Graduate Courses

591N Topics in Indigenous Literature: Shapes of Resistance in Indigenous Literature

Mon, 10:10-1:15 | Abigail Chabitnoy

Contemporary Native Women Poets. What attributes mark Indigenous women’s poetry today? How do contemporary Indigenous women poets engage in trends shared across feminist poetics as well as topics of specific concern to an Indigenous experience, both historical and contemporary? How do these concerns differ and shape the work at the level of subject and craft? As the population statistically most likely to experience violence, how do contemporary Indigenous women poets write under and against such violence. This seminar will focus on contemporary female poets from shared and various Indigenous nations, such for example Joan Naviyuk Kane, dg nanouk okpik, m.s. redcherries, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Selina Boan, No’u Revilla, and Layli Long Soldier, in the context of these and other questions posed together throughout the semester.

Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (Wesleyan 2022); How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award; and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak.

698-----Gen Ed Practicum            

By arrangement  | Katherine O'Callaghan

698M-Teaching Creative Writing/Part Two

Mon, 5:15-6:15 | Jennifer Jacobson

698MA - Teaching MFA Online Courses              

by arrangement | Jennifer Jacobson

698R - Applied Literary Arts                

by arrangement | Jennifer Jacobson

698RA - Practicum - Applied Literary Arts: Radius                

by arrangement | Edie Meidav

English 780/1 Imaginative Writing Poetry

Mon, 1:25-3:55  | Peter Gizzi

We will question the relationship between world and word and ask who is speaking in a poem. Do we speak or are we spoken? We will consider the role of mystery, presence, and intimacy in our writing. The workshop consists of work-shopping poems each week, providing comments and edits on others work, handing in revisions, discussing books of poetry and/or essays, participation and attendance are required. Open only for students currently enrolled in the MFA Program.

Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award; Now It’s Dark (2020); and Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award; all from Wesleyan. In 2020 Carcanet published Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems in the UK; and in 2024 Penguin UK published an expanded edition of Fierce Elegy (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize). His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation. He has twice been the recipient of The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. Editing projects have included o•blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and with the late Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). From 2007 to 2012 he was the poetry editor for The Nation. A PDF of his out-of-print selected interviews, A Users Guide to the Invisible World (2022) can be found at: www.freepoetrypress.com/petergizzi

English 780/2 Imaginative Writing Poetry

Tues, 10:45-1:15  | Abigail Chabitnoy

What is it to live one’s life in the service of the poetic act? By seasons work and play, what do we seek from the poem and how do our needs and expectations shape the resulting body of work? What life do we anticipate for that work beyond the page? In this class, we will learn how to recognize a poem’s unique goals and ambitions, and then cater our critique and reading according to those objectives. Students will be encouraged to reflect on the particular qualities of their own aesthetic influences and the gesture(s) of their craft and challenge their own habituation through risk-taking and creative play to develop a sustainable and generative practice beyond the classroom. Over the semester, we will workshop several batches of poems, provide in-depth written comments, hand in revisions, and read several books of poetry and/or essays. Consistent participation and attendance are required. The ultimate goal is to build a personalized method of creating that sustains and endures far beyond the workshop and the MFA.

Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (Wesleyan 2022); How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award; and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak.

English 780/3 Imaginative Writing Poetry

Tues, 10:00-12:30  | Desiree Bailey

This is a graduate poetry workshop focused on workshopping, revising and generating new poems. We’ll workshop new poems each week, with the exception of two revision-focused classes and two generative in-class writing classes. 

Desiree Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize. What Noise Against the Cane was also longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is also the author of the short fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’Clock Press, 2016). Desiree’s poems and short fiction have been published in the Academy of American Poets, Best American Poetry, American Short Fiction and Callaloo, among other journals. Desiree has received numerous residencies and fellowships, and is a recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Amy Awad, and the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts award. She is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY.

English 781/2 Imaginative Writing Fiction

Thurs, 3:00-5:30  | Jeff Parker

This workshop is an intensive course in lying and language-made hallucination. Expect to submit work to be discussed by the group; to revise that work; to read texts that do well that which we wish to do better; to identify strengths and weaknesses in your own work and the work of others; to focus on sentences; to read in form and craft; and to focus on narrative structure. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers.
 
Jeff Parker’s latest work is the novella G v P (Panhandler Books, 2024). He is also the author of Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal (Harper Collins), the novel Ovenman (Tin House), and the short story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc). His many collaborative books and anthologies include: Clean Rooms, Low Rates; Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion: The Poetry of Sportstalk; A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors; Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia; Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States; and The Back of the Line. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Tin House, and others.

English 781/3 Imaginative Writing Fiction

Thurs, 12:20-2:50  | Sabina Murray

This course allows the writer to develop work through individual supervision in tutorial meetings in addition to presenting writing in a traditional workshop setting. The class will begin with assigned readings and exercises followed by a series of individual meetings with the instructor analyzing the work in progress, offering specific critiques, and suggesting readings specific to individual interests and needs.   The second part of the semester will be devoted to traditional workshop discussions.  This model allows writers to get feedback on work as it develops and before it is presented before the group, while still offering the structure and community of a traditional workshop.
 
This workshop will be able to accommodate longer works--novels in progress, collected short stories, novellas--but will also be helpful to those working on individual stories and in the early stages of novels.
 
Sabina Murray is the author of five novels and three short story collections, including The Caprices, which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, and Magdalen College at the University of Oxford.  Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II. She has written on Sebald for the Writers Chronicle, Wordsworth for the Paris Review blog, time theory and historical fiction for LitHub, Duterte and the Philippines for VICE, Spam (the meat) for The New York Times, and published gothic fiction in Medium.  Her novel Valiant Gentlemen was included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016 and included in the Washington Post Best Books list of the same year. Her most recent book Muckross Abbey, a collection of literary horror fiction, was published March 2023.

English 781, Section 4 Imaginative Writing Fiction

Tues, 1:00-3:30 | Okey Ndibe

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard urges writers, in part, to “assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.” That intriguing entreaty bears on the idea of stories as exercises in seduction. Through attuned reading of two novels and members’ work, the class will contemplate fiction’s capaciousness and elasticity, both in its formal variety and the weight it can carry of imaginative experience. We will explore the writer’s deployment of narrative strategies to enrapture that reader whose clock is on the verge of running out. The workshop’s aims include locating moments of enchantment in each story, examining how stories reflect or vivify our interior lives or moral dilemmas, and identifying aspects of a story that demand revision/re-envisioning. 

Okey Ndibe is the author of two novels, Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain, a memoir, Never Look an American in the Eye (winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for nonfiction), and The Man Lives: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka on Life, Literature and Politics. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has taught at various universities and colleges, including Brown, St. Lawrence, Trinity College, Connecticut College, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar). His award-winning journalism has appeared in major newspapers and magazines in the UK, Italy, South Africa, Nigeria, and the US—where he served on the editorial board of the Hartford Courant. He’s completing work on a novel titled Memories Lie In Water.

791EM Early Modern Revolutions

Tues, 1:00-3:30 | Joseph Black

The political, religious, literary, media, social, and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century created a world that was, by the end of this period, recognizably modern.  This course surveys the literary and other writings of this century of revolution, reading writers such as John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Dorothy Osborne, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton alongside radical political and religious writings from the British civil wars; letters and diaries; and writing in such genres as travel, education, medicine, and science. The course pays particular attention to writing by women, and explores such topics as the intersection of the political, the religious, and the literary, and the material culture of books, manuscripts, reading.
 
Joseph Black has published widely on early modern prose and poetry and on the history of books and reading. His current projects include co-editing the Complete Works of Thomas Nashe in six volumes for Oxford University Press and conducting research on early modern women’s book ownership and reading practices.

