Upcoming Semester Courses - Spring 2026

500.001: Introduction to the Professional Study of English

Face to Face, TR 1230-1345
Sarah Townsend, sltownse@unm.edu

This course prepares M.A. and Ph.D. students in English for graduate study and professionalization. The first unit of the course will trace the stages of a graduate career in English. Our focus will be on professionalization, and students will develop skills and strategies aimed at preparing them to succeed in each phase of a graduate career, from coursework and graduate-level research to qualifying exams, thesis/dissertation, conferences, publications, pedagogy, the job search (both academic and alt-ac), and more. Advanced graduate students, faculty, librarians, dissertation coaches, and consultants will also share their expertise. The second unit of the course will reflect historically and philosophically upon English as a discipline and academia as a profession. The focus will be on interrogating our shared assumptions about the practices we implement (writing, pedagogy, critique) and the values we seek to foster in our scholarly work (accessibility, collegiality, mindfulness, and joy). By reexamining our textual objects of inquiry, considering the relationship between scholarship and teaching, and contemplating the changing nature of academic labor and the university workplace, the course will prepare students to navigate their graduate degrees and professional careers with knowledge and purpose. You will be guided throughout the semester by a first-generation college and graduate student turned tenured professor who is committed to demystifying academia so that everyone has a fair shot at succeeding in it.

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.

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 this course, send an email to Dr. Clark at clarkmp@unm.edu briefly detailing your literary interests and aspirations, and include your Banner ID number.

522.001: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry

Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Lisa Chavez, ldchavez@unm.edu 

This graduate workshop in poetry will focus on generating new material and revising poems in progress.  While much of the class will be focused on workshopping student poems, we will also read and discuss a variety of books by contemporary poets, including new books by poets connected to UNM. We willl do some writing exercises in class, as well as try out some revision techniques, and read a lot of poetry, including a novel in verse. Those who work primarily in other genres, but who are interested in poetry, are welcome! 

523.001: Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction

Face to Face, T 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 organization of a piece.

532.001: Teaching Multimodal and Online Composition

Face to Face, TR 930-1045
Julianne Newmark Engberg, newmark@unm.edu
Tiffany Bourelle, tbourell@unm.edu

535.001: Ethics in Technical and Professional Communication

Online
Tiffany Bourelle, tbourell@unm.edu

From the title of this course, you know that we will be examining ethics in technical communication. But as you’ll learn, the idea of ethics is complicated, and we’ll further complicate and problematize the definition(s). The course readings will be grounded in foundational rhetoric as well as newer theories, and we’ll read about and consider ethics through a frame of social justice. In other words, the course will focus on who the idea(s) of ethics serves, who it oppresses, and who it leaves out. In this class, we will consider ethics from a variety of angles, looking at communication and reviewing cases where documents, activities, and technologies have impacted people, places, and the environment; these cases will explore local and global ramifications. Finally, we will look at social justice theory to inform our research where we will analyze documents that may impact or have impacted communities in which we are a part or are familiar. 

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. Course projects include examining the rules that govern our language use, studying nonstandard language conventions, analyzing our own and others’ academic writing, and creating a call for action in response to language bias and the politics of language. 

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 understanding 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 touching upon the medieval and renaissance periods as well. 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.

548.001: T: Beowulf in Old English

Face to Face, TR 1400-1515
Jonathan Davis-Secord, jwds@unm.edu 

Beowulf is the most celebrated and studied Old English poem, yet it remains ambiguous and contested. Modern scholars continue to scrutinize difficult points in the text and wrestle over approaches to the poem. This course will be devoted to a close reading of Beowulf in the original Old English. We will explore the roles of women in the text, the meanings of the “monsters,” the patterns of gift-giving, the linguistic intricacies of the text, queer identities, racial identities, and many other topics. Students will prepare translations of the poem, read secondary literature, and complete writing assignments for the semester. Prerequisite: Knowledge of Old English.

553.001: The 17th Century: Milton in America

Face to Face, F 1400-1515
Online M 1400-1515
Marissa Greenberg, marissag@unm.edu 

What do Ursula K. Le Guin, John Muir, and Phillis Wheatley have in common? Each found inspiration in the writings of John Milton, the seventeenth-century English poet and polemicist. Milton is best known as the creator of Paradise Lost, an epic retelling of the biblical book of Genesis; but he also wrote poetry and prose that reflect on religious faith and freedom of expression, political revolution and disappointment, inherited privilege and acquired disability. Milton’s writings, especially but not only Paradise Lost, have profoundly influenced generations of artists and activists around the globe.

