Spring 2024 Course Descriptions
500.001: Introduction to the Professional Study of English
Face to Face, TR 1230-1345
Belinda Wallace, bwallace@unm.edu
This course prepares graduate students for graduate literary study and professionalization. Students will develop skills and strategies aimed at preparing them to succeed at each level of a graduate career, from coursework and graduate-level research to qualifying exams, dissertation, archival work, conferences, publications, pedagogy, fellowships, job applications, and more. The assignments and readings aim not only to impart practical approaches to graduate study and professionalization, but also to facilitate students’ historical and theoretical understanding of English as a profession. The course will conclude by considering recent transformations in the profession, from the digital turn to changes in pedagogy, professional work (including “alt-ac” careers), and the place of humanities in the university.
502.001: Technical and Professional Communication
Online
Stephen Benz, sbenz@unm.edu
An online course, ENGL 502 introduces you to the practices and procedures of professional writing and editing. You will learn about expository writing style, persuasion, audience analysis, genre analysis, and document design. Projects in this course will guide you through the process of document development and introduce you to the most common genres of workplace writing. These projects are designed to help you create material for a portfolio you can use when looking for an internship or employment in the field. Following the workshop model commonly used in creative writing courses, this course gives you the opportunity to share your work with a representative audience, your fellow classmates, who will provide you with evaluative responses and feedback.
513.001: Scientific Environmental Medical Writing
Online
Julie Newmark, newmark@unm.edu
ENGL 513 will focus on scientific, medical, and environmental writing and will be a project-based course, meaning that students will be designing texts and multi-media presentations around a subject of their choosing, a subject currently of interest to environmentalists, scientists, medical researchers, and the public (and of course to public intellectuals, citizens, and politicians). We will examine the tactics and structures of popular and field-specific scientific, medical, and environmental writing and we will consider how these texts (audio, print-based, film) make the arguments they make (what their rhetorical appeals are). We will engage with the texts we read in many forms, including via letters to the editor, article critiques, "popular science" essays, scientific abstracts and précis, and more.
520.001: T: Blue Mesa Review II
Face to Face MWF, 1400-1450
Marisa Clark, clarkmp@unm.edu
This class introduces you to the production of UNM’s national literary magazine, Blue Mesa Review. We receive hundreds of submissions each year from writers hoping to see their stories, essays, or poems published in our journal. Your primary responsibility is to assess these submissions for possible publication in BMR. In addition, you will keep a log about your participation reading submissions, write a couple of short papers (maybe a blog post or book review for BMR's website), and engage in discussions that arise from the submissions we receive. Understanding how literary magazines work can be of great value for writers; not only can it help you improve your own writing, but it can focus your editorial sensibilities as well as help you learn more about the submission and publication process.
If you're interested in the class, talk to other grad students who have taken it; talk to the current editors! They'll give you more insight about how the class works and what to expect overall. You can talk to me too, of course. This class is also the gateway to becoming an editor for BMR.
To enroll in the class, send an email to Dr. Clark at clarkmp@unm.edu briefly detailing your literary interests and aspirations, as well as your Banner ID number.
521.001: Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
Face to Face, W 1600-1830
Andrew Bourelle, abourelle@unm.edu
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
--Stephen King
In English 521, students will read a lot and write a lot, as Stephen King suggests, but we will take this practice one step further. Students will read a lot and write a lot together, helping each other through critique, discussion, and support. The class will address fiction in general but will focus specifically on short stories. Students will write, read, analyze, and discuss a variety of short stories in an exploration into the realm of possibilities available in fiction writing. Class discussions will address plot, point of view, character, conflict, setting, style, syntax, and more. Students will write and workshop at least two of their own stories, with classmates providing substantive written feedback as well as engaging in comprehensive discussions about the students’ work. By reading a lot and writing a lot—and doing so in a guided and supportive environment— students will be able to continue to develop their skills, craft, and processes for writing fiction.