ENG 791M Postcolonial Literary Studies

Mon, 1:00-3:30 | Asha Nadkarni

This course surveys major topics, approaches and debates within postcolonial cultural studies; it is intended for graduate students beginning work in postcolonial and related fields. Our topics will range widely through the postcolonial period and its movements, including the following: anti-colonial nationalisms; the analysis of Orientalism; subaltern studies; postcolonial feminisms; postcolonial sexualities; and recent developments ‘beyond’ the postcolonial. Throughout, we will focus on students acquiring a familiarity with key texts as well as the relevant concepts and vocabulary required to work with postcolonial theory and literature. 

Asha Nadkarni specializes in American studies, postcolonial literature and theory, Asian American studies, and transnational feminist theory. Her monograph, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minnesota, 2014), traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She is also co-editor (with Cathy Schlund-Vials) of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1996: Volume Three (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is working on a second book project, tentatively titled From Opium to Outsourcing, that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context.

English 791PT Professional Writing and Technical Communication II

By arrangement  | Janine Solberg

English 791SP Advanced Software for Professional Writers

By arrangement  | Janine Solberg

English 791TB Professional Writing and Technical Communication I

By arrangement  | Janine Solberg

English 791TC Professional Writing and Technical Communication III

By arrangement  | Janine Solberg

English 791Q Intro to Professional Writing

By arrangement  | Janine Solberg

English 792C Graduate Writing Workshop

Thursdays 4:00-6:30  | Caroline Yang

This course is open to any student interested in developing a robust writing practice in academia, with a focus on revising an existing seminar paper, conference paper, or unpublished essay into a publishable journal article. While the main goal of the course is revising for publication, we will make space for you to workshop other kinds of writings such as the rationales for the Areas (or the Comprehensive) Exam or the dissertation prospectus. Our focus on the genre of article writing is meant hopefully to demystify the academic publication process and help you develop useful writing habits. As Eric Hayot states, “Writing a good article requires a number of different skills, only one of which is learning to manage a twenty-five-page idea” (The Elements of Academic Style, 13). Using Hayot’s book and Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks as our guides, we will learn and sharpen those necessary skills to becoming published authors, as we build a writing community that thrives on accountability and a collective and individual commitment to writing as a practice and a process.

Caroline Yang teaches courses in Asian American and African American literatures, nineteenth-century to contemporary U.S. literature, and critical ethnic and race studies. She is the author of The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form (Stanford 2020). Her other writings can be found in American Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, Journal of Asian American Studies, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, Asian American Literature in Transition (1850-1930), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International (forthcoming). She is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled The Korean War in Black America.

English 796A IS-Directed study

English 796W IS-Independent Area 2

English 796X IS-Individual Area 2

English 890STA Climate, Coloniality and Sustainable Futures

Fri, 1:00-3:30  | Malcolm Sen and Robert DeConto

Radical in its conception and led by a humanist and a climate scientist, this course offers an opportunity to engage in an interdisciplinary understanding of climate breakdown and the Anthropocene. Seminars will foster robust discussions on texts (literary, scientific, critical, and visual) that speak to the intersections of empire, climate, and capital; we will learn about the birth of climate and the environmental sciences, discuss their relationship to ecological imperialism and environmental racism, and also think through why the humanities and the sciences need to work in tandem to address the most pressing problems of climate chaos. We will gain a better understanding of how imperial processes continue to dominate climate politics, what the racial and gendered implications of the crisis are, and what a politics that sustains life might entail. Focusing on wicked problems and emancipatory narratives, we aim to arrive at a politics of hope, equity and sustainability for a kinder future.  
 
Malcolm Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at UMass Amherst. His research focuses on questions of sovereignty, migration, and race as they emerge in climate change discourse. His literary archive spans global Anglophone, Indian, and Irish literatures. He is the co-editor of Postcolonial Studies and Challenges of the New Millennium (Routledge, 2016). He is the editor of The History of Irish Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); and co-editor of Race in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). Recent articles include “Joyce and Race in the Twenty-First Century” in Catherine Flynn, Ed., The New Joyce Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions (Cambridge University Press, 2022), “An Ordinary Crisis: Covid-19 and Irish Studies” in Mike Cronin et al., Eds., A Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021), and “Sovereignty at the Margins: The Oceanic Future of the Subaltern,” in Barbara Haberkamp-Schmidt, Ed., Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Amsterdam: Brill, 2022). His forthcoming essays include: “Climate Wars in the Anthropocene: Migrant Lives and Militarized Statehood,” which will be published in Sharae Deckard, Kerstin Oloff, and Treasa DeLoughrey, Eds., Routledge Companion on Literature and the Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 2024).  
 
Rob DeConto is Provost Professor of Geosciences and Co-Director of the School of Earth & Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Previously, he held research positions at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  Rob studies polar climate change, the response of ice sheets to a warming climate, and coastal impacts of sea-level rise. Rob serves on international science advisory boards and is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is the lead author of “The Paris Climate Agreement and future sea-level rise from Antarctica,” Nature 593, 83–89 (2021) and “Past extreme warming events linked to massive carbon release from thawing permafrost. Nature 484, 87–91 (2012), among many others.

English 891G Form & Theory of Fiction

Wed, 1:25-3:55  | Okey Ndibe

A Stay Against Silence. From antiquity to the contemporary epoch, writers have explored the tension between the competing grids of freedom and power. Our human quest for autonomy, self-enlargement and the exercise of free will is often besieged by predatory power. Numerous classical and contemporary texts have dramatized this struggle between subjects who strive to speak their memories and authoritarian figures who essay to suppress and silence them, even to erase their stories. Through the study of texts by the likes of Sophocles, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Mariama Ba, Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, Chimamanda Adichie, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Ferdinand Oyono, the seminar will examine the contestation over stories and memories. What’s at stake, in ethical and social terms, when powerful entities seek to still others’ voices and to abrogate their stories? And how are texts and lives reshaped by acts of resistance to these muting decrees? How is the utterance of forbidden speech, the stay against silence, implicated in the constitution of identity and construction of a different social order?

Okey Ndibe is the author of two novels, Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain, a memoir, Never Look an American in the Eye (winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for nonfiction), and The Man Lives: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka on Life, Literature and Politics. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has taught at various universities and colleges, including Brown, St. Lawrence, Trinity College, Connecticut College, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar). His award-winning journalism has appeared in major newspapers and magazines in the UK, Italy, South Africa, Nigeria, and the US—where he served on the editorial board of the Hartford Courant. He’s completing work on a novel titled Memories Lie In Water.

English 891I Writing & Emerging Technology

Weds, 1:00-3:30  |  Donna LeCourt

Designed as a survey of key issues, pedagogies, and cultural shifts in which writing and technology are embedded, this course seeks to examine how digitality, writ large, affects how we think about, produce, and theorize writing.  The course will examine how digital technologies alter not only the form and materials of writing but also the role writing plays within new economies and how it participates within changing ideologies.  The assumption behind the course is that the digital is inevitably a part of all our lives as teachers of writing but to employ it well in our teaching we must also understand how it functions within larger cultural structures to assess both is possibilities and limitations for our goals and hopes for writing.   Thus, we will take up questions such as how the materials we write with influence our compositions, what composing means in an age of “info bots,” algorithms, platforms, and AI; how our digital writing composes/expresses our identities; how we might leverage digitality for public spheres and social change; and how writing produces value for information capital in ways that might threaten the more socially just purposes we might hope it could serve.  Our conversations will take us far from pedagogy but will always return to teaching and composing as forms of intervention into digital ecologies. The course should address the interests of students in digital humanities as well as rhetoric and composition, or others interested in teaching or writing with technology. 

