English 698 Practicum
Tuesdays 4:00-5:00 Instructor: Katherine O’Callaghan
English 698B Intro to Teaching Writing
Tuesdays 10:00-11:15 Instructors: Aaron Tillman, Anne Bello, Tara Pauliny
English 698I Teaching Basic Writing
By appointment Instructor: Anne Bello
English 698J Teaching Mentoring
By appointment Instructor: Tara Pauliny
English 698V Special Topics: Teaching Writing
Mon 4:00-5:00 Instructor: Tara Pauliny
English 699 Masters Thesis
English 731 Bible as Literature
Th 4:00-6:30 Instructor: David Toomey
The class will explore several of the most studied and influential books of the Old and New Testaments.
As a whole, the class will study (in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament) all or parts of the books Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah and (in the New Testament) the gospels Luke and John. The class will also read the required texts below. Most class meetings, following Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura (scripture alone) will involve collective efforts to derive coherent close readings (or exegeses) of particularly provocative or problematic passages. Following the historical-critical type of exegesis called Higher Criticism, and to gain context and perspective we will appeal to secondary sources, especially the texts below. Course requirements include a seminar paper and a proposal for that paper, a presentation on a subject related to the course’s larger interests, and thoughtful contributions to class discussion.
required texts:
Allison Jr., Dale C. The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009.
Coogan, Michael D. (Editor) and Marc Zvi Brettler (Editor). The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, Third Edition. Oxford University Press; (2010). ISBN-10: 019528478X; ISBN-13: 978-0195284782.
Online version is here: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uma/detail.action?docID=1480933
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1987). ISBN-10: 9780156792011 / ISBN-13: 978-0156792011.
Miles, Jack. God: a Biography. Vintage; Reprint edition (March 19, 1996). ISBN-10: 0679743685; ISBN-13: 978-0679743682
Ruden, Sarah. The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible. Vintage; Reprint edition (December 4, 2018). ISBN-10: 0525563652 / ISBN-13: 978-0525563655.
English 736 Intro: English Graduate Studies
Tu 5:00-6:00 Instructor: Mazen Naous
Introduction to English Graduate Studies is a required one-credit course for all incoming MA/PhD and PhD students (MA-only students are welcome to enroll). The course meets once a week, and it is intended to help incoming graduate students navigate the basics and cultural norms of our program and establish camaraderie among the cohort. Graduate students will be required to attend select events that foster community; these include the department’s opening reception and department colloquia. The course covers the student handbook; area exams and course work; time management strategies; funding inside and outside the department; roundtables with faculty, graduate students, the English Graduate Organization, and the Office of Professional Development; and the job market. There will be some minor assignments: occasional reading; meeting with faculty advisors; researching faculty inside the department, outside the department and/or in the five colleges who might be potential resources.
780-01 Imaginative Writing: Poetry
M 10:45-1:15pm Instructor: Desiree C. Bailey
This course is a graduate poetry workshop. Students will write and submit poems weekly to be considered and discussed by the workshop group.
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.
780-02 Imaginative Writing: Poetry
M 1:25–3:55pm 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 the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Guggenheim Foundation. He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L'Atlantique, the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM), and the Tamaas Foundation of Morocco. 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. In 2024-2025 he was a Senior Global Fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. View his out-of-print selected interviews, A Users Guide to the Invisible World (2022).
780-03 Imaginative Writing: Poetry
W 10:45 –1:15pm Instructor: Abigail Chabitnoy
What is it to live one’s life in the service of the poetic act, to consider the poem indeed a moral 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? Where does the static medium of page fail and how might we conceive of a dynamic engagement with the poem through an innovative approach to text/uality? 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 individual and batches of poems, provide both off-the-cuff and in-depth comments, consider revisions, and read several books of poetry and/or essays together. 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.