In this course, we will focus on Milton’s adapters and interlocutors in the United States. Our readings will include Paradise Lost and a selection of his other writings, such as “When I consider how my light is spent,” A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (a.k.a., Comus), Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, and excerpts from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Students will participate in the selection of Miltonic adaptations and responses. Possibilities include Ronald Johnson, Radi os; Ursula K. Le Guin, Paradises Lost; Toni Morrison, Paradise; John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf; Samuel A. Taylor, Sabrina Fair; Mark Twain, The Diaries of Adam and Eve; Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral; and lyric and prose poems by Daisy Fried, Gary Snyder, and Monica Youn.

This course will be conducted fully online through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous meetings. Knowledge of Milton’s writings or early modern English literature is not required, although familiarity with either/both will be helpful. Students who have not studied Paradise Lost previously are strongly encouraged to read it over winter break. For more information and recommendations for other ways to prepare for this class, contact Professor Greenberg at the email address listed above.

568.001: T: Mark Twain and America’s Misadventure with Race

Face to Face, R 1600-1830
Finnie Coleman, coleman@unm.edu

This course examines Mark Twain’s complex and often conflicted constructions of “Blackness,” situating his work within broader late nineteenth-century debates about race, Jim Crow, slavery’s afterlives, and the cultural, social, and political architecture of White Supremacy. We begin by tracing the stock archetypes of Black representation from “Bobalition” broadsides to images of Blackness popularized by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) helped fix the sentimental and racial imagination of antebellum America. We then explore how these figures were challenged and reimagined by Black writers including William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Frances E. W. Harper, and Sutton E. Griggs, whose works sought to reclaim narrative authority and reconfigure the moral discourse of race. The heart of the course turns to Twain’s fiction and its entanglements with the visual and performative cultures of his time – especially the American Minstrel Show. We will read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in tandem with Percival Everett’s James (2024), a contemporary reimagining that restores Jim’s voice and subjectivity, as well as Sociable Jimmy and Pudd’nhead Wilson, texts that stage race, identity, and classification through satire and irony. Considerable attention will be given to the troubled history of Blackface minstrelsy, E. W. Kemble’s illustrations, and the struggle for control of the public image of Blackness in the late nineteenth century. Through these case studies, we will interrogate how Twain’s humor both exposes and participates in the racial fictions of his age. Readings from Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract will ground our theoretical exploration of race and power, while excerpts from Charles Chesnutt, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and Sutton E. Griggs will contextualize Twain’s negotiations of race within a broader literary field of Black and White contemporaries. Drawing on the scholarship of Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stephen Railton, and Eric Lott, students will analyze the ideological work of satire, sentimentality, and performance in shaping the American racial imaginary. Ultimately, this course contends that Twain’s writings—and their modern reinterpretations—offer a vital framework for understanding how the cultural logic of minstrelsy continues to inform debates over Blackness and representation in American literature, film, and popular culture.

581.001: Chaucer and the Comic Tradition

Face to Face, R 1600-1830
Anita Obermeier, aobermei@unm.edu 

One of the amazing aspects of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ample oeuvre is its incredible breadth of genres and forms, hardly ever seen in any other author in the English language. Chaucer is a master of the lyric, romance, saint’s life, fabliaux, prose treatise, lyric complaint, short story, and satire. The anthologized Chaucerian texts are mostly the ones that contain comedy and make people laugh. In this class, we will focus on the comic forms and the social commentary they often convey. Since Chaucer is a well-read polyglot, we will also examine works that he knew and that might have influenced him, such as troubadour lyrics, the Romance of the Rose, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. In our inquiries, we will enlist ancient, medieval, and modern theories of the comic.

587.001: T: Mystery and Thriller Writing

Face to Face, W 1600-1830
Andrew Bourelle, abourelle@unm.edu 

Ever wanted to get away with murder (in your writing, that is)?

Mystery and thriller fiction encompasses detective stories, police procedurals, noir, heist stories, other types of action and suspense, and literary stories wherein crime is the central focus. Students in English 587 will read contemporary mystery novels and short stories, studying them through the lens of creative writing. In other words, you’ll be reading mystery and thriller fiction with the intention of learning how to write it.