Donna LeCourt is a past director of the Digital Humanities Initiative and the author of Social Mediations: Writing for Digital Public Spheres just published in 2024 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has been researching and publishing on digital technologies since the early 1990s. 

English 891M Form & Theory of Poetry

Thurs, 9:45-12:15 | Desiree Bailey

Epics of Dissent is a graduate poetry seminar focused on the works of contemporary poets who have revolutionized the epic poem to express socio-political dissent. Through poems, essays, interviews and performance, we’ll examine the use of the lyric, fragment, rant and other speech as both formal innovation and interrogations of oppressive structures and systems. Some questions we’ll consider are: How might we define and redefine the conventions of the traditional epic? What possible tensions exist between the narrative and the lyric? What tools might the poet use to write against practices of coloniality, imperialism and ecocide? How can these contemporary epics expand or disrupt our understanding of form, meaning and legibility? Poets and theorists who we’ll read may include Etel Adnan, E.G. Asher, Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, Ken Chen, Mahmoud Darwish, Cathy Park Hong, Robin Coste Lewis, Alice Notley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Tommy Pico, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and others. These readings will inform our poetic processes as we gradually write our own epic poems throughout the semester. 

Desiree Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize. What Noise Against the Cane was also longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is also the author of the short fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’Clock Press, 2016). Desiree’s poems and short fiction have been published in the Academy of American Poets, Best American Poetry, American Short Fiction and Callaloo, among other journals. Desiree has received numerous residencies and fellowships, and is a recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Amy Awad, and the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts award. She is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY. 

English 891MX Transgender Marxism: Theories, Debates, Cultural Productions

Wed, 4:00-6:30  | Jordy Rosenberg

This class is an opportunity for intensive study in one of the most promising areas of development in Trans Studies, a field of thought aptly described by Elle O’Rourke and Jules Gleeson as “Transgender Marxism.” The course will explore the intersection of Marxist thought and struggles around gender and sexuality. We will address classic areas in Marxist thought - such as production/reproduction, capital accumulation, extractivism, the commodity-form, and fetishism - as well as more vanguard areas of the field - such as metabolic rift theory and eco-socialism - alongside major LGBTQIA movements, movements for racial justice, sex workers’ rights, industrial labor and workplace struggles, health activism, land struggles, mutual aid, and immigrant rights. Authors will include Leslie Feinberg, Treva Ellison, Tithi Bhattacharya, Kay Gabriel, Lou Cornum, C. Riley Snorton, Kadji Amin, Jules Gill Peterson, Sophie Lewis, M.E. O’Brien, and Eman Abdelhadi, among others.

899----Doctoral Dissertation                        

Staff

All graduate students must have a minimum of 18 credits at the time of their graduation.

698-----Gen Ed Practicum              

Tu, 5:00-6:00 | Katherine O’Callaghan

698B-----P-Introduction to Teaching Writing (Practicum I)              

Tu, 10:00-11:15 | Tillman, Yang, Pauliny, Dingo, Bello, Napoleone

698G-----P-Introduction to English Graduate Studies              

Tu, 5:00-6:30 | Daniel Sack

698I---P-Teaching Basic Writing

by arrangement | Anne Bello

698J---P-Teaching Mentoring                    

by arrangement | Tara Pauliny

698L---P-Teaching Creative Writing          

M, 5:00-6:00 | Jennifer Jacobson  

698MA-Teaching MFA Online Courses     

by arrangement | Jennifer Jacobson

698R---Applied Literary Arts                       

by arrangement | Jennifer Jacobson

698RA-01 | P- Appl Literary Arts: Radius            

Edie Meidav | By arrangement

Radius will be holding open-hour writing tutorials for men who are incarcerated at the Hampshire County Jail in Florence (hours to be finalized by the sheriff's office). To apply for this applied literary arts class, involving initial training and reading, write highwayfive@gmail.com with your year/discipline and interest in the program.

Edie Meidav is the author of the lyric novel Another Love Discourse (MIT/Penguin, 2022), as well as Kingdom of the Young (Sarabande, 2017), a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda, and three award-winning novels called editorial picks by the New York Times and elsewhere: Lola, California (FSG/Picador, 2012), Crawl Space (FSG/Picador, 2005), and The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (Houghton/Mariner, 2001) and a coedited anthology Strange Attractors (UMass Press, 2019). Her work has been recognized by foundations including Lannan, Howard, Whiting, Fulbright (Sri Lanka and Cyprus), the Kafka Prize, the Village Voice, the Bard Fiction Prize, Yaddo, Macdowell, VCCA, Art OMI, and Fundacion Valparaiso. Former director of the MFA at the New College of California in San Francisco, she has served as judge for Yaddo, the NEA, Mass Cultural Council, Juniper Prize, the PEN/Bingham first novel prize, and as senior editor at Conjunctions.

698V-----P-Special Topics in Teaching Writing (Practicum III) – Teacher Identity and Teaching
Philosophies              

Shakuntala Ray, Tara Pauliny, Haivan Hoang, Devin Day

699-----Master’s Thesis              

Staff

780-01 Imaginative Writing: Poetry

Bianca Stone | Mondays 10:15-12:45 pm

This rigorous and focused workshop will look at the complex psychic relations that go into the composition of a poem and the life-long development of our poetic voice. Beginning with an appreciation of the origins of the word “poet,” (from the Greek poietes, “maker,”) we will bring ourselves clearly into our own ability to “make” consciousness come alive on the page. Each student in the class will have an opportunity to workshop every week. We will focus on the ability to wed inner and outer realities on the page while wielding both clarity and ambiguity. This will include an exploration of poetry’s contradictions and binaries: self and other, truth and fiction, dreaming and reality, autobiography and persona. As a class, will investigate the poems as part of each poet’s unique project in their writing, pushing against the boundaries of our own status quo. Secondary materials to discuss throughout the workshop include inspiring poems and texts from psychoanalytic, philosophical, and mythological sources. Even with these outside sources, students will receive ample time for workshop and written feedback on each piece. 

BIANCA STONE is an award winning poet, teacher and mentor. She is the author of five books, including the poetry collections, What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) winner of the 2022 Vermont Book Award; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poets and Writers, The Nation and elsewhere. She co-founded the poetry-based nonprofit, Ruth Stone House, where she teaches classes on poetry and poetic study and hosts Ode & Psyche Podcast. She lives in Vermont. https://bianca-stone.com/

780-02 Imaginative Writing: Poetry

Peter Gizzi | Monday 1:25–3:55pm

We will question the relationship between world and word and ask who is speaking in a poem. Do we speak or are we spoken?  We will consider the role of mystery, presence, and intimacy in our writing. The workshop is a writing intensive class. It consists of work-shopping poems each week, providing comments and edits on others work, handing in revisions, reading several books of poetry and/or essays, participation and attendance are required.

Peter Gizzi is the author of Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan, 2023), Now It's Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK 2020), Archeophonics (Finalist for the National Book Award, Wesleyan, 2016); In Defense of Nothing (Finalist for the LA Times Book Award, Wesleyan, 2014); Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011); The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003); Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998); and a reprint of his first book, Periplum and other poems 1987-92 (Salt Publishing, UK 2004). His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has twice been the recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018, Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. A PDF of his out-of-print selected interviews, A Users Guide to the Invisible World (2022) can be found at his website.