781-01 Imaginative Writing: Fiction
Tu 1:00 – 3:30pm Instructor: Jeff Parker
Exhaustion v. 10. Exhaustion, now in its tenth incarnation, is a bit more than just a generative workshop. I like to think that it’s quite a bit more. In Exhaustion, students hand in ten pages of new prose every week for abbreviated, impressionistic critique. Some of this work will hold promise (may even be good) and some of it won’t hold up. 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 (one way to think about this workshop is, it’s like interval training); to create generative habits; and to amass a good bit of material (100+ pages) over the course of the term. It’s a particularly great context to test out any slender intuition you may have inclining toward a novel, but it accommodates other prose forms as well. For instance, one can write an entire novella in the course of a semester in Exhaustion, and many previous students have written short stories at a pace of as much as one per week or one serialized over the course of three or four weeks. It is also adaptable to multiple years in the program: it can be good for those of you in your first year looking to get down a lot of new work; it can be good for those in the second year hoping to make some progress on a potential thesis; and it can be good for third years looking to clock fresh and new pages on theses-in-progress. Poets are welcome and have often knocked Exhaustion out of the park! In addition to writing ten pages per week, you’ll be responsible for reading five of your peers’ submissions (~50pp) each week. This can be hard. It can also be transcendent—giving you a sense of your peers’ processes that you could never get in a more traditional workshop. A couple notes of caution: Exhaustion is not the space to work through revisions and edits. And most importantly, if you cannot commit to writing 10pp per week for this semester (even when it’s not going well—since there are invariably weeks when it’s not going well and working through those weeks is part of the point of the class), take another workshop. If you are nervous about fulfilling this commitment, that’s perfectly okay. Exhaustion strives to be a space of positivity that buoys you as we spend our time primarily in noticing what is working in your weekly installments and making you aware of what you’re doing well so that you can hopefully do more of that. Come prepared to write a lot and submit 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, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Guernica, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Tin House, and others.
781-02 Imaginative Writing: Fiction
W 1:25-3:55pm Instructor: Edie Meidav
The Negation of the Negation. In this generative workshop, we explore the question: how can we create compelling work which travels the full length of its possibility? By using our own work as a sandbox in which to play with and apply the concept of the negation of the negation, as well as other affiliate structures, we will aim to consider and create, in prose of all lengths, both characters and arcs which may offer readers deeper and more visceral journeys, transformations, and satisfaction. Weekly reading, writing, workshop, and presentations undergird our course structure. For those outside the MFA, for permission to enroll, please write [email protected].
Edie Emanuela Meidav wrote the novel Dogs of Cuba (Regal, 2027), the lyric survival text Another Love Discourse (MIT/Penguin, 2022), and Kingdom of the Young (Sarabande, 2017), a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda. Her novels have been 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). She coedited an anthology collecting women and nonbinary writers, Strange Attractors (UMass Press, 2019). Her work has received awards from the Big Other, Rockefeller Foundation/Bellagio Center, Lannan Foundation, Howard Prize, Whiting, Fulbright recognition (Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Portugal), the Kafka Prize for Best Novel by an American Woman, the Village Voice, the Bard Fiction Prize for writers under 40, Yaddo, Macdowell, VCCA, VSC, Art OMI, Fundacion Valparaiso,Norton Island, and elsewhere. Former director of the MFA at the New College of California on Valencia Street in San Francisco, she has served as judge for Yaddo, the NEA, Mass Cultural Council, Juniper Prize, the PEN/Bingham first novel prize, and also as a senior editor at the journal Conjunctions. At UMass, she founded and continues to help direct the community outreach Radius MFA program and the Azores-based Archipelago project.
781-03 Imaginative Writing: Fiction
W 4:00-6:30pm Instructor: Gabriel Bump
Experiments. This workshop will encourage students to experiment with form, style, and content. We will read stories and excerpts from writers like Gertrude Stein, Renee Gladman, Clarice Lispector, and others. In our submissions, we will attempt to see how experimentation can unlock deeper meaning and truths in our works-in-progress. Poets are welcome, although submissions will have to be prose. Students will be required to turn in three ten-page submissions.
Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and has won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Heartland Booksellers Award for Fiction, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award. His second novel, The New Naturals, was a Washington Post and New York Times Notable Book of 2023. He graduated from the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers.
English 791AL 19th Century American literature
W 4:00-6:30 Instructor: Brenna Casey
“Nineteenth-century American literature is not going anywhere,” quipped scholar Russ Castronovo in a recent introduction to the field. And with good reason. Despite the many scholarly switchbacks that have altered our understandings of the historical periodization, geographic boundaries, and constitutional texts of the era, the nineteenth century looms large in U.S. literary studies. Literature of the American 19c encompasses literary movements of American Romanticism, Gothic, Transcendentalism, and the trappings of early Modernism. It chronicles historical flashpoints like Indian Removal, the Mexican-American War, the U.S. Civil War, the Women’s movement, and Chinese Exclusion to name a scant handful. It boasts some of our most enduring literary figures: Dickinson, Douglass, Melville, and Poe.
