Upcoming Semester Courses - Fall 2026

Online

Julianne Newmark, newmark@unm.edu 

A workshop-based graduate-level introductory technical and professional communication course focused on audience and genre analysis, research, and persuasion. Included genres: brochures, instructions, reports.

510.001: Introduction to Critical Theory

Face to Face, T 1600-1830
Carmen Nocentelli, nocent@unm.edu 

What is theory?  Why does it matter, and what do we do with it? This course introduces critical and theoretical tools for analyzing cultural texts, including domains of everyday practice such as the social, the psychic, and the economic. We will begin by considering some thinkers—Plato, Aristotle, Longinus—whose work has been foundational to the field. For the most part, though, we will focus on modern and contemporary theoretical movements (e.g., structuralism, post-structuralism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, etc.) tracking their connections and exploring the dialogue between and among theorists. Our focus will be on learning how to ask the questions that theoretical movements have productively used to analyze culture, as well as on identifying both the potentials and the limits of a given approach. By the end of the course, you will be familiar with a number of critical “moves” you can build on in your writing and thinking.

518.001: Proposal and Grant Writing

Face to Face, TR 1400-1515
Charles Paine, cpaine@unm.edu 

In this course, you will learn how to write persuasive grant proposals. Drawing from the principles of rhetorical analysis, you will learn how to develop a clear statement of need, offer achievable objectives, design logical step-by-step plans, create specific and accurate budgets, and present your organization powerfully. We will explore how to locate appropriate funding opportunities and how to evaluate requests for proposals. We will also discuss methods of writing persuasively that include but also go beyond so-called clarity. We’ll discuss writing and design strategies that are both ethical and effective, and study how to use document design to create a professional proposal package.

This course should be useful for advanced undergraduates who are within a year or two of graduation. It should also be useful for students who are already operating within a professional setting where proposals are important and who want to enhance their understanding of how proposals work, how to critique them and how to write them more effectively.

520.001: T: Blue Mesa Review I

Face to Face, MWF 1100-1150
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.

This course is the gateway to becoming an editor for BMR, and is a course that can be taken multiple times for credit.

To enroll in the class, send an email to Dr. Clark at clarkmp@unm.edu briefly detailing your literary interests and aspirations, and include your Banner ID number.

521.001: Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction

Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Daniel Mueller, dmueller@unm.edu 

In this course, we’ll discuss fiction written by writers enrolled in this Graduate Workshop. Additionally, MFA students will recommend fiction for us to read and discuss. Writers should expect to develop their critical faculties, understanding of craft, and repertoire of narrative strategies. A final portfolio will be due at the end of the semester, representing each writer’s best, polished work. 

522.001: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry

Face to Face, T 1600-1830
TBD

This course is a graduate level workshop in poetry. More information about this course is to come. 

530.001: Teaching Composition

Face to Face, MTWRF 0900-1300 (08/10/26 - 08/14/26)

Lab, TR 0930-1045 (08/17/26 - 12/12/26)

Stephen Benz, sbenz@unm.edu

This course is designed for new teachers in UNM's Core Writing Program. We begin the week before the start of the fall semester with an overview of the goals, values, and student outcomes of the Core Writing Program. We will also review course materials for the semester and develop initial lesson plans so that you can hit the ground running. During the semester, the course will focus on issues related to your professional development as a teacher of diverse student writers. In addition to discussing selected readings on pedagogy, this course offers practical mentoring through classroom observation and feedback on the development of classroom materials.

534.001: Composition Theory

Face to Face, R 1600-1830

Cristyn Elder, celder@unm.edu 

Although a relatively young discipline, Composition Studies has a rich history with many areas of inquiry that influence the work we do as writers and as teachers of writing. In this course, we will read and discuss theories of audience, invention, genre, argument, voice, process, collaboration, multilingual writing, and multimodal composition, among others, published as articles and book chapters over the past several decades. By the end of the course, students should emerge with a broad understanding of various theories circulating in composition and have the understanding necessary to pursue further work in a particular area as well as how these theories might inform your own pedagogy and practice. Class work will include weekly readings, responses, and activities. For the major writing assignments, you will have the opportunity to apply the topics covered in class to your current (or future) teaching and research contexts. These assignments may take many forms, dependent on your interests and goals, including a literature review, program research, course development, an exploratory or pilot study, a book review for publication, a detailed research proposal, and others you might suggest.