780-03 Imaginative Writing: Poetry

Desiree C. Bailey | Tuesdays 4:00-6:30 PM

How does the poet write at the threshold — of language, landscape, country, dream? How can the poem be a vessel for journeying the complexities of the self and its surrounding terrains? In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write capaciously, negotiating the multiple voices, visions and influences that can enrich or complicate a poem. We’ll consider how to locate the desires of the poem and how they might interact with our own. Over the course of the semester, we’ll workshop poems, provide in-depth comments on each other’s work, hand in revisions and read books of poetry and/or essays. Participation and attendance are required.

Desiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize. What Noise Against the Cane was also longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is also the author of the short fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’Clock Press, 2016). Desiree’s poems and short fiction have been published in the Academy of American Poets, Best American Poetry, American Short Fiction and Callaloo, among other journals. Desiree has received numerous residencies and fellowships, and is a recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Amy Awad, and the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts award. She is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY.

781-01 Imaginative Writing: Fiction

Tuesday 1:00-3:30 PM | Jeff Parker

Exhaustion v. 8.0. Consider this workshop interval training. Students will hand in ten pages of work every week for abbreviated, impressionistic critique. Some of this work will hold promise (may even be good) and some of it won’t. But there won’t be much time to dwell on it either way, because we’ll be onto the next week’s stuff. The idea here is: to put the emphasis of the workshop on writing rather than on critique; to improve your speed and cardiovascular fitness; to create generative habits; and to amass a good bit of material, 100+ pages over the course of the term. Come prepared to write a lot and submit almost immediately. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled in the MFA.
 
Jeff Parker’s latest work is the novella G v P (Panhandler Books, 2024). He is also the author of Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal (Harper Collins), the novel Ovenman (Tin House), and the short story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc). His many collaborative books and anthologies include: Clean Rooms, Low Rates; Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion: The Poetry of Sportstalk; A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors; Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia; Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States; and The Back of the Line.  His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s Ploughshares, Tin House, and others.

781-02 Imaginative Writing: Fiction

Edie Meidav | Thursday 12:20-2:50 PM

Dramatic Structure:  What might your research and writing learn from locating and resisting dramatic structure and archetype?  Beginning with one Shakespeare play, in this writing workshop we will explore archetype in the stories you wish to tell, uncovering new structure within your writing while availing ourselves of theatrical principles. Coursework includes weekly writing and feedback, ongoing reading, presentations, and the possibility of field trips and your work being performed. Permission to join the course for those outside the MFA to be granted by the instructor. Required reading: one book over the summer.

Edie Meidav (she/her) is the author of ANOTHER LOVE DISCOURSE, KINGDOM OF THE YOUNG, CRAWL SPACE, LOLA, CALIFORNIA, and THE FAR FIELD, among other work, and served as coeditor on an anthology collecting women and nonbinary writers: STRANGE ATTRACTORS: LIVES CHANGED BY CHANCE. Her books have been called editorial picks by the New York Times, L.A. Times, and elsewhere, a script was selected for production by the Directors' Guild, and her work has received awards from the Bard Fiction Prize for Writers Under 40, Lannan, Whiting, Kafka Award for Best Novel by an American Woman, Howard Foundation, Fulbrights (Sri Lanka, Cyprus), and elsewhere. She has served as a judge for the PEN/Bingham First Novel Award, Yaddo, the NEA, Howard, UMass Press Juniper Prize, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and elsewhere. A 2023 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in Italy, she has received awards from Macdowell, Yaddo, VSC, VCCA, Fundacion Valparaiso, and elsewhere, and serves as a senior editor at Conjunctions while advising other publications. Former director of the New College of California MFA, she is a provost professor at UMass Amherst where she helps direct the MFA.

781-03 Imaginative Writing: Fiction

Okey Ndibe| Wed 1:25-3:55 PM

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard urges writers, in part, to “assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.” That intriguing entreaty bears on the idea of stories as exercises in seduction. Through attuned reading of two novels and members’ work, the class will contemplate fiction’s capaciousness and elasticity, both in its formal variety and the weight it can carry of imaginative experience. We will explore the writer’s deployment of narrative strategies to enrapture that reader whose clock is on the verge of running out. The workshop’s aims include locating moments of enchantment in each story, examining how stories reflect or vivify our interior lives or moral dilemmas, and identifying aspects of a story that demand revision/re-envisioning. 

Okey Ndibe is the author of two novels, Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain, a memoir, Never Look an American in the Eye (winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for nonfiction), and The Man Lives: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka on Life, Literature and Politics. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has taught at various universities and colleges, including Brown, St. Lawrence, Trinity College, Connecticut College, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar). His award-winning journalism has appeared in major newspapers and magazines in the UK, Italy, South Africa, Nigeria, and the US—where he served on the editorial board of the Hartford Courant. He’s completing work on a novel titled Memories Lie In Water.

791WP American Women Writers in Protest

Sarah Patterson | Mondays, 1:00-3:30 PM

What attributes make a woman's protest distinct from other types of activism? How has American women's protest literature fared as part of the American literary canon and historical memory? This reading seminar focuses on American women writers' non-fictional and fictional works as they coincide with broader biographical and cultural histories. We will especially address topics surrounding 19th-century African American women writers' expansion of the American literary canon, often pairing primary works with criticism and theoretical readings. At other times we will read the political literature of White and male writers that materialize areas of difference surrounding notions of feminism and the legal status of underrepresented groups. Readings include early American Black churchwomen's advocacy pamphlets, Harriet Wilson's novelized slave narrative Our Nig (1859), William Wells Brown's slave narrative My Southern Home (1880), and chapters from Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection.  In discussion, we will prioritize themes intersecting with race and processes of identity formation with topics on womanhood: enslavement, moral suasion, subjectivity, protest, and occupational feminism.

Sarah Patterson is an assistant professor who specializes in 19th-century African American literature, print culture, and social movements. Her work also addresses areas in the digital humanities involving public history and related ethical practices. With this course, she hopes to spark student interest in local history and in embracing the challenges of parsing women writers' individual and collective discursive aims.

Sarah Patterson's research specialties include African American literature and culture, reform movements, American periodical culture, and digital humanities. She is a co-editor of The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press 2021). She is also a co-founder and former coordinator of the award-winning  
ColoredConventions.org, a digital archive and space for exhibits and pedagogical materials.  
She teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in African American and American literature, and American women writers. Sarah Patterson is actively involved in scholarly organizations and local volunteer activities.

792A---Methods for the Study of U.S. Culture

Asha Nadkarni | Wednesdays 4:00-6:30 PM

This course surveys major methods, topics, and debates within American cultural studies. As the core course in the American Studies graduate concentration, it is intended for graduate students beginning work in American Studies. The course will range widely through different approaches to American cultural studies, including, but not limited to; transnational and postcolonial studies; critical ethnic studies; gender and sexuality studies; and disability studies. Throughout we will focus on students acquiring a familiarity with key methods and the relevant concepts and vocabulary required to do work in American Studies. The course will also feature a series of panel discussions with Americanist scholars from across campus. These panels will give the class a chance to engage with American Studies work coming out of a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, and will also be an opportunity to ask prominent scholars for practical advice about developing an American Studies project.

Asha Nadkarni received her B.A. in Gender and Women's Studies from Connecticut College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminist theory, U.S. empire studies, and Asian American studies, with an emphasis on the literatures and cultures of the South Asian diaspora. Her book Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She is working on a second book project, tentatively titled From Opium to Outsourcing, that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context.

796---Independent Study

By arrangement

For students wishing to do special work not covered by courses listed in the curriculum.  Each student when registering should submit a brief description of the semester’s work agreed on by the student and the instructor.  This must be signed by both the instructor and the student.  No instructor should do more than one such course.  Forms for registering for this course are available from Brianna Mason in W329 South College. The Director of Graduate Studies must approve each proposal.

