Graduate Studies Bulletin

Fall 2021 Course Offerings

English 501: Teaching of Writing: Methodology and Composition

Melissa Nicolas

Description not available. Contact the instructor for more information.

English 512: Introduction to Graduate Study

Donna Campbell

English 512 is a practical introduction to the materials and methods of graduate study in English. Readings are taken from Katina Rogers’s Putting the Humanities PhD to Work (Duke UP, 2020) and Gregory Colón Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century (Palgrave 2005). It includes the following topics:

  • Introduction to research methods, ethics, and issues (such as seeking IRB approval)
  • Campus centers (CDSC, etc.) and their resources
  • Reference management tools (Mendeley, Zotero, Endnote) and their uses
  • Reading scholarly articles (arguments, contexts, theories)
  • Writing seminar papers: finding your voice, making a persuasive argument, literature reviews, and so on
  • Writing for the profession: calls for papers, conference proposals, brief biographies, and other materials
  • Job market preparation: how to assess your goals, read a job ad, create a curriculum vitae (cv), and write a cover letter for academic and broader forms of employment
  • Conversations with and presentations by faculty through the colloquium series and through faculty visits to the class

Students are expected to complete the following:

  • Turn in a CV and cover letter;
  • attend at least one colloquium beyond this class;
  • attend and participate in the class.

English 543: Phonology

Michael Thomas

Description not available. Contact the instructor for more information.

English 545: Graduate Student Writing Workshop

Elizabeth (Liz) Siler, by arrangement

The Graduate Student Writing Workshop is open to all graduate students at Washington State University, including those for whom English is not a first language (ESL). Enrollment is limited. No over-enrollments are allowed in any section at any time, so encourage students, friends, and colleagues to sign up early.    

This is a completely web-arranged class, but it is taught through the English Department, not through Global Campus. To be in the class, a student needs two things: a substantial piece of graduate writing to work on and a computer that handles web video conferencing via Zoom. A substantial piece of writing could be an article, a proposal, a report, a presentation, a dissertation, a thesis, or any of many other types of writing. A minimum of seven individual conferences are held via Zoom. At each meeting, the student and I meet online at a mutually arranged time to work on their writing.   

Each student is different; each student has different writing needs. This class offers a highly individualized type of instruction — each student’s needs form that student’s course of studies. The class is suitable for students at all levels, from incoming graduate students to those in the last stage of dissertation production.   

There is some collateral instruction in oral production skills available through this class, often in the context of work with students who are preparing presentations for conferences, defenses, etc. However, the primary focus of the class is writing development.

English 546: Teaching and Learning L2 Academic Literacies

Nancy Bell

This seminar is designed to prepare you to teach second language (L2) users in composition courses in higher education. The course will provide a brief introduction to literacies and second language acquisition (SLA), but the main focus will be on learning about the experiences of non-native English speaking students in US university settings and ways of teaching academic literacies to these students. Much of the course will be devoted to researching an academic task/genre and designing activities to teach that task/genre to university level ESL students. Observation of at least two weeks of an ESL class will also be required.

At the end of this course you should be able to:

  • identify differences between first and second language literacy development,
  • identify different types of L2 users and their needs,
  • identify specific ways of supporting L2 users in your classes,
  • understand how genre-based pedagogy can be used to meet the needs of multilingual students,
  • use feedback and assessment techniques that are appropriate for these learners,
  • design and implement a curriculum to teach academic literacies to L2 users.

Required Texts & Materials:

  • Ferris, D. (2011).Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing. University of Michigan Press.
  • Wennerstrom, A. (2004). Discourse Analysis in the Language Classroom, Volume 2, Genres of Writing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

English 548: Seminar in Critical and Cultural Theory

Nishant Shahani

This course will aim to offer students the conceptual and theoretical tools to approach the study of literary and cultural texts through the lens of contemporary scholarly developments in the intersecting fields of gender, race, and sexuality studies. “Theory” as we will explore in this class can be a descriptive analytic: i.e. it can offer a critical vocabulary to analyze or describe social phenomenon, cultural objects, literary texts, and material realities. But of greater importance for the purpose of this seminar will be the performative nature of critical and cultural theory—that is, how can theory create a language to push toward new horizons or to articulate critical possibilities that have yet to be materialized? What epistemological leaps might be needed to unthink categories that have become calcified as natural and normal? How might “theory” function as pedagogic tool of undoing and unlearning?

Given the focus on mobilizing theory as a tool to contravene what we think we already know, the insights of feminist, queer, and critical race theory will play a central role in this class. But given their mutual embeddedness, we will not approach these frameworks through discrete and linear chronologies in which “race” “gender” and “sexuality” supplant or even build off one another. Instead the class will be organized around key terms in critical theory and cultural studies that are central to fields of feminist, queer, and critical race theory. Key terms (and readings associated with them) will include:

  • Neoliberalism (Lisa Duggan The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy)
  • Afro-pessimism (Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being)
  • Abolition (Ruth Gilmore Wilson, Golden Gulag)
  • Biopolitics (Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim)
  • Surveillance (Christina Handhardt, Safe Space)
  • Mobility (Aren Aizura, Mobile Subjects)
  • Animacy (Mel Chen, Animacies)
  • Intersectionality (Jenifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined)
  • Archives (Anjali Arondekar, For the Record)
  • Political Economy (Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism)
  • Fabulation (Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”)
  • Sovereignty (Driskill, Finley, and Gilley, Queer Indigenous Studies)
  • Crisis (Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism)
  • Failure (J. Halberstam The Queer Art of Failure)
  • Disability (Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection)

Work Load:

Students will choose two key terms which they will introduce for the first 15 minutes of class to generate discussion.

