, text games and hypertext, film, and scholarship–this course will identify and explore some of the key concepts, the key moves, and the key terms of the interdiscipinary fields of cultural studies.
CENTRAL QUESTIONS AND ENGAGEMENTS INCLUDE: What are the different critical practices and methodologies of cultural studies? How might we employ different cultural studies approaches and lenses to these virtual worlds and video games? Why study these “imagined worlds,” how are they important, and what values do they have? In this course, we will look at and analyze texts of media old and new through the lenses of cultural studies and deploy virtual worlds and video games as theories about and dramatizations of different social relationships and realities, to unpack and analyze the intersections of cultural formations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, particularly in the US context. We will look at how video games can be rhetorical, political, and popular tools, and in the words of Gonzalo Frasca, how “they can be used for conveying passionate ideas…to deliver an ideological message.” Moreover, Henry Jenkins adds that we should “look at games as an emerging art form…and talk about how to strike a balance between this form of expression and social responsibility” (120).
READINGS MAY INCLUDE IN WHOLE OR IN EXCERPT by: Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler’s Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Orson Scott Card, Shelley Jackson, Alexander Galloway, Ian Bogost, Lisa Nakamura, Maureen McHugh, Henry Jenkins, Donna Haraway, Cory Doctorow, Julian Dibbell, and Gonzalo Frasca. Digital and visual texts may include: Will Crowther’s Adventure, Jason Rohrer’s Gravitation, Gregory Weir’s The Majesty of Colors, LambdaMOO, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s Façade, Tron, Monster Camp, America’s Army, Frasca’s September 12, SuperColumbineMassacre RPG, and World of Warcraft.
NEW MEDIA AND GAME PLAY will be a required part of the class. Students will be required to keep a weekly “plog” (play log). Moreover, students will produce short, one-page, weekly critical response papers, which will potentially be used to develop into a larger project. Students seeking W-Credit will be accommodated.
“Not Your Average High School Novel Class: Re-Reading as Critical Practice” (PDF)
ENGL 242 A: Reading Prose Fiction
MAYA ANGELOU, once said, “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” It is this sense that literature is important, that literature can reveal something about ourselves and the world, and that reading is a practice and lifeway maintained and sustained over time that is central to this class. In other words, literature is more than just words on a page, literacy is not a destination or a merit badge, and reading is as much about rereading as writing is as much about revising. This class will take up reading and rereading as critical practice by pointedly revisiting literature commonly taught in high school curricula in the US, literature needing rescue and revivification from this-is-so-boring mindsets, from the constraints of teaching-for-the-tests, and from the too easy themes and summaries of notes by Cliff and Spark. This is not your usual high school novel class. Texts may include in whole or in excerpt the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Sherwood Anderson, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Ray Bradbury, Toni Morrison, and J.K. Rowling.
A REQUIREMENT for this class is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume. In other words, this class is about reading, critiquing, and analyzing our culture through literature. Our understandings of identities, meanings, and power, as well as the intersections of cultural and social locations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, can be excavated through the analysis of the texts we create and consume. This class will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about various fictions and how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in.
FINALLY, as a class, we will engage the techniques and practices of reading and enjoying literature. We will identify and develop different ways to read different kinds of texts — from verse to prose to visual and digital — and understand and develop strategies, habits, and perspectives of reading, thinking, and writing. Foremost, we will read with pleasure and for pleasure. We will also rhetorically read, close read, read for analysis. And lastly, we will read and deploy literature as theory, as dramatizing the concerns, wonders, struggles, and politics of lived life and experience.
“The American Imagination: Progress, Exploration, and Science Fictions” (PDF)
ENGL 250 B: Introduction to American Literature
HENRY DAVID THOREAU ONCE SAID, “The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” And central to the “American imagination” is a preoccupation with exploration, power, progress, innovation, and technology. It is no wonder then that writing about science, discovery, invention, and science fiction flourished in the United States. How then might we trace and track these themes, tropes, and formations as illuminating threads in American literatures from the US and its diaspora? What might these literatures reveal to us, reveal about us, and reveal about our culture? This class will take up these “threads” of possibility and impossibility in various American literatures, including texts not often considered sci fi, in order to see how and what these texts argue, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate our understanding of American histories, politics, technologies, and ideologies. Texts may include in whole or in excerpt: Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Edward Bellamy, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Jack London, Elmer Rice, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, C.L. Moore, Vannevar Bush, Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Delaney, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, William Gibson, Don Delillo, Cory Doctorow, Octavia Butler, and others.
A REQUIREMENT FOR THIS CLASS is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume. In other words, this class is about reading, critiquing, and analyzing our culture through literature. Martin Lister and Liz Wells, authors of “Seeing Beyond Belief,” argue for just this kind of curiosity, a methodology for unpacking cultural productions, such as novels or images or websites or film; they say, “Cultural Studies allows the analyst to attend to the many moments within the cycle of production, circulation and consumption of [a text] through which meanings accumulate, slip and shift” (Reading Contexts 459). They argue that our understandings of identities, meanings, and power, as well as the intersections of cultural and social locations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, can be excavated through the analysis of the texts we create and consume. This class will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about various literatures and how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in.