523.001: Creative Writing Workshop: Non-Fiction
Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Stephen Benz, sbenz@unm.edu
This graduate workshop in the writing of narrative nonfiction will focus, as workshops are designed to do, on student writing. Each participant will have multiple opportunities throughout the semester to share work with the other members of the workshop and receive feedback from peers. All varieties of narrative nonfiction are welcome, including memoirs, essays, travel writing, journalism, and micro/flash nonfiction. Beyond the workshopping of nonfiction pieces, the course will survey, through readings, the history of the essay as a genre, with the goal of discovering how that history can inform the work of nonfiction writers today. In our discussions, we will pay attention to craft and style, homing in on the decisions that writers make about diction, sentence structure, paragraphing, and the overall organic organization of a piece.
532.001: Multimodal and Online Pedagogies
Face to Face, TR 1100-1215
Tiffany Bourelle, tbourell@unm.edu
The theme for this course is composition in the digital era, defined as “a rhetorical communication process in which both thought and expression are engaged and in which various alphabetic, spoken, and digital modes are used to invent, create, arrange, and deliver a product to readers or viewers in digitally enabled media and print” (Hewett, Bourelle, and Warnock 4). As twenty-first-century educators, you are faced with the challenge of learning to teach students to communicate using technology; simultaneously, there is the expectation that you, as the instructor, also understand how to communicate and teach using similar technology. Added to that is the expectation of using that technology to teach within various environments (face-to-face, remote/hybrid, and fully online, to name a few). To help you through what might seem like an overwhelming task, this class will focus on teaching you the principles of online literacy instruction (OLI), which suggests that all composition instruction is now fused with digitality and multiliteracies. The principles of OLI are connected to and infused with practices of inclusion, access, equity, communication, and dialogue, and as such, the class will also focus on these important concepts as interwoven with the theme of composition in the digital era.
Specifically, this course will prepare you to teach in a multitude of environments, focusing on how best practices of OLI can be helpful for teaching in all environments regardless of modality. The class will help you understand the best practices of designing an online course, facilitating course discussions, holding online conferences, and providing feedback on digital projects students create. In addition, the class will also be practical, as you will develop your own course shell to teach in the subsequent semester (if you are eligible). This course design can be beneficial for all teaching environments, regardless of modality.
Perhaps more importantly, you will learn these concepts while immersed in the various environments in which you might teach, which is also an argument put forth by OLI scholars (see Hewett and Ehmann, 2004; 2014). You will learn the best practices of teaching digital composition within each teaching environment or modality, while also experiencing, firsthand, what your own students will experience in the classes you subsequently teach. Immersion in this class includes professional development within traditional onsite, remote/hybrid, and fully online environments. In other words, based on best practices for training instructors to develop their digital composition pedagogies, this course will be offered through various modalities: the first third of the class will be onsite, the second remote/hybrid, and the third fully online. You will learn the best practices of teaching digital composition within each teaching environment or modality, while also experiencing, firsthand, what your own students will experience in the classes you subsequently teach.
541.001: English Grammars
Face to Face, TR 1400-1515
Bethany Davila, bdavila@unm.edu
Studying grammar doesn’t have to be boring! This course helps students approach the study of grammar from different perspectives, all while attending to language politics, language attitudes, and language use. Projects include examining the rules that govern our language use, studying nonstandard language conventions, analyzing our own and others’ academic writing, and creating a public-facing response to linguistic injustice.
542.001: Major Texts in Rhetoric
Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Andrew Bourelle, abourelle@unm.edu
Modern society has changed significantly since the ancient Greek and Roman world. The emphasis on orality as the primary means of communication has long since been abandoned in favor of writing and, more recently, multimedia communication. But the concepts established during antiquity helped shape our current theories of education and communication. Students in English 542 will explore the history and theory of rhetoric, focusing on the foundations of rhetoric developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans. While the course will provide a historical survey of major texts, the class will focus on the applicability of classical rhetoric to students' modern lives.