796A---Independent Study

By arrangement

For students who are taking more than one independent study course per semester.

796W---INDEPENDENT AREA-1

By arrangement

796X----INDEPENDENT AREA-2

By arrangement

891DG Caribbean Cultural Theory

Rachel Mordecai | Thursdays 1:00-3:30 PM  

This seminar takes a “major authors” approach to reading Caribbean cultural theory. Each week we will read the work of one author (or, very occasionally, a small group of authors) who has had a significant effect on engagements – creative, political, scholarly and otherwise – with the Caribbean. As we read these authors, we will also be examining terms and questions of interest to them, potentially including: négritude, cubanismo, antillanité, creolité, modern blackness, creolization, language politics, tidalectics, plantation societies, transnationalism, and others. The problem of locating the Caribbean will inform our discussions, as we consider the region’s position within broader postcolonial, African-diasporic and hemispheric-American trajectories, and reflect on what is gained and lost by privileging these as lenses through which to make sense of Caribbean-ness.

Authors may include: Jean Price-Mars, Jane and Pauline Nardal, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Christina Sharpe, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, and others.

Rachel L. Mordecai holds a BA from Brandeis University, an MA from the University of the West Indies (Mona), and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. Her teaching and research interests include Caribbean and African Diaspora literature, hemispheric American literature, and popular literature and culture of the Caribbean. She has published articles on Jamaican popular fiction, Peter Tosh’s iterations of black citizenship, Lawrence Scott’s amnesiac white creole women, and figurations of blackness in Margaret Cezair-Thompson and Robert
Antoni. Her book, Citizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture, appeared from the University of the West Indies Press in 2014; her current book project is tentatively entitled “No Ancestry Except the Black Water”: A Study of Caribbean Family
Sagas. She is the editor of sx salon, a Small Axe literary platform. Professor Mordecai’s website, including her up-to-date CV, can be found at her website.

891DN Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Lit. Culture I            

David Toomey | Thursdays 4:00-6:30 PM

The course will explore the influence of Darwin, Freud and Einstein upon the literary cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using primary texts by those figures as lenses through which to reexamine several contemporaneous authors.  
 
Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Freud’s ideas of the unconscious, and Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity offered radically new views of human experience and at the same time suggested new and equally radical means to represent it. We will study those views and representations, giving special attention to brief selections from a range of nineteenth century British and American fiction, and to two longer works: Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Generally, we will examine how scientific knowledge is diffused and refracted through a larger cultural moment, being careful to distinguish direct influence from oblique influence.  In seeking context, we will appeal to the history of science.    
 
Required texts (subject to change):

• Charles Darwin (Author), Julian Huxley (Introduction).  The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition. Signet, 2003.
• Einstein, Albert.  Relativity: The Special and the General Theory.  Penguin Classics, 2006.
• Faulkner, William.  The Sound and the Fury. Vintage, 1991.
• Freud, Sigmund.  The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Interpretation of Dreams, and Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex).  Modern Library, 1995.
• Kuhn, Thomas.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  University Of Chicago Press; 4th edition 2012.
• Otis, Laura (Ed.).  Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Oxford World's Classics) Oxford University Press, USA (2002).
• Woolf, Virginia. Eudora Welty (Introduction).  To the Lighthouse.  Harvest Books , 1989.

Toomey’s most recent book is Kingdom of Play: What Ball-Bouncing Octopuses, Belly-Flopping Monkeys, And Mud-Sliding Elephants Reveal About Life Itself. Scribner, 2024.

891G_01 Form and Theory of Fiction

Jordy Rosenberg | Thursdays 3:00-5:30 PM

Novels of Revolutionary Ideas  This class explores techniques of politically-committed writing, and begins from the premise that we are living through a robust reawakening of artistic practice as a front of struggle. The work of our semester will be to generate a collective, in-depth conversation about strategies by which literature engages its social context - how it has historically done so, and how we might incorporate some of these approaches ourselves.  We will start by discussing the genre, as Colleen Lye and Viet Thanh Nguyen recently put it, of the “Novel of Revolutionary Ideas,” and explore the proposition that politically-committed writing is at its best when it brings readers into the process of materializing an idea - what the Venezuelan Marxist, Ludovico Silva, once described as the great stylistic ability to present writing “not as the result of previous thought but as the process or act of thinking itself.”  This might be another way of talking about novels that teach us how to read them, but we will push this concept further.  Our particular interest is in fiction that teaches us not just how to read, but how to read a revolutionary thought.  We will study different traditional novelistic elements - defamiliarization, dialogue, character, the arrangement of temporality - with an eye to how these elements have differently mediated the play of historical forces.  Readings will be drawn from a range of genres, including realism, metafiction, horror and science fiction, and may include authors such as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Adania Shibli, Toni Cade Bambara, China Mieville, Rivers Solomon, Rachel Kushner, Victor Serge, and Emile Zola.  In addition to assembling a mini-genealogy of novels of revolutionary ideas, we will also generate strategies for how our fiction can skillfully engage its own historical context.  We will, in addition, read a small but significant selection of theories of the novel form, as well as spend some time discussing the question of refusal and famous political refusals of literary labor.  Requirements for the class include weekly 1-page response papers, lively participation in class discussion, and a final creative essay.

Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Confessions of the Fox, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, the UK Historical Writers Association Debut Crown Award, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award.  He has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, the Clarion Writers Workshop, the Ahmanson-Getty Foundation, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies.  Confessions of the Fox was recognized by The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, Buzzfeed, and LitHub as one of the Best Books of 2018, and it was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection that year.  Jordy is also the author of a scholarly monograph on 18th-century religious enthusiasm, and a forthcoming hybrid work, the title of which keeps changing, which is forthcoming from Random House/One World891G, Section 2 Form and Theory of

English 891TA Talking Animals

Jeff Parker | Wednesdays 10:45-1:15 PM     

Talking Animals. There is a strong likelihood that most writers’ love of literature began with a talking animal of one sort or another and endowing an animal with human consciousness may be one of the oldest of literary gambits. This seminar will examine the form and theory of fiction through the lens of stories and novels whose main characters are something other than human. Among other questions we shall seek to answer: What may it mean to cast as one’s central character a non-human being in different times and cultures and contexts, and what effects do such narratives produce? Readings will feature classic and contemporary works from around the world and from numerous traditions and genres (including children’s lit, fables and fairy tales, horror, fantasy, etc.).

Jeff Parker’s latest work is the novella G v P (Panhandler Books, 2024). He is also the author of Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal (Harper Collins), the novel Ovenman (Tin House), and the short story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc). His many collaborative books and anthologies include: Clean Rooms, Low Rates; Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion: The Poetry of Sportstalk; A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors; Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia; Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States; and The Back of the Line.  His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s Ploughshares, Tin House, and others.

891LL Composition Theory      

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard | Thursdays 10:00-12:30 PM

Composition Theory introduces students to modern theories of writing. While many writing theories emerge from studies of teaching writing, the course will focus on conceptions of writing itself—its embodied and sociocultural functions; its effect on people and their world; its activities of ritual, routine, practice, process. Our goal will be to understand the variety of ways writing is theorized as well as the debates that exist among these theories, exploring questions such as:

• In what ways is writing a social and rhetorical activity? How does writing interact with social change?
• What is the relationship between writing and learning, both in and beyond school?
• How does composition differ from writing or literacy? Do such distinctions matter?
• What is the relationship between writing and identity? How do everyday readers and writers adopt, negotiate, or reject writerly identities (and why)?