550.001: T: Medieval French Borderlands

Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Nahir Otano Gracia, nahir@unm.edu 

This course helps prepare graduate students to explore how language, politics, and power are represented in the rich and still under-researched francophone corpus (c. 1000 literary texts and large bodies of documentary records) composed and/or circulating in the medieval French borderlands (England, Iberia, Italy, and so forth) from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. As Sharon Kinoshita points out “many of the best-known works of medieval French literature take place on or beyond the borders of ‘France’ or even the French-speaking world.” Because French was one of the most powerful languages of the Middle Ages, used in literature, governance, and culture as well as in government, trade, and other professions, understanding francophone literary culture changes our paradigms of medieval literary history and prompts new thoughts about the relations between literature, language, and power. We will focus on close readings of texts such as Chanson de Roland, the Lais of Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès, and Guy of Warwick as well as Chroniclers, Historical Records, among other texts to explore the interconnections between language, power, and the multicultural/multilingual realities of Europe. Ultimately, we strive to move away from models that prioritize the notions of one language, one nation, and one literature into the multilingual models exemplified by borderland theories and the global middle ages. The course combines a weekly linguistic practicum with a literary seminar to help students gain a rudimentary knowledge of Old French as they enjoy Old French literature.

552.001: The Renaissance: Disability Studies and Early Modern English Literature

Face to Face, W 1600-1830
Marissa Greenberg, marissag@unm.edu

Alongside some of the foundational texts in literature and disability studies, this course will discuss a range of materials, from poetry and drama to medico-philosophical treatises and cookbooks, to examine the aesthetic, ethical, and cultural work performed by representations of disability in early modern England. Our approach will be intersectional in acknowledgement of the premodern histories of (re)production, trade, technology, and health (and) care disparity that shaped the lives of individuals with disabilities and their literary representations. Students will be welcome to draw connections between disability in the early modern imaginary and other literatures and between the academic study of literature and disability and community activism in and beyond institutions of higher education.

557.001: Victorian Studies

Face to Face, MW 1400-1515
Aeron Haynie, ahaynie@unm.edu

568.001: T: C19 American Gothic

Face to Face, T 1600-1830
Jesse Aleman, jman@unm.edu

This seminar-style course focuses on the emergence of the American gothic in literary and cultural production during the long nineteenth-century. The course will study the emergence of the gothic across different literary and expressive forms, including art and architecture; the rise of the asylum and cultures of the dead; pseudo-science and slavery; and empire and environmentalism. We’ll begin with the critical position that race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect in the gothic, but we’ll also underscore how such intersectionality produces forms of the gothic specific to the United States and its formation between the 1770s-1900s. Here, we’ll encounter the indigenous, domestic, and eco gothics, alongside the hauntologies of slavery, sexuality, and racial mixing and the horrors of class, conquest, and expansionism in emergent US literary forms such as folklore, short fiction, and the novel—all three of which proved to be formative expressive vehicles for the US’s gothic literary tradition. The usual specters will appear on our reading list—Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Chopin, and Alcott—alongside indigenous folktexts and emergent African American gothic pieces by Collins, Harper, and Chesnutt, to name a few. Weekly readings will also include recommended secondary works on the history, theories, and critical movements of the American gothic as a growing subfield of American literary studies.