  • End of the semester presentation (Week 16) based on the final paper
  • One 20-page final paper where one or more key terms are mobilized in relation to a specific cultural or literary text. The goal of this paper is to think of texts as theoretical placeholders. We will try to move away from trickle-down methods of textual analysis where theory is a discrete entity that is then “applied” to a textual case study.

English/Digital Technology and Culture 560: Critical Theories, Methods, and Practice in the Digital Humanities

Roger Whitson

This course is an interdisciplinary examination of the history, theory, and practice of the digital humanities, particularly how the access to new tools and modalities of thinking are changing humanistic inquiry. Some topics include: histories of the digital humanities, impact of digital technologies on archives and collections, digital inclusions and exclusions, data science and digital humanities, relationship between science fiction and digital humanities, media histories and archaeologies, media infrastructures, digital rhetorics and digital literary studies, ecological impacts of digital technologies, and the intersection between critical theory, digital humanities, and critical making. Students are not expected to be proficient in coding, programming, or any particular digital application – yet some willingness to learn and experiment with new tools is recommended. Some texts include:

  • Amy Earhart, Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (U Michigan Press, 2015).
  • Douglas Eyman, Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (U Michigan Press, 2015).
  • Chen Qiufan, Waste Tide, Trans. Ken Liu (Tor Books, 2019).
  • Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020).
  • Nick Montfort, Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press, 2021).
  • Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2019)
  • Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia UP, 2020).
  • Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka, The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (U Minnesota Press, 2021).

English 590: Research in English Studies

By arrangement

English 590 is a graded independent study designed to provide directed research in English studies for individuals (or small groups) in conjunction with one or more faculty members. English 590 may be taken for 1 credit per semester up to a total of 3 credits altogether. One credit of English 590 is required for the Ph.D. program.

In Option One, the student would prepare least a one-page (typed and double-spaced) bibliography on key primary and secondary works in a specific research field along with a project description or rationale for choosing the works. In Option Two, the student’s work might include not only readings but also a practical exploration of other methods of research, including but not limited to learning statistical methods, working with digital technologies, or gaining experience with editorial work.

For both options, students typically meet with their research mentors once a week and at the outset draw up a memorandum of understanding that delimits the relative proportions of readings, discussion, and, if appropriate, practice, along with a clearly delineated set of standards for assessing quality and progress. The student’s research goals should be the focus of all work undertaken for the project. Under no circumstances may the instructor allow the needs of a larger project (for data collection, coding, and so forth) to supersede the benefit to the student.

All doctoral students must take at least 1 credit of English 590, but no more than 3 credits total are allowed. English 590 is not intended to be a substitute for a viable graduate seminar. M.A. students may take English 590 but might not find the time to do so in their program of study.

Students are encouraged to seek out faculty members to learn their research areas and availability for an English 590.

English 597: Topics in Composition and Rhetoric: Empirical Research Methods in Writing Studies

Johanna Phelps

In this seminar, students will situate their own scholarship within the multiple—sometimes incommensurate— paradigmatic approaches to knowledge construction in Writing Studies. We will discuss methodologies with an emphasis on tools used to successfully design and deploy qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies. We’ll reflect on how these tools can reify systemic oppression of marginalized groups and discuss strategies to ameliorate this in practice. Readings will provide students with an overview of empirical methods buttressed by thoroughgoing discussions of research ethics. As appropriate, invited speakers will visit and share in-progress empirical research to highlight specific methods and/or methodologies. We’ll address topics including justice, fairness, reliability, validity, born-digital tool use, data repositories, reporting findings, data egalitarianism, and big data research. Students will learn strategies to:

  • Design research questions and goals
  • Visually represent research plans and study findings
  • Collect, clean, compile, code, and analyze data
  • Use open source tools and repositories for data storage and analysis
  • Evaluate externalities such as funding and IRB review that can impact research designs

Readings will be no-cost to students. Open access/library available selections include:

  • WAC Clearinghouse entries such as Generalizability and Transferability, Qualitative Research Methods, and Quantitative Research Methods
  • Articles from journals such as CCC, Journal of Writing Analytics, & Written Communication
  • Selections from the following books:
    • Writing Studies Research in Practice
    • Methods and Methodology in Composition Research
    • Retellings: Opportunities for Feminist Research in Rhetoric and Composition Studies
    • Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies
    • Essential Guide to Effect Sizes
    • Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches

Student Workload Component:

  • Reading “Grid”: Students will connect concepts across readings/eras/authors/subdisciplines.
  • Data Collection Method: Students will present, and compose a brief written synthesis of, a data collection strategy or tool.
  • Analytic Method: Students will present, and compose a brief written synthesis of, an analytic method.
  • Data Management Plan: Students will produce a data management plan to ensure longevity and usability of data.
  • Data Analysis: Students will work with extant data to address research questions.
  • Study Design: Students will develop a preliminary project proposal for an empirical research study.
  • Paradigmatic Articulation: Students will articulate their paradigmatic orientation towards Writing Studies research.