By the end of the course, students should understand what is at stake in such theorizing and begin to consider how they position themselves within these debates as teachers and scholars. Readings will be drawn from a range of perspectives, including but not limited to expressivism; socio-cognitive theory; voice and identity; critical race theory; development and transfer; genre and activity theory. While the course is designed to be a survey, it is not meant to be comprehensive. Instead, the course will examine multiple perspectives on composition, and through individual projects, students will pursue a thread of their choosing more deeply.

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at UMass Amherst where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on language diversity, literacy studies, writing pedagogy, and research methods. Professor Lorimer Leonard’s current research examines the relationship between community-engaged writing and critical language awareness. She also has published on the transfer of writing knowledge and the multilingual practices of migrant writers.

891SF Shakespeare’s Speculative Fictions: Historical Imagination, Possible Futures

Tuesdays, 1:00-3:30 PM | Jane Degenhardt

How do Shakespeare’s plays offer models for speculative methods of thinking, reading, and writing? In what ways do they demonstrate fiction’s capacity to expand the limits of possibility to reimagine what could have been, what could still be, and what might yet come? And how might they serve as tools for developing a critical practice that sees beyond the authority of history, the facts of empirical knowledge, and the imperializing structures of space and time? This course pairs a rich sampling of Shakespeare’s plays (including some of his less canonical plays) with historical and theoretical readings ranging from Catherine Gallagher on counterfactuals, to José Esteban Muñoz on queering futurity, to Saidiya Hartman on critical fabulation, to Aimee Bahng on decolonizing speculation. Together, we will consider how the imaginative and performative elements of Shakespeare’s plays offer unique models of speculation and serve as springboards for incorporating speculation into our creative and critical practices. We will also give special consideration to the politics of speculation and how it can be mobilized for decolonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and other justice-oriented work. Likely plays include: Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, and Troilus and Cressida. Assignments will be geared around professionalization and will offer opportunities to produce a conference paper, an abstract, a book review, and an article, as well as creative-critical options.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt teaches courses on the global Renaissance, early modern drama and performance, and race and social justice. Her most recent book, Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (2022), examines evolving ideas of luck and chance in relation to the development of early capitalism and English global expansion. She is working on a new book that explores pluralistic understandings of “world” in Shakespeare’s plays. She is the co-editor of a recent special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on “Local Oceans: New Perspectives on Colonial Geographies.” She is also the author of Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010), co-editor of Religion and Drama on the Renaissance Stage (2011), and co-editor of the journal ELR.

891Z Intro to Research on Writing

Haivan Hoang | Wednesdays, 1:00-3:30 PM

This course provides an introduction to qualitative research methodologies in composition and literacy studies. Researchers in these fields seek to understand writing as deeply situated, and for this reason, our purpose here is to gain familiarity with a range of methodologies that encourage context-based understandings of writing, including ethnography, case study research, teacher-research, digital writing research, and historiography. To begin, we will read and evaluate research studies: What are the assumptions underlying methodologies? What do particular methods yield in terms of data and meaning-making? What ethical issues do researchers face during the research and writing process? At the same time, we will also practice qualitative inquiry by trying out specific methods—e.g., interviews, participant observation, textual analyses—and learn to design, conduct, and evaluate a short study. My hope is that these discussions about research practices help us reflect on the nature of knowledge-making in the fields of composition and literacy studies.

Haivan Hoang's scholarly interests center on critical race theory, literacy studies, writing pedagogy, writing in the disciplines, and qualitative research methodologies. She is author of Writing against Racial Injury: The Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric (U of Pittsburgh, 2015), and her current research explores how race becomes salient for students and teachers in discipline-specific writing courses.

899----Doctoral Dissertation

Staff

All graduate students must have a minimum of 18 credits at the time of their graduation.

Engl 698 Gen Ed Practicum

Tu, 5:00-6:00 | R. Mordecai

Engl 698B Intro. To Teaching Writing

Tu, 10:0-11:15 | A. Tillman

Engl 698B Intro. To Teaching Writing

Tu, 10:00-11:15 | A. Bello

Engl 698B  Intro. To Teaching Writing

Tu, 10:00-11:15 | C. Yang

Engl 698B Intro. To Teaching Writing

Tu, 10:00-11:15 | R. Dingo

Engl 698B Intro. To Teaching Writing

Tu, 10:00-11:15 | T. Pauliny

Engl 698I Teaching Basic Writing

By arrangement | A. Bello

Engl 698J Teaching Mentoring

By arrangement | T. Pauliny

Engl 698M P-Teaching Creative Writing II

M, 5:00-6:00 | J. Jacobson

Engl 698MA P-Teaching MFA Online Courses

By arrangement | J. Jacobson

Engl 698R P-Applied Literary Arts

By arrangement | J. Jacobson

Engl 698RA P-Applied Literary Arts – RADIUS

By arrangement | E. Meidav     

Engl 698V Special Topics: Teaching Writing

M, 4:00-5:15 | A. Bello

Engl 698V Special Topics: Teaching Writing

M, 4:00-5:15 | D. Day

Engl 698V Special Topics: Teaching Writing

M, 4:00-5:15 | H. Hoang

Engl 698V Special Topics: Teaching Writing

M, 4:00-5:15 | S. Ray

699 Master’s Thesis

Staff

780/1 Imaginative Writing: Poetry

Monday 1:25–3:55pm | Peter Gizzi

We will question the relationship between world and word and ask who is speaking in a poem. Do we speak or are we spoken? We will consider the role of mystery, presence, and intimacy in our writing. The workshop is a writing intensive class. It consists of work-shopping poems each week, providing comments and edits on others’ work, handing in revisions, reading several books of poetry and/or essays, participation and attendance are required.

Peter Gizzi is the author of Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan, 2023), Now It's Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK 2020), Archeophonics (Finalist for the National Book Award, Wesleyan, 2016); In Defense of Nothing (Finalist for the LA Times Book Award, Wesleyan, 2014); Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011); The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003); Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998); and a reprint of his first book, Periplum and other poems 1987-92 (Salt Publishing, UK 2004). His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has twice been the recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. In 2018, Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. A PDF of his out-of-print selected interviews, A Users Guide to the Invisible World (2022) is here.

780/2 Imaginative Writing Poetry    

Tuesdays, 1:00-3:30 | Abigail Chabitnoy  

What is it to live one’s life in the service of the poetic act? By seasons work and play, what do we seek from the poem and how do our needs and expectations shape the resulting body of work? In this class, we will learn how to recognize a poem’s unique goals and ambitions, and then cater our critique and reading according to those objectives. Students will be encouraged to reflect on the particular qualities of their own aesthetic influences and the gesture(s) of their craft and challenge their own habituation through risk-taking and creative play to develop a sustainable and generative practice beyond the classroom. Over the semester, we will workshop several batches of poems, provide in-depth written comments, hand in revisions, and read several books of poetry and/or essays. Consistent participation and attendance are required. The ultimate goal is to build a personalized method of creating that sustains and endures far beyond the workshop and the MFA.

Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (Wesleyan 2022); How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award; and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak.

780/3 Imaginative Writing: Poetry: Ars Poeticas

Wednesday, 4:30-7:00pm | Hannah Brooks-Motl

The ars poetica is first associated with Horace, who wrote an ars or technique or “art of” poetic composition somewhere around 20 BCE. Typically, an ars poetica addresses poetry—the how and why of writing poems; their “true” purpose or ontology; poetry’s “ultimate” meaning; perhaps even the problems of poets themselves. But such works also concern life and living, the vicissitudes of friendship and criticism; they might touch on topics inclusive of ethics, aesthetics, family, education, identity, hybridity, belonging, belief. Like Horace’s, such works may be “baffling outliers”, “full of mysteries.” This workshop will consider traditions of the ars poetica, understanding it less as a genre than a kind of attitude or orientation toward the various acts of thinking-writing-feeling that comprise poetry itself. We’ll workshop 5-8 pages of poems from each person a couple times throughout the semester and these works will form the basis of our discussions together as will readings, viewings, and the drafting of a poetics—whether an ars or not, we won’t be prescriptive. By the end of the workshop, folks should have many new starts, some revised poems, and a working draft of a poetics statement for thesis inclusion or other purposes.

