Spring 2026 Course Offerings

English 502: Seminar in the Teaching of Writing: Contemporary Theories

Wendy Olson, Monday, 3:10-5:40 pm

This course introduces students to key theories that inform and impact what and why, as well as how we teach when we teach academic writing in higher education. We’ll start from the premise that a theoretically informed pedagogy is both important and necessary. As such, we’ll look to the ways in which writing and composing theories have developed both historically and concentrically—that is, in dialectic with other theories and against the backdrop of social and material changes. In order to better understand the scholarly debates, contentions, contradictions, and values that shape composing theories and writing studies more broadly as a field, we’ll also think through (and unpack) the manifestation and institutionalization of academic writing within higher education. From there, we’ll develop our own pedagogical approaches toward how we might employ strategies for teaching writing in composition and writing-intensive classrooms across the curriculum. For folks without former teaching expertise, some experiential opportunities will be available.

We’ll begin with a discussion of the “social turn” in writing studies, then move to investigate its lingering impact and where we are now in the field’s research and teaching practices. A particular focus of our conversations will concern what is at stake for students in how academic writing is defined, valued, and institutionalized within higher education. In doing so, we’ll read a few earlier texts that have influenced composing/writing theories with a focus on more contemporary scholarship within the field, all along the way inquiring into what the conversation/debate/theorizing means for classrooms, curriculum, and students. Contemporary themes to include social justice writing pedagogies (including anti-racist assessment practices, access and inclusion, and trauma-informed teaching); literacy, technology and composing (including information literacy and AI); and writing transfer/teaching for transfer (including rhetorical genre studies, writing across the curriculum-WAC, and writing in the disciplines-WID). Course requirements to include weekly critical responses, a number of brief writing activities/assignments (practicing potential composing activities from the student perspective), a pedagogical presentation, a book review, a teaching philosophy statement, and a final semester project (multiple options).

English 548: Seminar in Critical and Cultural Theory: AI, Biopolitics, and Engineered Oppression

Bibhushana Poudyal, Thursday, 3:10-5:40 pm

This course is a radical excavation of how artificial intelligence functions as a weapon of empire, capital, and carceral power. We examine the violent entanglements of AI with biopolitical control and engineered systems of domination, such as systems that surveil, categorize, and criminalize the global majority and global plurality under the false banners of innovation, progress, and neutrality. Grounded in decolonial, Black feminist, Indigenous, queer, and abolitionist thought, this course exposes AI not as an impartial tool, but as a racialized and militarized infrastructure built to extend the legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and eugenics.

Through frameworks of necropolitics, racial capitalism, and surveillance abolition, we will interrogate how predictive policing, biometric surveillance, algorithmic governance, and data extraction are deployed to manage, punish, and disappear marginalized communities. We will analyze how AI consolidates power within the prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes: targeting Black, Indigenous, queer, disabled, undocumented, and impoverished bodies while presenting itself as objective and efficient. We confront the realities of data colonialism, digital enclosure, and the commodification of life itself.

Rather than framing these harms as accidental, we treat them as the logical outcomes of technologies designed within and for systems of racial and imperial domination. We will engage with radical scholarship, frontline activist strategies, abolitionist tech imaginaries, community archives, counter-surveillance aesthetics, music, social media, and global resistance movements. This course is not neutral. It is a call to dismantle oppressive AI systems and to build liberatory, collective, and just technological futures. We will study not just what AI is, but what it must become and what must be abolished to get there.

The success of this course depends entirely on our shared commitment to collective un/re/learning, radical solidarity, and a refusal to settle for anything less than total liberation.

Core Questions We Will Wrestle With:

• How does artificial intelligence entrench existing systems of power (such as racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, and settler colonialism) under the guise of neutrality and innovation? What forms of systemic violence does it automate, legitimize, or obscure?
• In what ways are algorithmic systems—predictive policing, biometric surveillance, risk scoring—actively complicit in expanding the prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes? How do they refine the logics of captivity, war, and occupation?
• How does the extraction and commodification of data—through digital profiling, surveillance capitalism, and data colonialism—undermine autonomy, erode collective power, and reproduce colonial domination? What is our role, as scholars, in either sustaining or refusing this system?
• What radical pathways exist for resisting and dismantling AI infrastructures of domination? How might we imagine and co-create technologies in service of collective liberation, rather than control? What does abolitionist, decolonial, and life-affirming AI look like—if it is possible at all?