Even if students don’t aspire to be mystery/thriller writers, the class can still be valuable, as our discussions on plot, structure, point of view, character, and narrative voice should help writers develop their craft. A mystery/thriller story is designed to build and maintain suspense—to keep readers turning pages. It’s my hope that closely studying page-turning stories will help expand the writer’s toolbox of all students in the class regardless of their genre focus.

592.001: Teaching Literature and Literary Studies

Face to Face, TR 1100-1215
Aeron Haynie, ahaynie@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.

My 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. We will also examine ways that teaching literature is impacted by AI.

610.001: SEM: Frankfurt School

Face to Face, W 1600-1830
Scarlett Higgins, shiggins@unm.edu

The term “Critical Theory” refers to the work of several generations of German theorists known as the Frankfurt School. This group of theorists distinguished their work from other theorists' in that it directly sought human emancipation. Critical Theorists claim that social inquiry ought to combine rather than separate the pole of philosophy with those of the social sciences and humanities so that their philosophical work can be practical in a moral/ethical (rather than instrumental) sense. Thus the work of the Frankfurt School's theorists can importantly be seen as the beginning of the trend toward interdisciplinarity.

This graduate seminar will begin with an exploration of Critical Theory with the most prominent members of the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin--who was not technically a member of the Frankfurt School), and continue through the work of Jürgen Habermas, among their most significant inheritors. The second half of the semester will focus on public sphere theories, jumping off from the work of Habermas into interventions by feminist and queer theorists.

Assignments will include weekly discussion questions and in class presentations, as well as a self-designed final project.

660.001: SEM: Southwest Desert Writers

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

This seminar in American literature focuses on the desert and desert writers of the Southwest. We begin with critical readings about the desert as a metaphoric space and actual place in the American and Southwestern cultural imaginary, and we discuss recent scholarship that looks at local and global expressions of desert people and places. This course takes a desert approach to the Southwest and focuses on twentieth century and contemporary writers whose work explores the borders of race, class, sex, and gender in desert modes and methods of expression. We discuss the desert humanities and the Southwest as respective fields of study and bring them together to build a collective understanding of the topic. We begin with Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación/The Account to frame the desert Southwest and give meaning to the multilingual and colonial histories that inform twentieth-century Chicanx and Indigenous writings of the region. We also read Scott Slovic’s Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest, as well as familiar environmental writers like Mary Austin, Edward Abbey, and Terry Tempest Williams alongside the lesser-known work of Alice Corbin Henderson, Chicana poets Pat Mora and Gloria Anzaldúa, Native poets Ofelia Zepeda and Natalie Diaz, Japanese American poet Mary Oishi, and fiction writers Ana Castillo, Denise Chávez, and David Meischen. Students gain a deep desert perspective of the twentieth century and contemporary Southwest desert writers, and they develop a writing project using critical thinking, scholarship, library tools and digital resources. Readings and discussions create a collective understanding of the topic, and students build new knowledge about the desert Southwest through research-based projects that utilize best scholarly, ethical and critical practices.

680.001: SEM: The Poetry Canon

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

This seminar on the poetry canon is intended for graduate students—including creative writers—who wish to develop a more comprehensive understanding of literary history, with specific reference to poetry (mostly lyric), from the Renaissance through the present.

This goal, while ambitious, should not be daunting. No prior experience of poetry is required or expected. Week by week we will discuss the contributions of particular periods by way of their most representative and influential contributions to the art of poetry. Students will present a brief synopsis, at the beginning of each session, of the salient features of a given style as well as its enduring significance for later writers.

The first part of the seminar will cover the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and its second part turns to modern and contemporary poetry.

• Renaissance (1 week)
• Restoration (1 week)
• Augustan (1 week)
• Romanticism (2 weeks)
• Victorian/Edwardian (1 week)
• Modern (2 weeks)
• Late Modern (3 weeks)
• Postmodern/Contemporary (3 weeks)

So: the first quarter-to-third of the class will be all British poets, after which our attention will be split between the U.S. and U.K. in a way that may somewhat favor American poets (or so I anticipate).

For each session we will read 20-25 pages of poems, typically individual lyrics of modest length, as well as, say, 10-12 pages of explication (to be adapted as needed or desired). Most of our material is available in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, with supplements taken from online sources or posted to Canvas, as needed.

Required Texts*

• The Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th ed.)
• The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed.)

*New copies of both texts come to approximately $80 and $50, respectively, on amazon.com; used copies should be even more affordable, by as much as half, if you act quickly.