Upcoming Semester Courses - Spring 2027

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.

511.001: Ecocriticism

Face to Face, W 1600-1830
Lisa Myers, myersl@unm.edu 

This course introduces students to the major theories and practices of environmental criticism, or ecocriticism. The course focuses on the interaction between literature and the environment, and we will examine the ways in which a variety of texts and authors approach the natural world. We will read key theoretical texts and consider some of the themes and debates that have helped shape the field, but the main focus of the class will be on the application of these theories to an analysis of literature. This class seeks to break free from the standard approach of ecocritical studies that centers American and British Romantic texts and will examine literature from a variety of traditions and time periods. Texts include: The Recognition of Śakuntalā, Beowulf, The Life of Guthlac, selected Robin Hood ballads, selected poems of John Clare, Silas Marner, Ceremony, Through the Arc of the Rainforest, Engineering Eden, and selected episodes of Reservation Dogs. We will also visit the UNM Art Museum to view important landscape artwork.

517.001: Editing

Online
Stephen Benz, sbenz@unm.edu 

This course focuses on editing as a professional practice. Along with improving advanced copyediting skills, we will learn about "information design": the development and production of documents that are complete, accurate, correct, comprehensible, usable, and appropriate for readers. Because editors often must be responsible for a document from its inception to its presentation as a finished product, we will also learn about layout and document design, as well as contemporary production processes. Successful completion of this course will provide you with the foundation necessary for a future career in the field, whether as an editor in the publishing industry or as an editor of documents for organizations, businesses, and institutions.

520.001: T: Blue Mesa Review II

Face to Face MWF, 1400-1450
Marisa Clark, clarkmp@unm.edu

This course 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, R 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 will 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
Gregory Martin, gmartin@unm.edu 

This is a writing workshop focused on revision. Each student will write two new pieces of creative nonfiction. We will workshop each piece twice. Then, each of you will choose one of these two pieces to revise again, and you will submit this at the end of the semester to six literary magazines. The goal of the course is to push you to produce more than you thought you could, to break down what Jane Smiley calls “evasion strategies,” and to produce a polished essay ready for publication. Creative nonfiction is highly flexible form, full of innovative possibility, and the subgenre you may turn in to the workshop is wide open: Memoir or Autobiographical Narrative (an essay that has the dramatic structure of a short story); a Lyric Essay or Meditation; a Profile; Travel Writing; Literary Journalism; a hybrid essay that intentionally blurs the boundaries between genres. It's all fair game. Readings for discussion in class will consist of (1) published essays and (2) essays on craft. In selecting pieces for us to read and discuss, my aim is for eclecticism--to give you a sense of the range of literary nonfiction, to give you a sense of the possibilities of the form. My hope is that the course will push you stylistically and technically, and encourage you to take risks, to raise your standards for what you consider good writing, and then to meet those standards through the development of the habit of art.

532.001: Teaching Multimodal and Online Composition

Face to Face, TR 930-1045
Julianne Newmark, newmark@unm.edu

This course will prepare you to teach in a multitude of environments, focusing on how best practices of online literacy instruction (OLI) can be helpful for teaching in all environments regardless of modality. This course 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, this course will also be practical, as you will develop your own 2210 (the Core Curriculum technical writing class at UNM) 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.

535.001: Ethics in Technical and Professional Communication

Online
Julianne Newmark, newmark@unm.edu 

This course will focus on professional ethics of technical and professional communication. You may think you already know what ethics is: the ethical obligation to provide honest, accurate, safe, and usable information to end users, clients, and customers. However, sometimes ethics goes beyond “doing the right thing” to include making sure that the documents you produce, both multimodal and print-based (and the organization you work for), do no harm to specific groups or communities and/or the environment. In this course, we will consider ethics from a variety of angles, looking at documents written for the workplace and reviewing cases in history where documents and/or activities have impacted people, places, and the environment; these cases will explore local and global ramifications. We will look at social justice theory to inform a redesign of documents that may impact communities of which we, as communicators, are a part or with which are familiar and (importantly) unfamiliar.

