English

Courses Taught

• ENG 111 Writing through Literature
  Writing-intensive introduction to literature using poetry, drama, short stories, and novella. Emphasis is placed on the process method of writing, basic techniques of literary analysis, and library research. Offered regularly. Fulfills first-year writing requirement. Open to first year students only.
• ENG 271 Transnational Writing in the Americas, 1850-1917
  This course introduces students to the concept and literary history of transnational writing throughout the hemispheric Americas by examining a pivotal period of the nineteenth century. By 1850, slaveholding societies across the Americas were booming, giving rise to imperial dreams that decisively shaped the future of the world. Pro-slavery leaders envisioned an expansion of slavery that would create a new global empire around the Gulf of Mexico, an idealized hub of exchange linking Atlantic and Pacific, Amazon and Mississippi. We will consider how writers portrayed both the global webs of political and economic interests that set these dreams in motion and the anxieties about race and revolution by the enslaved that troubled them. How did these writers contest or unsettle grand expansionist visions? How does their artful writing change our understanding of apparently national conflicts like US westward expansion, the US Civil War, the Cuban War of Independence, or the Mexican Revolution? To pursue these questions, our course will survey portions of contemporary histories as well as primary documents from the period to understand the broader sweep of the century. We will explore how the central literary works reimagine and grapple with processes such as the transatlantic slave trade, revolutions, wars, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and exile.
• ENG 272 Nineteenth-Century Domestic Fictions in the U.S.
  What secrets were kept behind the closed door of the nineteenth-century home? If we read and listen carefully, what can we overhear? Thought to be an idealized space of respite and retreat from the pressures of the modern world, the domestic sphere was actually rife with conflict. Whether in the free North or slaveholding South, Anglo-American housewives were enlisted to “civilize,” control, and “tame” their servants and even their own children. But how did housewives really feel about their exclusion from public life, their duty to advance the mission of imperial expansion and domesticate the “foreign” within? How did Mexican, Native, Chinese, and African American women resist this project of Americanization? This course pursues these questions as it explores the multiple meanings of “domestic” in the long nineteenth-century U.S. and introduces students to key genres of women’s writing. We will consider not only fiction about the home, as the title might most immediately suggest, but writing that invents the idea of the domestic as home, nation, and central civilizing metaphor that enables imperial conquest. Through a survey of various texts and cultural artifacts from the period including fiction, advice manuals, and political writing, we will seek to uncover the secret violences and buried histories upon which the myth of the ideal American home rests.
• ENG 368 Fantasies of the Foreign and Other U.S. Founding Fictions
  What is an orangutan from Borneo doing in Edgar Allen Poe’s first detective story? Why do so many images of the foreign appear in early U.S. fiction? This course will stage a series of close encounters with an anxious—and even haunted—early U.S. literary imagination as it conjures fantasies of the foreign. Whether as antagonists or lovers, threats to the sanctity of the domestic or heroically moral “Others,” we can find these fantasies in nearly every early genre from the gothic to the romance, the sentimental, naturalism, local color writing, and realism. How did these founding genres mediate experiences of what was encountered as “foreign?” What role did this tendency in literary culture play in the construction of a national culture and the projects of U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism? To pursue answers to these questions, we will track these fantasies of the foreign across a range of genres in both texts that manifest broader social anxieties about racial and cultural differences, and those written in the early U.S. that contest these prevailing tendencies. We’ll contextualize our engagement with this literature by looking at historical artifacts from the period, including political cartoons, legal proceedings, visual art, and even wallpaper that represent, at turns, fearful and utopic ideas about what the U.S. was or could be.
• ENG 369 Making and Remaking Atlantic Worlds
  What visions and portents were the uncharted landmasses and depths of the Atlantic made to hold? A period of massive English colonial expansion began in the early seventeenth century that saw the rise of a new transatlantic economy. As goods and raw materials circulated the planetary currents of the Atlantic throughout the succeeding two centuries, colonialists and those upon whose labor they depended wove tales, wrote literature, and philosophized about the “exotic” peoples and landscapes they encountered. The Atlantic world was a vast expanse that took on many meanings—danger, opportunity, paradise, death. In this course, we will consider how social and economic changes went hand in hand with ways of portraying them in the making and remaking of the worlds of the Atlantic. We will compare colonialists’ writings with the impressions sketched by lesser-known and less-empowered figures that troubled them: pirates, laborers, indentured servants, the enslaved, and other working people who navigated the ocean as rebels, resisting the ruthless rulers of the mercantile and slave trading economy. We will focus, that is, on a material and representational battle that was playing out within the constraints of this newly global commercial and literary economy. Taking as our starting point Linebaugh and Rediker’s seminal history of the modern world, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, we will then read novels, poetry, and other writing ranging into the early nineteenth century that thematize travel, circulation, commerce, and the violence inherent in the maintenance of the transatlantic slave trade. In doing so, we will explore the kinds of insights we can generate when we adopt conceptual frameworks other than the nation state for the study of early American literature. What do we see, for instance, when we foreground the impact of transatlantic exchange, including translation, on literary form, notions of the human, and the production of an intellectual or artistic persona? The Atlantic studies approach that Linebaugh and Rediker provide will allow us to test ways of reading early national literature that reframe it as part of the making and circulation of peoples and ideas among Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
• FYS 126-5 Out of Context
  Taking something out of context can damage everything from cultures to reputations and the ability to assess the truth. But what about when we do so to be playful, to seek new understandings, or to challenge existing “truths?” There is a long literary and cultural history of pulling materials from their sources to recontextualize them, and it now extends to retweets, TikTok trends, and memes. In this seminar, we will examine what happens when writers and artists take things out of context to change our perspective on both where they came from and what they mean now.