ENGL 560: Critical Theories, Methods, and Practices in Digital Humanities

Roger Whitson, T/TH, 1:30-2:45 pm

Called a “tactical concept” by Matthew Kirschenbaum, a “big tent” by Patrick Svensson, and “the study of things, digitally” or “the study of digital things” by Anastasia Salter — the digital humanities embodies almost as many definitions as it has people who work in the field. Editors Matt Gold and Lauren Klein mention in the introduction to their 2016 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities DH practices as varied as “visualization of large data sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, ‘born digital’ dissertations, hashtag activism, and the analysis thereof, alternate reality games, mobile makerspaces, and more.” My interest in DH stems from my background in media studies, history of the book, science and technology studies, and cybernetics. As such, we will explore a wide set of texts discussing these themes as well as engage in workshops surveying various practices in the field. Requirements include a 10-15 page seminar paper or equivalent digital project, a workshop on a tool or technique in the field, and two days where you lead class.

Some required Texts include:

• Bernard Dionysius Geohagen, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory.
• Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects.
• Amy Earhart, Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies
• Whitney Treitten, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism
• David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin.
• Jussi Parikka and Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media

English 595: Topics in English: Critical Narratology

Jon Hegglund, T/TH, 12:05-1:25 pm

Narratology has long been considered a purely formal and technical approach to narrative fiction, but this seminar will explore its intersections with and possibilities for critical cultural and social inquiry. We will approach narratology through four frameworks: structuralist, rhetorical, cognitive, and materialist. Though we will attend to narratology’s roots in prose fiction, the course will venture far beyond the literary origins of narratology, exploring its relevance to narrative forms such as film, television, video games, social media, and political discourse (as such, the course will be of interest to students from both graduate tracks). The reading in the course will mainly consist of critical and theoretical pieces, with students furnishing literary and/or cultural examples for discussion and analysis by the class. Each week we will focus on one or two shorter readings, with optional selections—I am more interested in the quality rather than the quantity of our reading. Our aim will be to become better readers of the world, armed with a precise and powerful conceptual framework for doing so. Students will give multiple short presentations, write a bibliography or conference proposal, and submit a seminar-length paper of 20-25 pages.

English 597: Topics in Rhetoric and Composition: On Memory: What We Remember, Misremember, and Forget

Patty Wilde, Wednesdays, 2:50:5:40 pm

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as William Faulkner reminds us. Probing this temporal connection, ENGL 597: On Memory: What We Remember, Misremember, and Forget examines what we remember, how, why, and to what effect. Though we will explore memory through a rhetorical lens, this course is designed to meet the needs of graduate students from both tracks. In the broadest sense of the term, memory has a long-established relationship with the persuasive arts. Most notably, the fourth canon of rhetoric attends to strategies for memorizing speeches, but this connection has been reimagined through memory studies, a multidisciplinary field that examines the cognitive, social, cultural, technological and political influence on how individuals, communities, and societies remember.

After reviewing contemporary neuroscientific research on personal memory, we will study the ways that memory informs memoir and autobiographical genres, analyzing and even producing these highly curated narrative forms. But exploring how “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories,” a theory advanced by French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (38), we will also take up social views of memory. Influenced by the work of Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim, Halbwachs believed that memories are evoked through “frameworks” that “reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society” (40). These ever-evolving structures function as a mobius strip that conjure views of the past that align with the present values and priorities of a given community, however defined or imagined, that are then, in turn, rearticulated back into that framework.Given the constitutive repercussions of memory, whatwe remember, forget, or misremember has significant socio-cultural consequences, and thus, is inextricably tied to power and identity. But because, as Pierre Nora observes, “Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image” (13), we will round out the class by considering different sites of memory, tackling official sources such as monuments, memorials, museums, and archives, but also countermemories and the ways that they challenge dominant visions of the past. Students in this class will be asked to write a mini memoir, build a digital archive, prepare and deliver class presentations, write a conference proposal, and complete a research project. While I will hold class in-person at least twice during the semester, we will primarily meet on Zoom.