543.001: Contemporary Texts in Rhetoric

Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Bethany Davila, bdavila@unm.edu 

This course is a survey of situated histories and theories of contemporary rhetorical studies. Drawing from ethnic studies, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist rhetorical theories, we will engage the production of knowledge as a raced, gendered, ableist, and contested process with material consequences. We will examine social constructs created by rhetoric(s) as they exist in cultural, historic, economic, and political contexts. As a survey course, this class involves a lot of reading (although, I attempt to make it realistic) with regular homework, informal writing assignments, a reading presentation activity, and a final project in which students will engage the topics we’ve discussed throughout the semester.

549.001: T: Middle English Dialects

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

This course provides an introduction to the principal dialects of Middle English, demonstrated by selected readings, in the context of the development of the language from Old English to Early Modern English (c. 1150-1500). We will be looking at the language both diachronically (the historical development) and synchronically (the differentiation of dialect features at a given time). The primary goal of the course is to familiarize students with the range of texts available in different dialects during the period. At the end of the course, students should, for example, be able to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original North-West Midlands dialect with a full appreciation of the contribution of the language to the artistry of the poem, and to recognize its difference from the London dialect of Chaucer. Assignments will include take-home exercises, a midterm, an article presentation, a final, and a group translation project.

568.001: Early American Archives

Face to Face, R 1600-1830
Jesse Alemán, jman@unm.edu 

This course teaches the early modern or contact period via the texts, lives, and archives that span from New Spain to New England by way of circum-gulf, southern, and southwestern points of contact. The course will begin with a focus on the arrival of print in the Americas to chart how its technologies produce archives of coloniality, power, dispossession, and nation-building through exploration, contact, captivity, or fugitive narratives. We’ll then raise critical questions about archives, archival studies, and archival scholarship, especially in relation to indigenous, enslaved, Latinx, and gender non-conforming populations, whose presence in the early Americas has long been characterized as one of absence, fugitivity, silence, or erasure. Our goal will be to leverage archival holdings, online databases, digital humanities projects, and archival centers to examine how the critical turn in archival studies has opened new directions for reaching the people and stories on the margins of the so-called early colonial period. We’ll learn about the literary rise of captivity narratives, for example; the proliferation of early Black print; and the visual and cultural rhetorics found in the trans digital archive. The class will introduce students to online archival sites, will engage students in interactive learning with available databases, and will model pedagogical and scholarly opportunities by using key titles or topics as touchstones for researching, teaching, and analyzing texts, textualities, or the power of print in the early Americas. Students can choose to produce a scholarly piece, a conference paper, a pedagogical portfolio, or a DH project.

570.001: Modernist Literature

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

In this graduate course, which will focus on poetry and poetics, we will analyze and assess the main currents of transatlantic exchange (in both directions) across four particularly charged literary historical moments of the twentieth century: 1) the high modernism of the 1910s and 1920s, 2) the Objectivism of the 1930s, 3) the late modernism of the 1950s and 1960s, and 4) the emergence of a critically meaningful postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s (we will, throughout, focus primarily on short poems). We will accomplish this primarily by emphasizing the work and relationship of two major poets from each period. We will, however, also supplement and purposefully destabilize these dyads with a more modest selection of poems from a less firmly canonical but significant third poet, who will be randomly selected from a roster of carefully considered candidates (U.S. & U.K). Students are welcome—but not required—to suggest a relevant poet for each roster. The aleatory context afforded by the interpolated third figure will help to establish diversity, encourage fresh and unconventional thinking, and provide new opportunities for synthesis. This is intended as a conscious attempt to counter the winnowing of the art of poetry too often established and enforced by conventionally “neat” literary histories as well as the market forces that influence the publishing world, determining not only how work is initially presented to readers but also what remains in print over time.

587.001: T: Make Something

Face to Face, W 1600-1830
Jake Skeets, mskeets@unm.edu 

Writers often do more than write. The writing practice is a constellation of listening, investigation, collection, experimentation, and sometimes failure. In this course, we can encounter our own attempts to make something, test unfamiliar methods, and follow our curiosities. We will explore poetry, prose, film, and other creative works that challenge our assumptions about genre and form, learning from writers and writer-scholars who queer, refract, and perhaps even refuse the conditions of art and writing. Along the way, we will reconsider what it means to make something, how we make it, and what our attempts might teach us about our own creative practice.

