Teaching

English 1001: Introductory Composition

This course emphasizes critical thinking and persuasive writing skills. Students learn to read critically and analyze a text’s content as well as its rhetorical strategies. In addition, students are immersed in research writing practices, including how to integrate source material into their writings, evaluate sources, and position ideas in relation to published research. This course aims to develop confident writers who know how to pursue and develop a relevant, consequential line of inquiry.

English 2089: Intermediate Composition

In this course, students are introduced to higher-level compositional learning about writing and reading, with a large focus placed on students’ attention to how meaning is made, understood, and communicated across and within discourse communities. The course emphasizes critical reading and writing, genre studies, personal literacies, advanced research and argumentative skills, and rhetorical sensitivity to differences in academic, professional, and/or public writing.

English 2030 / Environmental Studies 2030: Climate Fictions

In this class, students will explore environmental literature through the lens of speculative climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” By analyzing novel excerpts, short stories, and films, we’ll consider the ways authors such as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Omar El Akkad craft visions of climate-changed worlds, and how such works help define this growing and influential genre. As we read, we’ll examine how environmental futures echo and project the crises of our present day, and display an ever-widening range of motifs, themes, and worldbuilding scenarios. We’ll consider disaster, survival, technological revolutions, and the seismic societal shifts that might occur on a rapidly changing planet. Through conversations and writings, we’ll gain a better understanding of how future-facing environmental literature becomes a vehicle for warning, critique, prediction, and hope, as well as the creative approaches used to envision such worlds and works.

English 3022: Writing Science Fiction & “The Near Future”

When we think of science fiction, we might imagine fantastic, far-flung tomorrows: glimpses of human civilization set in far off times and on even more distant worlds. Still, as sci-fi author Nnedi Okoroafor writes, “I don’t just make random things up. I consider the world around me. I live in it. I experience it. I love it. I hate it. I worry about it. Then I imagine what’s to come.” This course examines science fiction through the lens of the “near future” — what it means, how we write it, and how this approach to the genre has grown into a provocative and influential writing tradition. This will be accomplished by exploring texts that tread the fine line between “today” and “tomorrow,” and seeing how writers envision our own world in the coming years, decades, and centuries. Students consider what pressing contemporary questions authors are attempting to answer in their works, and how they go about creating futures that are hauntingly familiar, yet totally unique. Readings will explore scenarios such as post-oil civilizations, the end of the internet and data, and a Second American Civil War, as well as the traditions of cyberpunk, biopunk, dystopia, speculative literature, and “Anthropocene Lit.” Most importantly, this class will be built on how we ourselves can implement such techniques through weekly writing and creative exercises. Students experiment in the diverse worlds presented to them through readings, eventually creating their own near future scenarios while considering how this brand of science fiction makes use of richly complex characters, environments, social systems, technologies, and world-shaping events.