547.001: Old English
Face to Face, MWF 1100-1150
Nicholas Schwartz, nschwar@unm.edu
This course will introduce students to the most ancient form of English, Old English, which was the dominant language in England from c. 600-c. 1100 CE. Students will learn Old English grammar, vocabulary, and a number of changes that affected the language’s pronunciation and written appearance. This course will also delve into Early England’s rich literature and history. Students should expect to take quizzes and exams in addition to completing various homework assignments. These assignments will include readings, grammar exercises, and translations of Old English texts. No prior experience with Old English or linguistics is required. All are welcome to take this course.
551.001: Paleography and Codicology
Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Timothy Graham, tgraham@unm.edu
This course will provide a comprehensive introduction to the culture of medieval manuscript production and the evolution of western European scripts. Before the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, historical and literary texts were transmitted in handwritten format, each manuscript being a unique artifact. The course will consider the entire process of manuscript production, which began with the preparation of parchment from animal skins and continued through the stages of writing, decorating, correcting, and glossing the text to end with the binding of the completed codex. The course will include a thorough survey of Latin scripts from the fifth to the fifteenth century, and students will receive training in how to read and transcribe those scripts accurately. Medieval conventions of abbreviation and punctuation will be the subject of special study, as will the decoration and illustration of selected major illuminated manuscripts. Students will be expected to complete regular transcription assignments; there will be a final examination. A basic reading knowledge of Latin (to 200 level or higher) is a desideratum and will help students to derive maximum benefit from the course.
555.001: Wigging Out: Tirades, Trolls, and Targets in 18th-Century Social Media
Face to Face, W 1630-1900
John Knapp, jwknapp@unm.edu
So much for the eighteenth-century being the age of reason and politeness! Actually, Britain at this time was eerily similar to our own culture—with all kinds of people indulging (or wigging out) in a seemingly endless stream of gossipy, cruel, distasteful, intolerant, even repugnant attacks on each other. This seminar-style course explores many of these attacks and counterattacks, and it considers the perspectives of both trolls and targets, in context and across genres (verse, novels, plays, essays, periodical writing, satiric prints). We'll treat topics related to gender and sexuality, politics and partisanship, celebrity feuds, poverty and crime, high-and low-brow culture, and more. Well-known names such as Pope, Swift, and Hogarth share the spotlight with brilliant, lesser-known figures, men and women alike. Assignments in this cross-listed course range from short written responses and reading quizzes to expanded academic arguments and perhaps a comparative project and presentation. Regular active participation in discussion is a must.
561.001: American Romanticism
Face to Face, MW 1400-1515
Kathryn Wichelns, wichelns@unm.edu
Joseph Conrad wrote about his own work, "Above all I want to make you see." In this seminar-style course, we'll explore the wide variety of ways that writers have used images not just as appeals to vision but as structural attributes of narratives. The reading list will include poems, stories, essays, and novels from the Modernist and Post-Modernist eras.
564.001: Advanced Study of Native American and Indigenous Literature
Face to Face, T 1600-1830
Sarah Hernandez, hernands@unm.edu
This advanced course on Native American and Indigenous Literature centers on contemporary Native American fiction and non-fiction. Many contemporary Native American writers are mixed-genre writers who use multiple forms of expression to explore issues and ideas that are relevant to contemporary tribal communities. This semester we will examine how contemporary Native/Indigenous writers use both literature and literary criticism to address some of the most pressing issues facing tribal nations today including: #MMIW, Landback, LGBT+ rights, boarding schools trauma, treaty rights, and sovereignty. Students will read literature and literary criticism by contemporary Native/Indigenous writers and scholars from a variety of tribal backgrounds and regions including: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Daniel Heath Justice, Beth Piatote, Jake Skeets, and Taté Walker to name a few. We will analyze and discuss these writers in their specific cultural/historical contexts, and start to examine some of their shared thematic concerns and literary strategies.