598.001: Graduate Internship

Online
Tiffany Bourelle, tbourell@unm.edu 

This course is designed to prepare students in the professional writing concentration for careers after college. You will develop skills, knowledge, and strategies, and organize materials through an internship that will make you an attractive candidate in your post-college career. This could include developing electronic and/or print portfolios, résumés, application documents, and other related materials (the portfolio is mandatory; what you include is up to you). These materials may be used in a job search or in applying to graduate education. Even if you have a job now, preparing portfolio materials in this course will help you systematize an approach to applying for a new job in the future. You will also learn about professional writing as a discipline and come to recognize the variety of experiences a professional writer could encounter, as well as the common issues that arise in the practice of professional writing. You will write about your professional experiences and those of others in activities designed to explore the complexities of writing in the workplace.

610.001: SEM: Marxist Theory

Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Bernadine Hernández, berna18@unm.edu 

Marxist theory has been useful not only for critiquing social systems, but also for studying literature and culture. Decades later—and with the political, economic, and environmental contradictions of the "new world order" now in plain sight—critics will benefit once again from reassessing the appropriateness of Marxism for the study of culture, literature, art, and life. We will spend the first 7 weeks of our seminar reading and engaging with the writing of Karl Marx. We will read texts like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The Jewish Question, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, The Communist Manifesto, and Das Kapital. We will move from Marx’s early understanding of history, the state, and democracy to his theories of revolution, then to his labor theory of value and capital. After gaining a firm understanding of Marx as a writer, we will examine contemporary Marxist criticism that takes Marx to task for his glaring omissions and his focus on European economics. The criticism will intervene in Marxist theory through Marxist feminism, racial capitalism, gender, sexuality, and other theories. Throughout, we will attempt to understand and theorize the relation between the material conditions of social life and aesthetic forms.

640.001: SEM: Writing Across the Curriculum: Writing as a Tool for Learning Across Disciplines

Face to Face, T 1600-1830
Cristyn Elder, celder@unm.edu 

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) promotes writing as a tool for learning in every discipline. As each discipline has its own discourse, written genres, and ways of knowing, WAC views writing as an integral aspect of all levels of education that should not simply be relegated to writing courses. Furthermore, WAC recognizes that students come to the classroom with a wide range of literacy, linguistic, technological, and educational experiences. As a result, WAC seeks to build on students’ strengths as they work to become more flexible and effective writers, thinkers, and problem solvers. In this seminar, we will read some of the history and theories that inform current WAC practices at both the classroom and program levels across campuses, including working with diverse writers; designing assignments, curriculum, and programs; and implementing strategies for responding to and evaluating (student) writing across disciplines. Seminar students will choose a topic of focus and from among a menu of major course assignment options, allowing you to choose assignments that will best help you explore and address your academic and professional goals. Topic examples include researching writing within a particular discipline, examining WID (writing in the disciplines) through a chosen critical or rhetorical lens, writing within a particular industry, etc. Weekly course assignments will include readings, responses to the readings, and in-class discussions and activities. This class is designed particularly for those interested in teaching writing at the postsecondary level and across various disciplines; in facilitating a faculty development program; in administrating a writing center or WAC program; and/or in working as a professional writer in and across industries.

650.001: SEM: Religious Conflict in Old English

Face to Face, M 1600-1830
Jonathan Davis-Secord, jwds@unm.edu 

Early medieval England was largely Christian, but encounters—whether violent or intellectual—with other religions directed its development. This seminar will explore less-commonly studied texts that document or imagine these interactions with Vikings, Judaism, Islam, Roman paganism, local “superstitions,” and more. Knowledge of Old English and Latin is not strictly necessary, although class discussions and secondary readings will at times engage with primary texts in the original languages. The course will primarily consist of reading and discussing translations of primary texts and/or important recent scholarship each week; students will also develop presentations and write a major paper for the semester.

660.001: SEM: Contemporary U.S. Women Poets

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

This graduate seminar in American literature will investigate later twentieth/twenty-first century American poetry through the specific examples of two women poets, Harryette Mullen and Alice Notley, as well as an extended exploration of their cultural contexts. Both poets began their careers associated with coterie poetics and period styles; both made extended careers through the development of individualistic and idiosyncratic styles. The course will consider large questions such as the impact of late twentieth century feminisms on artistic practices, changes in formal and content-driven norms across decades, and shifting understandings of the work of art within groups as well as for individual artists and writers.