574.001: Contemporary Southwest Literature

Face to Face, W 1600-1830
Melina Vizcaino-Aleman, mviz@unm.edu 

This course is a study of contemporary Southwestern literature and focuses on Native and Chicanx narratives about the region. We pay close attention to the ways Native and Chicanx artists and writers reconceive the region in written and visual narratives that include poetry, fiction, murals, music, and installation art. Students will learn about the major Native and Chicanx artists and writers of the region and visit local museums and other public sites to consider the literature alongside the murals, paintings, photography, and other forms of visual culture that constellate the class. Course readings include twentieth-century poetry and fiction, as well as critical readings in Southwest, Indigenous and Chicanx studies that rethink the Southwest and its settler colonial pasts. The course also includes both feature and short films by mainstream and independent filmmakers, as well as painting, pottery, mixed media, and other experimental visual art forms. Students will learn about key writers, artists, and filmmakers whose work is tied to the region, and they will become familiar with critical research methods and tools in Indigenous and Chicanx studies.

586.001: British Fiction

Face to Face, R 1600-1830
Sarah Townsend, sltownse@unm.edu

Do discontent and survival have a distinct literary style? In this course, we’ll attempt to answer that question by delving into fiction published since 2000 by British and Irish writers who challenge traditional structures of literary prestige and gatekeeping. The readings will center on upstarts—women, immigrant, minority, queer, and working-class writers—whose novels and short fiction chafe against the worlds they and their characters have inherited. Part of our investigations will be formal and thematic, as we track through discussion and written assignments how authors respond to the pervasive threats of our day, whether cosmic or local. The worlds depicted in the novels and shorter fiction we will read are shaped by phenomena like climate change, geopolitical violence, broken institutions, intergenerational trauma, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and mental health crises—but they are not defined by them. This course invites you to read these works as survival manuals of sorts: beautiful reminders of how to be human and find joy in spite of the wreckage.

Another aspect of our course will consider how fiction is produced, circulated, and judged in the twenty-first century. We will examine topics like the elevated status of genre fiction, the critical reception of non-“traditional” authors, and the people and institutions that are changing the consumption patterns of today’s readers, from indie presses to social media, fan fiction, review sites like Goodreads, celebrity book clubs, and more. We will also turn the spotlight on ourselves through regular reading logs that track our reading technologies and habits, allowing us to reflect thoughtfully on how we and our contemporaries read today—and what that forecasts about the future of reading. Finally, we will spend a lot of time this semester looking at how authors use ordinary structures and units of language to create a voice and affect that is uniquely theirs. Together, we will develop a vocabulary for describing how authors construct worlds and how they make readers feel, trying to identify what it is about their writing that cannot be reproduced by an algorithm.

587.001: T: Experiments in Genre

Face to Face, R 1600-1830
Gregory Martin, gmartin@unm.edu 

Experiments in Genre is a graduate craft seminar for creative writers in fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction about literature that intentionally and provocatively challenges genre conventions and that bookstores and libraries don’t quite know where to shelve. What kind of book is this? Is this fiction or autofiction or memoir? A booklength lyric essay? Do the differences matter? How much and to whom? Together, we will explore the experiments writers make within and between genres. We will look at how writers, implicitly and explicitly, manipulate the reader’s desire for the relative safety of categories and convention. The course is also practical. Each week we ask the questions: How was this made? How does this work? What is its design? What are its organizing principles? How does an understanding of its construction shape my own work and sensibility, and inform my ambition?

587.002: T: C20 Epic Poetry

Face to Face, W 1600-1830
Matthew Hofer, mrh@unm.edu 

This course considers the evolution of the “American Epic” from the twentieth century into the early twenty-first. Moving away from the Homeric model of a foundational narrative poem as well as the Virgilian model of national celebration, these monumental works redefine the poem as an inclusive, often fractured “field” capable of containing history, economics, and the sundry detritus of the local.

Together we will analyze how these poets contend—conceptually, structurally, and formally—with the impossibility of totality, seeking to write a “poem including history” while navigating both the limitations of language and the ethical demands of the archive.

Although the syllabus is not yet finalized, the class is likely to be organized around four crucial texts that represent radical shifts in poetic practice:

William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Louis Zukofsky, A

Charles Olson, Maximus

M. NorbeSe Philip, Zong

*While all are welcome, this is neither an introduction to poetry or meant to be a first class in it.

660.001: SEM: Native Literary Criticism

Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Sarah Hernandez, hernands@unm.edu