This course surveys the essential, the emblematic, and the less canonical texts of nineteenth-century American literature. With emphasis on the political and historical underpinnings of cultural production, we’ll read novels, poetry, and a range of nonfiction writing that will elaborate the contours of a literary period that is celebrated, maligned, and deeply abiding in our cultural consciousness.
Students can expect to read works by the above-named authors as well as Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, José Martí, William Apess, Walt Whitman, Sojourner Truth, Henry Rollin Ridge, Henry David Thoreau, Sui Sin Far, Fanny Fern, and more.
Brenna M. Casey specializes in American literature and visual culture. Her scholarly work has appeared in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, African American Review, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. Her public-facing work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books, among others.
English 791M Postcolonial Literary Studies
Th 1:00-3:30 Instructor: Mazen Naous
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: the (inter)disciplinarity of postcolonial studies; anti-colonial nationalisms; the analysis of Orientalism and cultural imperialism; subaltern studies; postcolonial feminisms; postcolonial sexualities; postcolonial ecocriticisms; 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.
English 791UX UX for Writers
MW 2:30-3:45 Instructor: Janine Solberg
Think of your favorite app or website — and then think of one that made you want to throw your phone across the room. What's the difference? Why do some digital tools feel effortless while others are confusing, exhausting, or even manipulative?
In this course, we’ll explore some of the ways that writers and designers working in User Experience (UX) fields make digital tools and information easier and more enjoyable to use. A cornerstone of UX work is empathy: a desire to better understand the needs of people using an app, website, or text. For example, writers who work on public facing content—such as information that appears on government websites about healthcare, regulations, or public programs—may use UX methods to ensure that people can find and use the information they need. These methods (drawing from psychology, design, writing studies and rhetoric) have much to offer us as writers when it comes to creating online texts and spaces that are more inclusive, accessible, ethical, and humane. You’ll learn about UX concepts (such as human-centered design, deceptive patterns, plain language) and practice applying UX research methods like user interviews and usability testing (observing people as they try to use an app, website, or document). By the end of the semester, you’ll have completed a hands-on project that you can include in a portfolio or discuss when applying for jobs or internships.
This course is geared toward students curious to learn more about UX as a career path for writers, those interested in adding UX concepts or research methods to their existing skill set, or students in areas of study that emphasize writing or digital technology. No special technical experience is required—just curiosity about how digital spaces shape our lives, and a desire to make them better.
This course is offered as English 491/791UX. For graduate students, this course offers an intro to UX as a professional field where advanced skills in rhetoric, writing, and humanistic research are relevant. In addition to drawing from practical resources (e.g., Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research, Rubin and Chisnell’s Handbook of Usability Testing and Usability.gov), the course’s design is informed by scholarship in writing studies, technical and professional communication, science and technology studies (STS), and accessibility studies.
English 792A Research Methods: American Culture
Tu 1:00-3:30 Instructor: Asha Nadkarni
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 but also aims to be relevant for graduate students in related areas. The course will range widely through different approaches to American cultural studies, including, but not limited to; transnational, decolonial, and postcolonial studies; settler colonial 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.
English 891CF Caribbean Family Sagas
W 1:00-3:30 Instructor: Rachel Mordecai
Family-saga novels – like the nations which they are often deemed to represent in miniature – are predicated on the assumption of genealogy as a fixed, knowable and legible quantity; this faith in the epistemological stability of genealogy is often visually expressed in the book’s front matter, via a family-tree diagram. But because of the complicated histories of Caribbean countries, and the implications of those histories for family-formation practices, most Caribbean family sagas are concerned to trouble this assertion of epistemological reliability, even as they continue to evoke it. In this class we will read a selection of Caribbean family sagas and accompanying critical/theoretical texts. We will ask (in Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s terms) what “expressive need” the genre serves in Caribbean literature; what Caribbean instantiations of the genre might tell us about the form more broadly; and how these novels both enact and interrogate Caribbean ways of knowing about time, space and relation. Sample primary texts include Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban; Édouard Glissant, The Fourth Century; Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco; Rosario Ferré, The House on the Lagoon; Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge; Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Daughters of the Stone; Yanick Lahens, Moonbath; Janice Shinebourne, The Last Ship; and Maisy Card, These Ghosts are Family.
Rachel L. Mordecai's teaching and research interests include Caribbean and African Diaspora literature, hemispheric American literature, popular literature, and material culture. She has published in Small Axe, the Journal of West Indian Literature, Humanities, Sargasso, CaribbeanQuarterly, Wadabagei, Kunapipi, the Caribbean Review of Books, and sx salon. 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 Caribbean Family Sagas in the Shadow of the Plantation. She is the editor of sx salon, a Small Axe literary platform.
English 891LL Composition Theory
Th 10:00-12:30 Instructor: Rebecca Lorimer Leonard
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 and how does writing interact with social change? What is the relationship between writing and learning, both in and beyond school? What is the relationship between writing and identity, and how do everyday readers and writers adopt, negotiate, or reject writerly identities (and why)? By the end of the course, you should understand what is at stake in such theorizing and begin to consider how you position yourself within these debates as a teacher/scholar.
English 891MD Early Modernity & the Global: Theories of World, Globe, and Planet
Tu 1:00-3:30 Instructor: Jane Degenhardt
This course will pair literature and theory to offer an historical understanding of how the world became global, and how this shift dovetailed with the early history of capitalism, the development of cartographic and navigational technologies, and the scientific revolution and its production of new empirical knowledge. We will explore a range of popular English plays set in distant locales such as Morocco, Tunis, the Americas, the Moluccas Islands, Persia, and Malta, as well as fantastical imagined geographies. We will think about how these theatrical productions designed for mass entertainment contributed to the cultural imagination of a global world, as well as to new constructions of empire, nation, and region. We will also sample early modern travel writing, news pamphlets, and maps; in the process, we will cultivate tools for conducting archival research. Finally, we will develop a theoretical apparatus for approaching these historical sources by exploring a range of frameworks, including global, imperial, local, regional, oceanic, archipelagic, cosmological, and planetary approaches. Throughout our study, we will give careful consideration to how transformative developments of the early modern period informed fundamental aspects of the global worldview that we take to be constitutive of modernity. We will also consider how early modern sources and cosmological models might be mobilized in service of a planetary heuristic that speaks to the crises in our current world. Plays may include Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, John Fletcher’s Sea Voyage and The Island Princess, Richard Brome’s The Antipodes, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and others. Theoretical readings will include a range of influential thinkers, including Ayesha Ramachandran, Steve Mentz, Peter Sloterdijk, Erin Suzuki, Michelle Stevens, Lisa Lowe, Laura Doyle, Arturo Escobar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others.
Jane Hwang Degenhardt teaches courses on the global Renaissance, early modern drama and performance, and transhistorical speculative fiction. Her most recent book, Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (2022), examines how new understandings of the concepts of luck and chance emerged in relation to English global expansion and early capitalism. She is working on two new book projects: one the considers Shakespeare’s plays as exemplars of early modern speculative fiction, and another that explores key organizing concepts of early modern cosmology, including kind, order, variety, and horizon. She is the co-editor of a 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 the current lead editor of the journal ELR.
891G Form and Theory of Fiction
Th 3:00 – 5:30pm Instructor: Edie Meidav
Didion: Predecessors, Cousins, Heirs. In this seminar for writers, dedicated to a major literary figure, we will consider Didion within the family of her chosen aesthetic ancestors and unwitting lovechildren. No matter whom Didion claims, together we will trace the birth and lineage of a writer within a very particular sociohistorical context. Why has the name Didion become synonymous with a certain engagement, disaffection, coolth, style? Our supplementary readings may include work by writers such as Adler, Auden, Augustine, Babitz, Baldwin, Berlin, Campbell, Eliot, Ford, Frew, Garner, Hardwick, Hemingway, Heti, Isherwood, James, Juchaw, Kushner, Mailer, Marquez, Moshfegh, Naipaul, O’Hara, Oates, Orwell, Sexton, Spiotta, Stevens, Watkins. Especially for writers not allergic to theory, our coursework will include reading, weekly presentations, written engagement, and final projects. Warm recommendation: prior to fall, read all Didion, especially the earlier work, though a few works from different periods will serve as our crucial foci.
Edie Emanuela Meidav wrote the novel Dogs of Cuba (Regal, 2027), the lyric survival text Another Love Discourse (MIT/Penguin, 2022), and Kingdom of the Young (Sarabande, 2017), a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda. Her novels have been 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). She coedited an anthology collecting women and nonbinary writers, Strange Attractors (UMass Press, 2019). Her work has received awards from the Big Other, Rockefeller Foundation/Bellagio Center, Lannan Foundation, Howard Prize, Whiting, Fulbright recognition (Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Portugal), the Kafka Prize for Best Novel by an American Woman, the Village Voice, the Bard Fiction Prize for writers under 40, Yaddo, Macdowell, VCCA, VSC, Art OMI, Fundacion Valparaiso,Norton Island, and elsewhere. Former director of the MFA at the New College of California on Valencia Street in San Francisco, she has served as judge for Yaddo, the NEA, Mass Cultural Council, Juniper Prize, the PEN/Bingham first novel prize, and also as a senior editor at the journal Conjunctions. At UMass, she founded and continues to help direct the community outreach Radius MFA program and the Azores-based Archipelago project.
891M Seminar: Poetics of Exile
Th 12:20 – 2:50pm Instructor: Desiree C. Bailey
Poetics of Exile. This seminar considers works of poetry that engage conditions of exile, including expressions of migration, placemaking and return. Our focus will also include metaphoric explorations of exile, thinking through notions of the body, state, landscapes and conceptions of the self. We’ll spend time with a range of styles and forms, from singular poems to the epic, incorporating theory and multimedia.
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.
English 891Z Intro to Research on Writing
M 1:00-3:30 Instructor: Haivan Hoang
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.
Bio: Haivan Hoang is a scholar-educator whose work centers on literacy studies, postsecondary writing education, and critical race theory. She is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Junior Year Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She authored Writing against Racial Injury: The Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). Her current research is a qualitative study of how race impacts teaching and learning in college-level writing in the disciplines courses.
698-----Gen Ed Practicum
Tuesday 5:00-6:00 | Katherine O’Callaghan
698B-----P-Introduction to Teaching Writing (Practicum I)
Tuesday 10:00-11:15 | Tillman, Bello, Day, Ray, Paulino
698I---P-Teaching Basic Writing
by arrangement | Anne Bello
698J---P-Teaching Mentoring
by arrangement | Tara Pauliny
698M Teaching Creative Writing II
Monday 5:15-6:15 | 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 [email protected] with your year/discipline and interest in the program.
698V-----P-Special Topics in Teaching Writing (Practicum III) – Teacher Identity and Teaching
Philosophies
Monday 4:00-5:15 | Tara Pauliny
699-----Master’s Thesis
Staff
777 Modern Poetry
Monday 4:00-6:30 | Ruth Jennison
This course surveys American poetry from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Students will become familiar with canonical accounts of modernism (e.g. Dickinson; Whitman; Pound; Eliot; Stevens; Stein; Moore; Williams). We will also take up modernism's "others" (e.g. Rukeyser; Fearing; Hughes; H.D; McKay; Zukofsky). Against modernism's own individuated "cult of genius," we will treat poetry in its context of interconnected and sometimes antagonistic literary movements, coteries, political fronts and avant-gardes (e.g. Imagism, Dialect Poetics, the Harlem Renaissance, the poetics of the Popular Front and of Objectivism.) We will also attend to the historical and political coordinates which subtend our poets’ various ideological orientations and formal strategies. Questions we will address include: To what aspects of capitalist modernity are modern poets responding? How do uneven developments in racial formation, politics, economics, and culture provide the conditions of possibility for modernist poetry's contradictory commitments to precapitalist organicism and futural experimentation? What is the relationship between the rise of new forms of political consciousness (anti-racist; feminist; early Black nationalist, communist, etc.) and the innovative languages of a modern poetry seeking transformation in art and life?
Ruth Jennison publishes on modern and contemporary American poetry, with special attention to the intersections of literary form, capitalist development and crisis, and politics.
780-01 Imaginative Writing: Poetry
Monday 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 (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); 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. Last year (2024-25) he was a Senior Global Fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. 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.
780-02 Imaginative Writing: Poetry
Monday 10:15–12:45 | Abigail Chabitnoy
What is it to live one’s life in the service of the poetic act, to consider the poem indeed a moral 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? Where does the static medium of page fail and how might we conceive of a dynamic engagement with the poem through an innovative approach to text/uality? 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 individual and batches of poems, provide both off-the-cuff and in-depth (written) comments, consider revisions, and read several books of poetry and/or essays together. 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.
780-03 Imaginative Writing: Poetry
Thursday 9:45-12:15pm | Desiree C. Bailey
Imaginative Writing is a graduate poetry workshop focused on workshopping original poems. Poets will bring in poems weekly. There may also be the occasional class dedicated to generating new work or revision.
781-01 Imaginative Writing: Fiction
Tuesday 1:00-3:30 | Jeff Parker
This workshop is an intensive course in language-made hallucination and storytelling centered around your writing. In addition to your writing, we will read for form and craft texts that do well that which we wish to do better. For this semester our reading will focus on the Soviet short story and the varied approaches by which writers enacted resistance through literary art. Expect to submit work to be discussed by the group; to revise that work; to identify strengths and weaknesses in your own work and the work of others; to focus on sentences; and to focus on narrative structure. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Readings will include stories by Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, Linor Goralik, Daniil Kharms, Lyudmilla Petrushevskaya, Teffi, Tatyana Tolstaya, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and others.
781_02 Imaginative Writing Fiction
Wednesday 1:25-3:55 | 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. We will read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and discuss the various adaptations. Class participants will be required to work in groups on a creative adaptation of their own selection.
FYI, my script for the film Beautiful Country (directed by Hans Petter Moland, commissioned by Terrence Malick) was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and an Amanda Award. The film was a finalist for a Golden Bear. I have worked on numerous film projects, including adaptations and rewrites.
781-03 Imaginative Writing: Fiction
Thursday 3:00-5:30 | Jedediah Berry
Let’s use this as a space for experimentation and serious play, for exploring the many facets of “the game one can put one’s life into,” as Cortázar described the practice of literature. We will doggedly pursue whatever peculiarities and preoccupations drive us again and again to the page—we will also leave room for the unexpected, for the word or twist or vision that leads to fresh territories. Combined with rigorous discussion of submitted writing, an openness to a wide range of genre and formal traditions, and an eye on those principles of craft that don’t just ground the work but make it sing, we will discover and rediscover the possibilities folded up in this necessary and madcap endeavor. Submissions of short stories and novel excerpts, as well as more difficult to categorize works, are welcome.
791BA Why Compare? Black and Asian Pairings in U.S. Culture and Criticism
Wednesday 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 short stories by Sui Sin Far, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda,W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, A Romance, 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 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, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and TDR/The Drama Review (forthcoming). She is currently working on a second book, titled The Korean War in Black America.
792C Graduate Writing Workshop
Thursday 4:00-6:30 | Haivan Hoang
This seminar is a graduate writing workshop, where the primary aims are to make progress on your individual writing projects and, more broadly, develop awareness about and practical strategies for your scholarly writing. Graduate students in this course will develop a writing plan for the semester; projects may include but are not limited to area exam rationale, prospectus, dissertation chapter, or an article for publication. Our course will include reading a modest amount about graduate student writing development and research genres, developing and reflecting on sustainable writing plans, and refining writing and revision strategies, and sharing and exchanging feedback with peers about your writing.
Haivan Hoang is a scholar-educator whose work centers on literacy studies, postsecondary writing education, and critical race theory. She is Associate Professor & Associate Graduate Program Director in English and Associate Director of the Junior Year Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She authored Writing against Racial Injury: The Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). Her current research is a qualitative study of how race impacts teaching and learning in college-level writing in the disciplines courses.
891B Poetry of the Political Imagination
Tuesday 1:00-3:30 | Martín Espada
Poetry of the political imagination is a matter of both vision and language. Any progressive social change must be imagined first. Any oppressive social condition, before it can change, must be named in words that persuade. Poets of the political imagination go beyond protest to define an artistry of resistance. This course explores how best to combine poetry and politics, craft and commitment. Students will read historically significant works such as the World War I poems of Wilfred Owen, the epigrams of Ernesto Cardenal, written in defiance of the Nicaraguan dictatorship, and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the poem that sparked an obscenity trial. They will also read contemporary works of the political imagination, including the farmworker poems of Diana García, born in a migrant labor camp; the emergency room sonnets of Dr. Rafael Campo and the barrio sonnets of Puerto Rican activist Jack Agüeros; the prison poetry of political dissidents Nazim Hikmet and Faiz Ahmed Faiz; Marilyn Nelson’s family history of the Jim Crow South; and the feminist satire of Marge Piercy, among others.
891EN Sounded Encounters: Aurality in Early Modern Literature
Thursday 1:00-3:30 | Adam Zucker
This course explores critical approaches to the sounds and soundedness of local and global forms of exchange as they are represented and enacted by early modern English literature. Central texts will include plays by Shakespeare, Dekker, and Jonson; poetry by Sidney, Donne, and Virgil (via Elizabethan translator Richard Stanihurst); travel narratives by Hakluyt and Leo Africanus, and other noisy historical and contemporary work. Special attention paid to points of contact between English audiences/readers with more distant sounds and indigenous languages, including Irish and Nahuatl, and later adaptations of early modern sounds by poets such as Kamau Braithwaite. Other topics will include the role of music and lyric in drama in the performance of racial and national difference; the soundedness of nonsense and inscrutable language in comic and satirical texts; and the role of linguistic innovation and hybridity in the formation of English language traditions. A course for anyone who loves thinking through the aural effects of language and music, and wishes to learn more about the trans-linguistic, protocolonial engagements of English literature.
Sample critical readings:
Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick, eds. Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects
and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (OpenBook Publishers, 2021)
Michael Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (Continuum Books, 2008
[1985]).
Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minnesota, 2011), 39-76.
Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Jonathan Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
Joseph Ortiz, Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music (Cornell University Press, 2011).
Jennifer Linhart Wood, Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago, 1999).
Anthony Reed, Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke, 2021).
Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge UP, 2009).
Professor Bio/Interests – Adam Zucker teaches classes and publishes widely on early modern literary culture and drama (including Shakespeare), on histories of sound’s relation to text and editorial practice, on the critique of scholarliness and pedagogical practice, on cultural competency and intellectual disability, on early modern material culture and urbanity, and on a range of other related topics. His most recent monograph, Shakespeare Unlearned (Oxford, 2024) discusses the community-forming potential of nonsensical and non-semantic sound in early modern literature and in university classrooms, and he is at work on an edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost for the Arden Shakespeare.
891G Form and Theory of Fiction
Thursday 12:20-2:50pm | Edie Meidav
Topic: Decomposition How do our most propulsive novels undo both ambition and voice? What aspects of unraveling make us care for a character or milieu? What makes up our contemporary sensibility regarding containment, unraveling, the diasporic, the archipelagic? This seminar for writers will help us consider how great work undoes its premises. Dramaturgy, theory, and concepts such as those of the technoself will help us consider forms of social interaction, while we read novels such as those by Adam, Aw, Buckley, Choi, Desai, Kitamura, Markovits, Miller, Orner, Reva, Szalay, Wood, and Xhoga. Presentations, writing (creative/analytic), and field trips will aid our exploration. Permission to enroll in the course is required for those outside the MFA.
891M Form and Theory of Poetry
Monday 10:45-1:15pm | Abigail Chabitnoy
Topic: Seminar: Writing Toward the Feminine Epic Tradition What is deemed worthy of the term “epic”? What expectations and internal biases do we bring to such claims? What opportunities for reconceiving the landscape—historical, aesthetical, political, ecological—does the contemporary and specifically female approach to (or subversion of) the epic raise in the collapse of narrative and lyric? In this seminar we will read closely long and at times unwieldy texts in consideration of what such breadth and positioning of works under a singular title offers to the reader—and writer. To frame the contextual gesture of the long poem, we may also consider poetic works that, while broken into discreet titles, operate as a singular work, exploring how the work manipulates time, subverts plot, and reveals patterns of thought that challenge a Western patriarchal ideation of the form. Poets considered may include Anne Waldman, Lyn Hejinian, Diane di Prima, Alice Notley, H.D, Anne Carson, Bernadette Mayer, and others currently shaping the contemporary landscape of the extended lyric. While this class will demand much reading and in-class conversation, it will also facilitate practical engagement with the notion of the female epic as a form (i.e., writing toward an epic project).
891NA: Indigenous Literary Craft
Tuesday 1:00-3:30 | Laura M. Furlan
Topic: Native Autobiography In this course, our primary work will be to trace the tradition of Native American life writing, with a focus on contemporary memoirs, autofiction, and other personal narratives. We will map the critical terrain of Native autobiography and its key debates, including the concept of authorship, modes of production, questions of textual authenticity, and the role of the editor and/or translator, in addition to those specific to contemporary Native literature—relationship to place and community, issues of sovereignty, preservation of language and culture, the legacy of boarding schools, and how to be good kin. Texts may include Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, excerpts from Deanna Reder’s Autobiography in Indigenous Intellectual Traditions, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life Among the Piutes, N. Scott Momaday’s The Names, Peter Razor’s While the Locust Slept, Stephen Graham Jones’s Growing Up Dead in Texas, Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians, Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave, Danielle Geller’s Dog Flowers, Joshua Whitehead’s Making Love with the Land, and Deborah Jackson Taffa’s Whiskey Tender.
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. In 2021, 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, Susan Power, and Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star.
891TT Introduction to Rhetorical Theory
Tuesday 4:00-6:30 | Rebecca Dingo
The study of rhetoric is generally concerned with how messages are crafted by authors to achieve desired effects in audiences. While, in some circles rhetoric is probably best known as a term of political abuse (as in “that’s just empty rhetoric”), in academic studies, rhetorical theory signals a variety of approaches and methods for looking at the persuasive and circulatory funtions of discourses and how contexts mediate the relationship among authors, texts, and audiences. As contexts (e.g. cultural, economic, political, geo-political) and time change so do rhetorical arguments and textual production and, as a result, scholars’ lenses and approaches to the study of rhetoric.
This class serves as a graduate introduction to the study of rhetorical theory. We will approach our study of rhetorical theory thematically tracing how key conversations persist yet change within particular historical and cultural moments and political, economic, and geopolitical contexts. Students will look across scholarship from the beginning formation of the field rhetorical studies into the present. They will gather core conversations in the field and trace the development of a variety of rhetorical theories. While we will read book-length studies of rhetoric, much of our reading will come from key journals in the field of rhetorical studies and students will be responsible for choosing a conversation to follow within a set of journals and then taking formal notes on how theories and methods develop as a result of that conversation. The goal of the course is for students to have a deeper understanding of rhetorical studies as a diverse field and to understand rhetorical study as a distinct approach and method of analysis.
Rebecca Dingo is a Professor of English in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts. She is a recognized national and international scholar who has pushed transnational studies into the forefront of rhetorical studies. In addition to many peer reviewed essays, she is the author of Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing, which won the W. Ross Winterowd Award in 2012. Additionally, with J. Blake Scott she has edited the book The Megarhetorics of Global Development. Another monograph with Dr. Rachel Riedner titled Beyond Affirmation: Reckoning with Imperial Legacies in Feminist Rhetorical Theory is forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press. Her work has been well-cited not only in rhetoric, composition, and communication studies, but also across other disciplines and sub-disciplines including feminist international political studies, global education studies, feminist studies, literacy studies, and disability studies. From 2021-2025 she was co-editor of the journal Peitho, the flagship journal for the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. She has also engaged in work that has public value and, for example, was invited by the United Kingdom Parliament of International Development Committee to offer a policy memo that comments on how their disability programs might be more inclusive. Rebecca has been invited to give workshops, seminars, and lectures in the US, South Africa, Lebanon, and Belgium on feminist approaches in rhetoric and writing studies, including faculty writing support and development. A member of the HERs 2019 cohort, Rebecca is currently a Senior Fellow and Associate Director of Faculty Development at UMass and is working on assessing and building robust faculty writing support across the university.
891WL Writing and Language Ideology
Wednesday 1:00-3:30 | Rebecca Lorimer Leonard
Proceeding from a sociocultural approach to literacy and language, this seminar explores writing through the lens of language diversity, critically examining how writers work at the boundaries of languages. In reading, writing, and discussion, seminar participants will explore the following questions: How and why do everyday writers move among their languages? How do "soft boundaries" between languages impact writing in and outside of school? How are language beliefs and values used to control writing and whose interests do they serve? The course addresses these questions by exploring theoretical work from fields like world Englishes, applied linguistics, and bilingual education, as well as empirical studies of transnational literacy, translanguaging, and multilingual writing. Seminar participants will write a review of research on a current problem in language diversity, a conference paper proposal, and a conference-length paper on a language diversity-related topic. Reading will include Alvarez, Blommaert, Canagarajah, Garcia, Gonzalez, Kachru, Kalmar, Makoni & Pennycook, Norton, Prendergast, Pratt, You, and others.
Professor Rebecca Lorimer Leonard specializes in language diversity, literacy studies, 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. Her monograph, Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy, won the 2019 Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She is currently the special issues editor for Community Literacy Journal.
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 21st-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).