This advanced research seminar reframes “accent” as something that conditions not just speaking, but also looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. There is no such thing as a voice without an accent, and yet, colloquially as well as in scholarly literature on voice – from film studies to linguistics to machine learning – accents are treated as the exception rather than the rule. We will begin with the opposite premise.

Avant-garde poetry resists definition. In this class, we will explore poetry that defies convention, be it formal (exploding the poetic verse line), material (appearing outside of the conventional venues of the published, mass-produced book), or linguistic (using everyday language rather than poetic diction).  We will read widely from a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century poets as well as important nineteenth-century forebears.

An advanced writing workshop devoted to the reading and writing of novellas.  We will study such novellas as Samantha Lan Chang’s Hunger, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life, and Danielle Evans’ The Office of Historical Corrections, in order to get a sense of the parameters and scope of this in-between form.  Students will write up to ten pages per week with the aim of composing and revising a work of 70-80 pages by the end of the semester.

In this course, we will follow the trajectory of U.S. Black writing from its origins to 1940, paying particular attention to the extraordinarily rich diasporic culture out of which that writing grew. The sounds of Black living, in particular, will inform our approach to the rhythms and patterns of Black writing. We will also address the use of white textual models in early U.S. Black literature, with an emphasis on the artfulness of the way in which Black writers bent the traditions of British and American writing to their own uses.

(Offered as: ASLC-XXX, ENGL-356 (before 1800), RELI-256) At the heart of Buddhism is the story of Siddhartha Gautama, a young prince who had everything but renounced it all to become a homeless wanderer, attain awakening, and found one of the world's largest religions 2,500 years ago. His story has been told in countless ways in literature, art, and ritual practice. It is a story that begins in his distant previous lives and encompasses a vast time-scape of pursuing human perfection. It also includes the stories of his family and closest disciples.

This course will examine a variety of ethical dilemmas writers face, and face with particular intensity in our current moment. We will consider identity/representation, appropriation, representing violence and self-harm, standards of “truth” in memoir, cancellation, and the ethics and politics of the creative writing workshop.

(Offered as ENGL 316 and SWAG 316) “From whence comes my help?” “From where does your strength come?” The psalmist and Adrienne Rich ask these questions, which we will face while we read coming-of-age narratives that fit in a genre known by its German name, the Bildungsroman. These novels go beyond the pilgrimage out of adolescence, and into explicit representation of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual growth experienced in unison with sexual development, awakenings, thrills, mishaps, and marriage.

This course situates Asian American studies in conversation with feminist and queer of color critiques. For years, Asian American literary formation was shaped by a heteromasculinist ideology, but this course asks: What happens when we place queerness at the heart of Asian American cultural production? The course will teach students queer methods of reading against the grain, but it will also immerse them in queer alternatives to that canon. Throughout, the course will chart the literary, artistic, and scholarly genealogies of queer Asian American writers and artists.

(Offered as ENGL 278 and BLST 212 [A]) This course will examine how African writers incorporate digital technologies into their work when they publish traditional print texts, experiment with digital formats, or use the internet to redefine their relationship to local and international audiences. We will reflect on how words and values shift in response to new forms of mediation; on the limits these forms place on the bodies they represent, and on the protections they occasionally offer.

This course is a survey of U.S. LGBTQ literature, culture, and media in the fifty-five years since the landmark 1969 Stonewall Rebellions (widely acknowledged as the “birth” of the modern U.S. LGBTQ human rights/civil rights movement). Our exploration of queer narratives will take two tracks. We will trace a variety of cultural “narratives” associated with LGBTQ+ identities and experiences, including narratives of resistance, transness, coming out/inviting in, fabulosity, dis/ease, exile, butch/femme subjectivities and more.