Graduate Courses

English 698  Practicum

Section 1         Tu 5:00-6:00                  Instructor: Katherine O’Callaghan

English 698B Intro Teaching Writing

Tu 10:00-11:15             Instructors: Aaron Tillman, Anne Bello, Devin Day, Shakuntala Ray, Tara Pauliny

English 698I   Teaching Basic Writing

Time Varies                    Instructor: Anne  Bello

English 698J Teaching Mentoring

Time Varies                    Instructor: Tara Pauliny

English 698L Practicum: Teaching Creative Writing

Mon 5:15-6:15             Instructor: Jennifer Jacobson

English 698MA Practicum: Teaching MFA Online Courses

Time Varies                    Instructor: Jennifer Jacobson

English 698R Applied Literary Arts

Time Varies                    Instructor: Jennifer Jacobson

English 698RA  Applied Literary Arts: Radius

Time Varies                    Instructor: Edie Meidav

English 698V Special Topics: Teaching Writing

Mon 4:00-5:00             Instructors: David Toomey and Tara Pauliny

English 699 Masters Thesis

English 780    Imaginative Writing Poetry

Section 1         Mon 10:15-12:45                        Instructor: Abigail Chabitnoy

English 780    Imaginative Writing Poetry

Section 2         Mon 1:25-3:55                             Instructor: 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. We will also discuss what is the function of time or timing in a poem. The late visual artist and poet, Etel Adnan, tells us: “Each day is a whole world.” To this claim, we might add that each poem is a whole world, or each line is a whole world. Hence the poem is always in the present. Poetry is not immortal because it endures through the ages but because it exists in all ages at once. 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, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award (2023); Now It’s Dark (2020); and Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award (2016); 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 (winner of 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, 2025); 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: https://www.freepoetrypress.com/petergizzi

English 781    Imaginative Writing Fiction

Section 1         Wed 10:45-1:15                          Instructor: Jeffrey Parker

English 781    Imaginative Writing Fiction

Section 2         Thur 3:00-5:30                             Instructor: Sabina Murray

English 781    Imaginative Writing Fiction

Section 3         Wed 1:25-3:55                             Instructor: Gabriel Bump

English 791ET  Elemental Thinking

Wed     4:00-6:30 PM                 Instructor: Marjorie Rubright

Elemental Thinking is a transdisciplinary exploration of the environmental humanities across literature, music, art, and public activism. Guided by a transhistorical orientation around the classical elements of water, earth, air, and fire, this co-taught seminar will toggle from our earliest records of human engagement with the natural world to imagined visions of possible futures. Along the way, we will engage with an array of musical interpretations of the natural environment as well as a variety of acoustic ecologies and more experimental, contemporary, and protest music connected to the environment and the pastoral, to catastrophe and creation, to myths about music’s power over nature. We will learn about methods of acoustic research on human and non-human soundscapes and interrogate approaches of the interdisciplinary study of biomusic (e.g. bird song and whale song) and techniques for recording passive acoustics (e.g., underwater hydrophones, etc). On the literary and visual arts fronts, we will begin with a series of cosmogonic myths across cultures to explore the elemental thinking that is so pervasive in such myths and, throughout the term, explore how these ways of thinking endure and decay under political, scientific, cultural and epistemological turns. Throughout, we’ll mine a range of critical theory, including collections such as: New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World; Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures; and the elementals series, to name only a few. Our collective goal will be to explore an expansive set of models and opportunities for engagement in the kinds of interdisciplinary scholarship, criticism, artistic-creation, and activism that will substantively affect our climate crisis and shape more hopeful futures for the environmental humanities. No previous study of music or specific focus in literary periodization is required. 

Marjorie Rubright is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. She is founder of the Renaissance of the Earth Project, a transdisciplinary research collaboration that engages the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Her recent research has focused on intersections of language, earth, and human embodiment. Her essays appear in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (2016), Ovidian Transversions (2019), and the JEMCS special issue: Early Modern Trans Studies (2020). She has recently co-edited Logomotives: Words the Change the Premodern World, 1400-1700 (Edinburgh 2025) and is writing a monograph entitled, A World of Words: Language, Earth, and Embodiment in Early Modernity. With Evan MacCarthy, she has co-curated the exhibit, “Water-Worlds,” and is co-authoring “Attuning to Terra Incognita.” 

Evan A. MacCarthy is Five College Visiting Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is Director of ELEMENTS, a multi-year arts and humanities research project. As a singer and musicologist, he focuses his research and teaching on the global exchanges and encounters of music and musical thought, together with the mobility and migration of musicians, in the late medieval and early modern eras, as well as on nineteenth-century music of the United States. His scholarship has been supported by a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and by The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. In addition to an edition and translation of an important treatise on the nature of music in the fifteenth century, he is presently completing a book on the musical lives of fifteenth-century scholars who engaged deeply with the cultural and intellectual traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. 

English 792A  Research Methods: American Culture

Tues 1:00-3:30            Instructor: Laura Furlan

In this course, we will take on the impossible task of surveying some of the most critical and innovative work in American Studies, particularly those that participate in key discussions and debates in feminism, transnationalism, regional studies, Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, as well as material, visual, and popular cultural studies. The texts will represent a broad range of subjects and methodologies, written by established scholars and newer voices. We will read (mostly) recent multi-disciplinary Americanist scholarship as a way to survey many models for doing compelling work in American Studies, to gain a working competence in its vocabulary, debates, and approaches, and to establish a vision of where the field is today. 

Laura M. Furlan teaches courses in Native American literature and American Studies. She is the author of Indigenous Cities: Urban Indian Fiction and the Histories of Relocation (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and is finishing a new book project entitled The Archival Turn in Native American Literature and Art, a study of the function of archives in contemporary Native cultural productions. She co-edited a special issue of Massachusetts Review of new Native writing and a special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures on Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians. She has published articles on Louise Erdrich, Janet Campbell Hale, Deborah Miranda, and Susan Power, and she has a forthcoming curatorial essay on Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star.

English 792W Hybrid Forms + Creative Criticism

Wed 1:00-3:30                             Instructor: Daniel Sack

Hybrid-form works stand on thresholds, between genres and media, inventing themselves out of necessity to address that which may be impossible to articulate within established bounds or identities, or to reach audiences outside traditional disciplinary fields. This hybrid seminar/workshop asks what such liminal and intermedial play offers to the critic or scholar, how divergence from conventional modes of research output might provoke new ways of thinking. We will encounter a range of productions that straddle literary forms and media – filmic and photo essays, books-as-performances, drawings that theorize, and so on – both as objects of study and as models for practice. Alongside these encounters, a good portion of the class will be devoted to the development of our writing and making.

Each participant should arrive with a research project underway, even if that research is broadly conceived or in its initial stages. Experiments will approach our respective objects from various perspectives and transpositions to explore what alternative modes or creative criticism might afford our thinking. As such, the class invites participation from those with established interests in hybrid forms, as well as those with no experience who may want to trouble their own habits of writing or conducting research. While our workshopping will focus on hybrid forms of theory, criticism, and scholarship, creative practitioners across the arts or scholars outside of English are also welcome.

Daniel Sack is a professor with a joint appointment in the English Department and the Commonwealth Honors College, where he works on modern/contemporary theatre and interdisciplinary performance, and critical writing as a creative practice.  His most recent book, Cue Tears: on the Act of Crying (University of Michigan Press, 2024), makes use of autobiography and a variety of textual forms to regard the tear onstage and onscreen as a prism through which to reconsider how we feel alone and with others. He is the editor of Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (Routledge 2017), which gathers a host of conceptual performances and theoretical closet dramas written by close to 100 scholars and artists of the contemporary stage. The project has expanded into the online open-access journal Imagined Theatres, one of the few academic journals featuring performative and creative criticism. He is currently at work on a book about drawing, printmaking, and performance.

English 796  Independent Study

English 875  Decolonial Reconstellations DGS Core

Thur 4:00-6:30                             Instructors: Asha Nadkarni and Mwangi Githinji

This interdisciplinary seminar serves as a core course of the proposed Decolonial Global Studies Certificate (DGS). Students from all disciplines are welcome, whether or not you plan to pursue the Certificate.

Focusing on non-eurocentric, non-androcentric analyses of world political economy and culture, this course will engage with diverse emancipatory and critical approaches, including decolonial, postcolonial, Indigenous, environmental, intersectional, queer, Marxist, speculative, transnational, and inter-imperial. We will particularly tackle the Eurocentric paradigm of “modernity,” which has severely distorted historical legacies and narrowed conceptions of past, present, and future. Several readings will address long-historical data, deep-time perspectives, and pluriversal epistemologies.  

As we will explore, decolonization is not simply a removal of European colonial forms and a return to prior practices or to a golden period, as was sometimes envisioned in the process of political decolonization. While many hierarchies of gender, race, class, nationality, and religion were formed by European colonization, some versions of them predate the rise of European hegemony and have later co-evolved or interacted conjuncturally with European formations. In this context, we will highlight long-historical practices of ethical relationality as we also critique power configurations in whatever era or form they appear. Close study of these dynamic processes allows for a deeper overturning of the Eurocentric, androcentric points of view that pervade much of our understanding of the contemporary world. Some class projects will therefore invite students to situate their more contemporary research projects or interests within a longer history.  

The course will also emphasize decolonial and relational practices.  Co-taught by a Humanities and a Social Science professor, the seminar aims to model decolonial interdisciplinary methods while widening the horizons within which students conceive their research and their aspirations.  The course will encourage collaborative thinking and invite experimental or creative projects, including some in teaching, research, activism, art, or other engagements. We anticipate that the interdisciplinary mix of students in the class will also enable students to widen their campus community and enhance their understanding of decolonial practices.

BIO: 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). 

English 891DD  Literacy Studies

Mon 1:00-3:30                             Instructor: Haivan Hoang

English 891EW  History: Higher Education in America

Thurs 4:00-6:30                          Instructor: David Fleming

This course is a graduate-level introduction to the history of higher education in the United States, treating the educational past both as a field of inquiry in its own right and as a lens to think about institutions, disciplines, systems, practices, and problems today. The idea of the course is twofold: to encourage historical research on higher education among scholars in diverse disciplines and to prepare future academics for careers in higher education by helping them see the broader institutional and sociocultural contexts of their work. Topics of inquiry will include the history of the university; the rise of institutions more or less unique to the U.S., including liberal arts colleges, land-grant institutions, women’s colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and community colleges; the rise of for-profit and online higher education; the evolution of the post-secondary curriculum; ties between colleges/universities and the state, market, and society; issues of access and affordability; articulation among secondary education, higher education, and the workplace; the rise of disciplines and professions; the history of graduate education, etc. There will be some focus on the rise of English as an academic discipline, including histories of literary study, creative writing, and composition and rhetoric. Histories of higher education outside the United States will be incorporated as desired. Other adjustments regarding topics and readings will be based on students’ interests, backgrounds, and goals. The course will culminate in individual projects; both primary and secondary research are possible. Readings will include Pedersen’s The First Universities, Rudolph’s The American College and University: A History, Menand et al.’s The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook, as well as more focused historical scholarship on a range of topics. The 2021 syllabus and reading list for this course can be found at https://websites.umass.edu/dfleming/ .

David Fleming is Professor of English and former Director of the Writing Program at UMass Amherst. He has published widely on histories and theories of rhetoric and composition, including City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America (SUNY, 2008) and From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957-1974 (Pittsburgh, 2011). He is at work on a third book, about the history of the bachelor’s degree in U.S. higher education, focused on the rise of the “composite” undergraduate curriculum, mixing general and specialized education.

English 891M   Form & Theory of Poetry

Weds 4:00-6:30                          Instructor: Desiree Bailey

 English 891RR  Transnational Fiction

Mon 5:30-8:00                             Instructor: Mazen Naous

Transnational fiction is an enduring phenomenon that persists into the 21^st-century. The genre (if we can identify it as such) is not self-evident, however. It is varied in scope and substance, which prompts the question: On what terms can we ground a comparative study of transnational fiction and the cultures and sociopolitics it carries across our contemporary world? This question notwithstanding, certain features of transnational fiction become pronounced in the current century. The growing pace and intensity of migration, wars, genocides, and climate change all point to a sense that standard mappings may not fit the experience of a world of fluctuating but nonetheless persistent boundaries. We will explore the possibilities of overlap and transculturality in transnational fiction and engage it both as a conceptual frame and a literary imaginary. With subversive imaginaries of nonplace and the unmaking of borders, our constellation of novels engages and complicates questions of migration, home, nation, identity, and climate. Our task will be to explore the variable forms of transnational fiction as well as the challenges of transnational reading in a cross-cultural and unequal world. Sources in theory and criticism will supplement our primary texts. Possible novels include Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope; Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost; Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West; Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were; Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizer; Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore; and Zadie Smith’s NW.

Mazen Naous specializes in Arab American literature, Arabic literature, postcolonial studies, translation studies, and music and literature. He is currently writing a book provisionally titled The Music of Arab American Literature. Naous is the translator of Memoirs of Juliette Elmir Sa’adeh: Syrian Social Nationalist, Reformer, Political Prisoner (2022), the author of a monograph titled Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel (2020), and editor of an interdisciplinary collection of essays titled Identity and Conflict in the Middle East and its Diasporic Cultures (2016).

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.