FINALLY, as a class, we will engage the techniques and practices of reading and enjoying literature. We will identify and develop different ways to read different kinds of texts — from verse to prose to visual and digital — and understand and develop strategies, habits, and perspectives of reading, thinking, and writing. Foremost, we will read with pleasure and for pleasure. We will also rhetorically read, close read, read for analysis. And lastly, we will read and deploy literature as theory, as dramatizing the concerns, wonders, struggles, and politics of lived life and experience.
“Imagining Cyberspace: Representations of Cyberspace in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture” (PDF)
ENGL 111 Q: Composition with Literature
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD CYBERSPACE? What do you see? What do you know? Since the inception of the Internet and the World Wide Web and the discipline of ‘digital studies’, the notion and imagining of cyberspace has been deeply celebrated, contested, and colonized. Long before Keanu Reaves donned sunglasses and leather trenchcoat, William Gibson in the early 1980s coined the term ‘cyberspace’ and jacked the culture into the (many-layered) world of cyberpunk. From Burning Chrome, Gibson describes cyberspace, describes the matrix as “an abstract representation of the relationships between data system…bright geometries…Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless nonspace…the electronic consensus-hallucination…” So what is cyberspace? Is it a place? Is it a space? Is it thought or body or machine or all of the above? Cyberspace has been touted as the ultimate frontier, the promise land where all ground is level for all people, the time and place where you can be anything you want. Cyberspace has been criticized for its lack of definition, its commercialization, its slipperiness when it comes to identity, community, and access. Cyberspace has even been demonized as the shadowy lair of thieves, perverts, sexual predators, terrorists, and subversives. Is cyberspace any of these things? All of these things and more?
THIS CLASS, in broad strokes, will investigate and interrogate the idea, the material, and the manifestations of cyberspace, primarily in the US, through the lenses of literature and writing. This class will look at, explore, and tease apart what we believe to be a monolithic, all-powerful (and now completely naturalized) construction and convention and take into consideration historical context, commodification, technology, and the intersection of race, gender, class, and identity on- and off-line. We will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about (and surfing, mining, and clicking) cyberspace in literature, in film, in theory, and in everyday use. In other words, we will look at texts about cyberspace and cyberspace itself as text.
“Close Playing, or, Bioshock as Practicum” (PDF)
CHID 496 I: Focus Group
IN 2000, HENRY JENKINS WROTE, “The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century,” that video games do matter. But only within the last few years has the state of video game studies, either popularly or academically, found legitimacy and critical attention, pointedly the recent John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning Initiative, which “aims to determine how digital media are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.” Given this recent proliferation of video games, playership of video games, video game technology, art and film inspired by video games, and scholarship on video games, the moment is ripe for interrogating this growing medium, art form, and cultural production and to produce a critical vocabulary for their analysis and discussion.
OUR FOCUS GROUP, as part of a continuing series on video games generated by the Critical Gaming Project at UW, will draw inspiration from Raymond William’s influential Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and the new Keywords for American Cultural Studies book and website to identify and interrogate the key terms, the key moves, and the key players in video game studies. We will play a range of games alongside formal video game and cultural studies scholarship in order to investigate keywords like: play, control, immersion, interactivity, identity, avatar, violence, casual, hardcore, race, gender, sexuality, nation, and economy.
THE COURSE will meet once a week for 2 hours to engage reading, guided discussion, analytical and reflective writing, and game play. This course coincides with the inauguration of the Keywords for Video Game Studies graduate interest group sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Students will be required to attend two working group sessions in lieu of two, regular class periods. Students will be asked to participate in discussions both in class and online, write a review of a video game of their choice, and make a short in-class presentation.
“‘Serious Research Mode’: Critical Approaches to Buffy (and Stuff)” (PDF)
CHID 496 G: Focus Group
WHEN JOSS WHEDON’S Buffy the Vampire Slayer television debuted in 1997, no one could have foreseen the cult following, the spinoffs, the cultural phenomenon, and the critical and scholarly interest it would inspire. Now, over a decade later, “Buffy Studies” is an established field that draws on a range of disciplines and perspectives. Our focus group will take up some of these critical approaches including film and genre studies, Victorian studies, feminism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and queer theory. Our goal is to address the critical question “Why Buffy?” and how might Buffy help us think about the recent resurgence of vampire culture, about the role of monsters, and about cultural anxieties over the body, the self, and the Other. Overall, we hope to explore in general the value of examining pop culture.
AS RHONDA V. WILCOX AND DAVID LAVERY say in their introduction to Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002), “The many meanings of Buffy are reflected in [s]cholars from English, communications, women’s studies, sociology, religion, and other fields…[who] present their different perspectives, sometimes analyzing the series and lines in radically different fashion, from cultural studies to Jungian analysis, from problematizing to praise. [We] have chosen such a various group with a purpose: their multiplicity reflects the polysemic variety of this rich text” (xxvi).
THE COURSE will meet once a week for 2 hours to engage in watching, reading, guided discussion, and some reflective writing. Our focus group will screen select Buffy episodes (and perhaps other things from the Whedon universe) as the focus of discussion. Students will be asked to participate in discussions both in class and online including brief weekly responses and an in-class presentation.
For more information about my teaching, see also the following: