More women than men wrote novels during the nineteenth century - and when they did, they had to navigate a world haunted by the suffocating shadow of the Angel of the House (as Virginia Woolf put it). By abandoning such stereotypes of femininity in order to write novels, women turned to genres... (read more)

ENG 361: Native American Writers--Contemporary Indigenous Women Writers

Malintzin Tenepat. Pocahontas. Sacagawea. These are likely a few of only a handful of Indigenous women with whom many of us are familiar. Though real historical and contemporary figures, they are often depicted in... (read more)

ENG 241 introduces students to African American literature through a survey of short stories, essays, poetry, and autobiography. This course does not require a textbook or the purchase of any course materials. As we move through a selection of literature from the 19th and early 20th centuries,... (read more)

Study of the relationship between small groups and dominant culture in the United States. Explore issues of language, culture, self-representation, identity, and social structure.

What does it mean for a woman to write her self in comics? Our class will explore the form of graphic memoir through works such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Bishakh Som’s Spellbound, in order to think through the risks and tactics of... (read more)

Instructor: Lowthorp, L.

This course introduces students to the research questions, theoretical orientations, and fieldwork methods used to study folklore, and therefore satisfies the Arts and Letters group requirements. Students will examine concepts that are central to folkloristic... (read more)

ENG 240 introduces students to essential texts and concepts in disability studies and applies them to American history, popular culture, and literature, with a focus on racial diversity and learning directly from people who experience a wide spectrum of bodymind variabilities. Disability is not... (read more)

In 1968, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American literature. Momaday's award signaled for many the “arrival” of Native authors to the American literary scene and ushered in an unprecedented era of Native literary and cultural... (read more)

Black Feminist Literature

In this course, we will study works from the vast body of Black feminist literature. Our texts will be by African American women writers, activists, teachers, and intellectuals and will span the late-nineteenth century to the present. Our readings will be diverse... (read more)

In this course, we will study a selection of novels by Black American women from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Using close reading and historical context, we will consider how these novels construct race, class, and gender; the possibilities of the novel form; ways these texts engage... (read more)

Explores the relationship between folklore and popular culture; examines a diversity of approaches to the analysis of "common culture" including urban legends, comics, cultural performances, youth culture, Internet folklore, street art, and other forms of expression as these relate to various... (read more)

Native American Writers (Contemporary Indigenous Women Writers): La Malinche. Pocahontas. Sacagawea. These are likely the only Indigenous women with whom many are familiar. Though real historical figures, these Indigenous women are often depicted in popular literature along a rigid spectrum as... (read more)

According to Cherokee scholar, musician, and storyteller Thomas King, “The truth about stories is, that’s all we are” (2). Of course, then, at times people are dependent on who is telling their stories. Since time immemorial, Native American peoples have been telling their own stories, of... (read more)

This course is a survey of writings by African American authors. We will study fiction, essays, and poetry in their historical, political, and literary contexts from the late-eighteenth century to the present. We will investigate whether there are specific formal and thematic elements that... (read more)

In 1968, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American literature. Momaday's award signaled for many the “arrival” of Native authors to the American literary scene and ushered in an unprecedented era of Native literary production widely... (read more)

Travel, or the journey, is often conceptualized in relation to home as the point of departure and return: in Homer’s Odyssey, the hero wanders as his wife waits faithfully in Ithaca. These gendered roles—man as traveler, woman as homebody—reflect age-old assumptions about travel. But... (read more)

This course will examine feminist film criticism from multiple theoretical perspectives and diverse geo-political contexts. We will study how feminists have not only critiqued media and its representations of gender but also how the institution of cinema and media itself is gendered in terms of... (read more)

We will engage with a rich tradition of Black-centered essay writing articulating how Blackness shapes (and shapes our understanding of) existence in an anti-Black world. Kelley, Du Bois, and Gordon lead us to the inherent contradictions in Institutions of thought and thought, itself. Sharpe,... (read more)

The Black Fantastic 

In 2020, against the backdrop of a pandemic, wildfires, anti-Black violence, a global wave of protests and social unrest, and political upheaval, Octavia Butler’s 1993 Afrofuturist novel, Parable of the Sower, reached the New York Times bestseller... (read more)

ENG 240 introduces students to central concepts and essential texts in disability studies and applies them to literary and cultural texts, with a focus on racial diversity and learning directly from writers and scholars who experience a wide spectrum of body/mind variabilities. The texts in this... (read more)

We will engage with a rich tradition of Black-centered essay writing articulating how Blackness shapes (and shapes our understanding of) existence in an anti-Black world. Kelley, Du Bois, and Gordon lead us to the inherent contradictions in Institutions of thought and thought, itself. Sharpe,... (read more)

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