587.001: Light and Writing
Face to Face, T 1600-1830
Greg Martin, gmartin@unm.edu
This is a craft seminar for creative writers and for photographers which examines the intersection between photography and literature, particularly looking at hybrid books and texts which combine these mediums. The class is cross-listed with ARTS 429, a graduate course in the College of Fine Arts for photographers taught by Meggan Gould. Together, we will discuss and explore aspects of the creative process that artists of different disciplines share, as well as aspects where they diverge. We’ll explore the ways in which artists combine mediums to provoke and subvert and challenge reader’s expectations and understanding of what a story or essay or meditation or photograph might be and how this changes due to juxtaposition with a different form. We will be looking for models, looking to be influenced, seeking to expand our aesthetic sensibility and sense of what’s possible. Each week we ask the questions: How was this made? How does this work? How does an understanding of this work shape my own work-in-progress and fuel my ambition?
592.001: Teaching Literature and Literary Studies
Online
Aeron Haynie, ahaynie@unm.edu
Stephanie Spong, sdspong@unm.edu
Why do we think that reading and studying literature is important and how are we communicating this to our students, particularly students in introductory courses? What are our “natural” ways of teaching literature, and do we know that these are the most effective? There has been much conversation within literary studies about diversity and inclusion; however, often these conversations focus on what we teach rather than how we teach.
Our intention is for this course to be an intellectually engaging conversation about literary pedagogy, a hands-on practicum for developing teaching skills, and a way for you to prepare materials for your future job search. Although we will focus on the pedagogy of literary studies, we will also examine general recent research about how students learn. How might the teaching of literature benefit from some of the insights this new research provides?
598.001: Graduate Internship
Online
Tiffany Bourelle, tbourell@unm.edu
The graduate internship in Professional and Technical Communication will prepare graduates to write in technical and other professional settings and/or to pursue doctoral work in the field.
660.001: SEM: Hempispheric American Literature
Face to Face, R 1600-1830
Bernadine Hernandez, berna18@unm.edu
From Walt Whitman’s influence on Latin American revolutionary poetics to the influence and affinities between Edgar Allan Poe and several writers of the Río de la Plata region—Argentina and Uruguay—of South America, this class will examine, interrogate, and analyze Nineteenth Century Inter Hermispheric American Literatures between the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean, We will examine and interrogate how texts form, circulate, and mitigate by focusing on several zones of contact and discussing the ways in which major and minor genres - the novel, travel narratives, short stories, political essays, and poetry– knit the extended Americas together in complex narratives of interdependence. Focusing on how literature produces meaning through the interconnected relations of different sites in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean. First, we will examine and interrogate the field of Inter Hemispheric American literature and what is at stake in de-centering the U.S. Secondly, we will examine how the complexities of multilingualism, competing nationalisms/colonial powers, ethnic, and racial differentiations, migrations, and U.S. expansion and imperialism inform robust literary readings that take into consideration a literary history of culture, politics, production, and form. Authors we will examine are Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, as well as political essays, poetry, periodicals, short stories in translation from Spanish authors, like José Martí, Leopoldo Lugones, Juan Francisco Manzano, and Jorge Isaacs.
680.001: SEM: The English Arthur and Empire
Face to Face, R 1600-1830
Anita Obermeier, aobermei@unm.edu
For many, King Arthur is the quintessential medieval British hero. This notion belies the fact that Arthur is a Celtic hero who had his genesis in a Latin chronicle and his major development in French romances. This seminar is going to examine the premier Middle English Arthurian works that feature a primarily English Arthur: the Arthur section of Layamon’s Brut and the Alliterative Morte. In contrast to those, we will also examine the Stanzaic Morte and read Malory’s entire Morte Darthur as well as smaller pieces. We will explore thematic, historical, nationalistic, as well as poetic concerns, as several works belong to the alliterative tradition, to demonstrate how medieval English authors over a three-hundred-year period utilize the Arthurian myths to express their developing sense of Englishness.