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), and Earth (2019). Her poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in the Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, the Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity, and in edited collections from Cambridge University Press and Wesleyan University Press. With Stephanie Burt she helped edit Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden (2005). She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and PhD from the University of Chicago. She lives in western Massachusetts.

781/1 Imaginative Writing: Fiction

Thursday 10:00-12:30pm | Monica Brashears

This workshop will be a generative course focusing on short story, flash fiction, and longer forms. The class will be in traditional workshop format with response letters and marked manuscripts, discussions, and supplemental readings. We will explore the subconscious and revision, ways to toy with genre, and many other delights! 

 Monica Brashears is an Affrilachian writer from Tennessee. She is a graduate of Syracuse University's MFA program. Her work has appeared in Nashville Review, Split Lip Magazine, Appalachian Review, The Masters Review, and more. House of Cotton is her first novel. Her short story, "The Skittering Thing," will be featured in The Black Girl Survives in This One: Horror Stories (Flatiron, 2024). 

781/2  Imaginative Writing: Fiction

Tuesday 4:00-6:30pm | Sabina Murray

This workshop is designed to discuss work with a focus on structure and handling of time.  Through a combination of craft talks, exercises, and selected reading, we will study how to pass time in an organic manner, how to better explore character through perspective and contrast, and other stylistic elements that we so often construct instinctively but should be able to edit with cold intellect.  This workshop will be able to accommodate longer works--novels in progress, collected short stories, novellas--but will also be helpful to those working on individual stories and in the early stages of novels. Time is fun!

Sabina Murray is the author of five novels and three short story collections, including The Caprices, which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, and Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II. She has written on Sebald for the Writers Chronicle, Wordsworth for the Paris Review blog, time theory and historical fiction for LitHub, Duterte and the Philippines for VICE, Spam (the meat) for The New York Times, and published gothic fiction in Medium. Her novel Valiant Gentlemen was included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016 and included in the Washington Post Best Books list of the same year. Her most recent book Muckross Abbey, a collection of literary horror fiction, was published March 2023.

781/3  Imaginative Writing: Fiction: Hyrbid Memoir

Wednesday, 1:25-3:55pm | Edie Meidav

In our odd era, how do we remember and to what end?  In what new ways can we understand hybridity? In this generative workshop for writers, each week we will quilt work to explore these questions. Taking the idea of the hybrid memoir in its broadest sense, we will explore what happens when we imagine new communities of readers and forms. Writers such as Carson, Akhtar, Amichai, Antunes, Baldwin, Borges, Braithwaite, Cabrera Infante, Carpentier, Celan, Coetzee, Evaristo, Galeano, Ishiguro, Kafka, Kapil, Levy, Luiselli, Machado, Nguyen, Nunez, Paley, Rankine, Salvayre, Shafak, Shange, Winterson, and Yapa are examples of those we will consider for inspiration, as well as exponents of hybrid memoir across the disciplines. Classwork involves writing, reading, inquiry, presentations, and includes the possibility of field trips and a final reading. Permission from the instructor required for those outside the MFA. 

Edie Meidav is the author of the hybrid lyric novel Another Love Discourse (MIT/Penguin, 2022), as well as Kingdom of the Young (Sarabande, 2017), a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda, and award-winning novels called editorial picks by the New York Times and elsewhere: Lola, California (FSG/Picador, 2012), Crawl Space (FSG/Picador, 2005), and The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (Houghton/Mariner, 2001) as well as a coedited anthology collecting women and nonbinary writers, Strange Attractors (UMass Press, 2019). A 2023-24 Rockefeller Fellow, she has received support for her work from granting bodies including the Lannan, Howard, Whiting, Fulbright (Sri Lanka and Cyprus), the Kafka Prize, the Village Voice, the Bard Fiction Prize, Yaddo, Macdowell, VCCA, Art OMI, Fundacion Valparaiso, and elsewhere. Former director of the MFA at the New College of California in San Francisco, she has served as judge for Yaddo, the NEA, Mass Cultural Council, Juniper Prize, the PEN/Bingham first novel prize, and serves as a senior editor at Conjunctions.

791AP The Age of Pictures: American Visual Culture 1825-1925        

Thursdays 1:00-3:30 | Brenna Casey

This course will offer an introduction to key concepts in visual culture through the study of images and concomitant literary texts circulating in the United States from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. “The picture making faculty,” wrote the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass amidst the violent political, social, and territorial restructuring of the mid-nineteenth-century U.S., “is a mighty power.” Moving from early national artistic movements through the emergence of photography, we will work with special attention to quickly consolidating and interlocking markers of race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship to track more precisely how this “mighty power” was cultivated by early illustrative makers. 

Members of this course should expect to sample a range of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writing as well as illustrations, paintings, and photographs from the American Romantic to the Modernist period. We will also engage a host of critical theoretical texts that may be applied to and beyond this periodization. Course participants will have the opportunity to supply archives from their own area of study for course assignments.  

Brenna M. Casey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English where she specializes in American literature and visual culture. Her academic work has appeared in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth Century American Studies, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and African American Review. Her public-facing work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Assembly, and The New York Times.

791BA Why Compare? Black and Asian Pairings in U.S. Culture and Criticism    

Wednesdays, 4:00-6:30 | Caroline Yang

In 1867, speaking on the topic of Chinese labor in the United States, Frederick Douglass predicted, “The old question as to what shall be done with [enslaved Black people] will have to give place to the greater question, ‘what shall be done with the Mongolian.’” Thus rooted in the questions of slavery and who counted as “free” and rightful citizen of U.S. empire, Black and Asian pairings have exceeded any other comparisons of non-white peoples and have taken on different shapes and aims since Douglass’s speech. This seminar takes a critical examination of this history of Black and Asian racializations in U.S. culture and criticism. In addition to representations of the comparison in dominant white culture, it examines historical writings, literary and cultural productions, and critical scholarship by Black and Asian writers to begin to answer the question: why compare? What does the comparison teach us about race and racialization in U.S. empire? Beginning with Reconstruction, we will study key historical flashpoints, ultimately concluding with our present moment in the Supreme Court’s dismantling of affirmative action in college admissions. Possible literary texts may include Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, A Romance, John Okada’s No-No Boy, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, Gayl Jones’s The Healing, Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, Nina Revoyr’s Southland, and Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth.

Caroline Yang teaches courses in Asian American and African American literatures, nineteenth-century to contemporary U.S. literature, and critical ethnic and race studies. She is the author of The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form (Stanford 2020). Her other writings can be found in Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, Journal of Asian American Studies, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, Asian American Literature in Transition (1850-1930), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (forthcoming), and American Quarterly (forthcoming). She is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled The Korean War in Black America. 

791V Shakespeare for Everyone?

Mondays, 1:00-3:30 | Adam Zucker

This course is designed to offer writers, artists, teachers, and everyone else a guided, wide-ranging survey of the works of William Shakespeare. No single theme or method will shape the course; instead, we will collaboratively explore intricacies of language, narrative, and idea in an effort to better understand and question the lasting influence of Shakespeare’s plays in classrooms, theaters, and global mass media.  

We will read one play and one short supplemental text each week, ranging from brief critical essays, related Elizabethan poetry, fictional or other adaptations, et cetera. In addition to reading, participants will offer one flexible format in-class response, and create one longer final response to course material, in a manner that best suits their own graduate level work (i.e, MFA students might write in or on poetry or fiction; PhD students might write a more traditional researched essay; students in other departments beyond English might work with the ideas and methods of their own fields).

Adam Zucker has been a member of the UMass English Department since 2004. His area of expertise is 16th- and 17th-Century English literature, with a special focus on the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and their contemporaries. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University. Professor Zucker is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and the co-editor of two books: Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (Routledge, 2015), with Ronda Arab and Michelle Dowd; and Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), with Alan B. Farmer. His next book, Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and he is working on a new edition of Love’s Labor’s Lost for the fourth series of the Arden Shakespeare. He is also a co-editor of the journal English Literary Renaissance.

792C Graduate Writing Workshop

Thurs, 4:00-6:30 | Rebecca Lorimer Leonard

This course is open to any student interested in developing a robust writing practice in academia, with a focus on revising an existing seminar paper, conference paper, or unpublished essay into a publishable journal article. While the main goal of the course is revising for publication, we will make space for you to workshop other kinds of writings such as the rationales for the Areas (or the Comprehensive) Exam or the dissertation prospectus. Our focus on the genre of article writing is meant hopefully to demystify the academic publication process and help you develop useful writing habits. As Eric Hayot states, “Writing a good article requires a number of different skills, only one of which is learning to manage a twenty-five-page idea” (The Elements of Academic Style, 13). Using Hayot’s book and Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks as our guides, we will learn and sharpen those necessary skills to becoming published authors, as we build a writing community that thrives on accountability and a collective and individual commitment to writing as a practice and a process. 

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on language diversity, literacy studies, and research methods. Her book Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy (University of Pittsburgh Press) won the 2019 Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Her co-written book, Transfer: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research and Pedagogy, will be published in October 2023. 

796 Independent Study

By arrangement

For students wishing to do special work not covered by courses listed in the curriculum.  Each student when registering should submit a brief description of the semester’s work agreed on by the student and the instructor.  This must be signed by both the instructor and the student.  No instructor should do more than one such course.  Forms for registering for this course are available in South College W329.  The Director of Graduate Studies must approve each proposal.

796A Independent Study

By arrangement

For students who are taking more than one independent study course per semester.

796W INDEPENDENT AREA-1

By arrangement

796X INDEPENDENT AREA-2

By arrangement

891CG Critical Geographies of 20th and 21st Century American Poetics

Wed, 1:00-3:30 | Ruth Jennison

This course will examine 20th and 21st century (mostly) American poetry, with a special focus on ways in which critical theories of space and spatial formation open up our primary texts. We will examine the conceptual history of space in contemporary critical thought: from the signature articulations of Raymond Williams regarding the dominant, residual and emergent cultural mediations of spatial segmentation, to Henri Lefebvre’s generative taxonomies describing the social production of space, to David Harvey’s elaboration of a full-throated critical geography, to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s pathbreaking account of spatial fix and the carceral state. We will also read recent accounts of spatial turns specific to mechanisms of state and population control: securitized borders, settler colonialism, the current reorganization of US manufacturing zones, and the urban and rural constitution of what capital views as “surplus populations.” We will examine not only how American poetry encodes these spatial intricacies (Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Louis Zukofsky, Claude McKay) but also how American poetics itself has developed in shifting regional alliances. We will pay special attention to the ways in which poetry written in the 1970s and after screens the spatial regimes of racism and xenophonia within and beyond the American interior, and the revolutionary, anti-imperialist responses to these regimes (eg. Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Sean Bonney). We will also examine poetics that treat crises and transformations in the geographies of social reproduction. To this end we will engage with texts by Bernadette Mayer, Kay Gabriel, and Juliana Spahr, many of which elaborate alternative spaces hived out of, or in negotiation with, capitalist imperatives gendering social reproductive labor. 

Ruth Jennison publishes on modern and contemporary American poetry, with special attention to the intersections of literary form, capitalist development and crisis, and politics. 

891G Fiction to Film 

Mon, 10:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Sabina Murray

This is a course that looks at elements of narrative—time, interiority, voice, summary, backstory, character, et cetera—as they transition from prose into screenplay.  In addition to learning the basics of writing scripts, you will also learn how to better manage time, dialogue, structure, information, and group scenes in your fiction.    Works studied will (most likely) include Twelve Years A Slave (Northrup/McQueen), The Painted Veil (Maugham/Curran), Don’t Look Now (du Maurier/Roeg), and some others.  Class participants will be required to work on a creative adaptation of their own selection.  

Sabina Murray is the author of five novels and three short story collections, including The Caprices, which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, and Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charlie Chan is Dead II. She has written on Sebald for the Writers Chronicle, Wordsworth for the Paris Review blog, time theory and historical fiction for LitHub, Duterte and the Philippines for VICE, Spam (the meat) for The New York Times, and published gothic fiction in Medium. Her novel Valiant Gentlemen was included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016 and included in the Washington Post Best Books list of the same year. Her most recent book Muckross Abbey, a collection of literary horror fiction, was published March 2023.

891WB Sex, Bloat, and Zombies: On Writing the Body         

Thurs, 1:00-3:30 | Monica Brashears

“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form?” This course asks students to view themselves and the authors studied as Dr. Frankenstein. We will study various approaches to crafting the physical body in fiction and all they can achieve when exploring themes of trauma, agency, illness, and human desire. Books will be selected from an expanding list that includes work written by Gayl Jones, Elena Ferrante, Anthony Veasna So, S.A. Cosby, Garth Greenwell, James Joyce, Colson Whitehead, Johnathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, Mohsin Hamid, Mariana Enriquez, and others. Requirements will include a presentation on an assigned book and the creation of your own monster (a short story in which the body is written).

Monica Brashears is an Affrilachian writer from Tennessee. She is a graduate of Syracuse University's MFA program. Her work has appeared in Nashville Review, Split Lip Magazine, Appalachian Review, The Masters Review, and more. House of Cotton is her first novel. Her short story, "The Skittering Thing," will be featured in The Black Girl Survives in This One: Horror Stories (Flatiron, 2024). 

891WC Writing across the Curriculum

Mon, 10:00-12:30 | Haivan Hoang

This course explores the development of writing across the curriculum (WAC) in higher education; WAC is often described as an education movement that emphasizes writing to learn as well as writing in the disciplines (WID). Historians of college composition, such as David Russell, have traced the origins of writing across the curriculum to the late 19th century as universities increasingly emphasized disciplinary specialization. By the 1960s and 70s, the WAC movement began to influence academic programs, curricula, and pedagogy in US universities and British K-12 schools. In this seminar, we’ll learn about the history of WAC development in educational contexts, the ideologies underlying these movements, research on WID teaching and learning, and descriptions and analyses of WAC/WID program structures and administration. Beyond broad understanding of the WAC/WID movement, the seminar asks us more specifically to take up critiques that Donna LeCourt and Victor Villanueva raised 20-30 years ago: How might we work against assimilationist and exclusionary tendencies when teaching students to write in the disciplines? More specifically, how might we envision a critical, including anti-racist, approach to WAC/WID commitments and practices? 

Haivan Hoang's scholarly interests center on critical race theory, literacy studies, writing pedagogy, writing in the disciplines, and qualitative research methodologies. She is author of Writing against Racial Injury: The Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric (U of Pittsburgh, 2015), and her current research explores how race becomes salient for students and teachers in discipline-specific writing courses.

899 Doctoral Dissertation

Staff

All graduate students must have a minimum of 18 credits at the time of their graduation.