Spring 2021

SPRING 2021


ENGL 260 Exploring Literature in a Global Context (Professor Lutz) Outsiders and Wanderers 

 Why do some choose to exile themselves, to live beyond the margins of society, sometimes in conscious opposition to its rules and morals or possibly in mere indifference to those laws others feel required to follow? And then there are those outside who have no choice. They have been cast out because of gender, sexual orientation, class, race, disability, or some other reason. In this course we will read literature about (and by) outsiders who question existence, who stand on the edge and see the broader meaning of things. Some who are pushed out fight it, either through reshaping that society to include him or her, or by embracing outsiderness and glorying in it. Through the novels, essays, poetry, and a few films we will read and watch in this class, we will explore the uses and beauties of a rebellious stance or way of life, and we will delve into ethical issues involving social justice. 

 

ENGL 280 Exploring Popular Culture and Genre (Professor Sheridan) Memes, Media, and Social Justice Movements

When Beyonce’s video “*** Flawless” excerpted the words of award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it raised the question that animates this class: How has popular media shaped our reading and writing of literary and activist stories?  In this class, we explore this question, focusing on the complex intersection of social media, circulating stories, and contemporary social justice movements.

We will read widely and compose in multiple formats. Likely readings include: fiction, such as Shamsie’s Home Fire, Thomas’ The Hate U Give, or Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, to explore both how social media have become characters or plot devices and how literature circulates activist projects; poetry, such as Kaur’s Milk and Honey, to explore how platforms such as Twitter and Instagram can be contested spaces that amplify activism; popular media, such as Beyonce’s “*** Flawless,” to explore how contemporary media are reworking literary texts; and, circulation studies theories (e.g., Gries and Gifford; Williams) to explore how and why ideas spread, especially on social media. Likely writings include short assignments examining the intersection of social media, circulating stories, and current activism, as well as more traditional academic assignments, such as a mid term and final paper.

No technology experience required. Just bring your experience with and curiosity about social media, current stories, and social movements. 

 

ENGL 300-03/300-04 Introduction to English Studies-WR (Professor Mattes) 

This course will cover a range of fiction, poetry, and drama while introducing students to central terms and methods of literary analysis. In addition to giving close attention to the linguistic forms of texts, we will consider the social contexts in which such works are written and read. These contexts may include the political, economic, and cultural currents in which our readings are embedded and to which they speak; changing attitudes regarding the importance of art and the politics of literary study; and the contributions that literary studies make to conversations across disciplines.

 In addition to reading some really beautiful and thought-provoking works of literature, you will receive guidance and feedback on your writing that will be tailored to your own situation and skill set. Some of you will be English majors and minors; others will not. In all cases, you should see me as your personal writing coach this semester. My feedback on your writing will provide guidance on how to take advantage of your existing interests and strengths and help you identify ways to advance your skills in analysis and academic writing.

 Required Texts

Reading and Writing about Literature: A Portable Guide – Gardner

Black Genealogy – Petrosino

Wide Sargasso Sea – Rhys

Ceremony – Silko

The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo – Stansel

 

ENGL 300 Introduction to Literature (Professor Hadley)  Twisted Tales and The Pleasures of Literary Perusal

From the loose thematic perspective of “Twisted Tales,” this course will cover a range of genres and historical periods, while introducing students to the basic conventions and methods of literary study. In preparation for further study as English majors, students will gain experience in developing a thesis-based argument, engaging with literary terminology, exercising close reading skills, and practicing disciplinary-specific research skills. As the course is writing-intensive, several staged writing projects will be assigned, along with quizzes and regular exercises emphasizing the careful reading and analysis of literary texts. 

 

ENGL 301 Literature Before 1800 (Professor Rabin) Monsters, Heroes, and Saints, oh my!

 This course will trace the history of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the end of the eighteenth century. Our principal goal will be to develop a better understanding of the forms, genres, and themes of the periods covered. We will also focus more specifically on the emergence of the idea of  “literature” itself. How did an identifiable concept of literature develop in England?  How is this development influenced by the history, language(s), and geography of Britain?  How is the emergence of English literature related to the emergence of English literary criticism.

There will also be angels, demons, dragons, man-eating swamp monsters, evil wizards, dirty riddles, sex and violence galore…and that’s just the beginning of the course!

 

ENGL 302 Literature After 1800 (Professor Anderson)

 In this course, we will discuss American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Besides reading major writers such as Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Hemingway, Hughes, and Morrison, we will connect literature to important historical and cultural changes in American social and cultural history, including competing ideas about national identity, the Civil War, rapid urbanization and industrialization, the expansion of American political, military, and economic power, immigration and migration, increasing cultural diversity within the United States, two world wars, the Great Depression, and so on. Similar to other 300-level English courses, this course will also help students learn the basic terms, conventions, and scholarly methods for studying literature. Grades will be determined by exams, homework, in-class writing, and class participation.

 

 ENGL 305 Fiction (Professor Griner) Fail Better

 Welcome to English 305, fiction.  This course is designed to help fiction writers and students interested in fiction hone their craft. I expect to see all of you improve as writers, readers and critics.  That doesn’t necessarily mean I expect you to become more polished writers; in some cases it may mean you’re more willing to take risks, while in others it may mean you’ll gain greater expertise in things you already do well.  Class participants will also be expected to deepen their reading practices and to provide thoughtful feedback on their peers’ work and insight into the work of published fiction writers. Beyond that, the most important goals are probably the ones you discover and define.  The focus of the course is student work.  We’ll read published pieces, and have various exercises, designed to help improve writing, generate ideas, etc., but the majority of class periods will be taken up with workshops. 

 

ENGL 305 Intermediate Poetry (Professor Maxwell)

 This intermediate poetry course is designed to help poets and students interested in poetry hone their craft, expand their bank of compositional strategies, and experiment with language and content. This is a generative class, meaning, you will write a lot. You will also deepen your reading practices and provide thoughtful feedback on your peers’ work and insight into the work of published poets we read, becoming more confident talking about poetry. The class will culminate in a chapbook (12-20 pages of poems), an optional bookmaking session for those interested in binding and distributing their work, and a class reading. 

 

ENGL 309 Inquiries in Writing (Professor Johnson) Writing In and About Organizations

In the course of a day, many individuals will buy goods from a corporation, join a club, debate what to do on a committee, or take part in a digital social network. In short, many signs suggest that we are living in the age of the organization. Reflecting on this, social theorist Bruno Latour has said that “there is a huge, an abyssal difference between speaking about an organization and talking or acting organizationally.”  In this course, we explore this notion of “talking or acting organizationally” through writing. 

The semester begins by considering how organizations “speak,” taking up the case study of Starbucks (via Bryant Simon’s book Everything But the Coffee). We will reflect on questions like: “how do large organized groups compose arguments?” and “how do these organizations ask that individuals compose both literally (through their writing) and figuratively (how we “write” our lives)? 

Next, using Simon’s work as a model, students will work toward creating their own rhetorical analysis of a chosen organization while practicing library and archival research skills. This research process ends with students writing an analysis of how to become a member of a particular discourse community. For example: how high school students’ lives have been organized to prepare them for college success, how a university converts its “Mission Statement” into a set of collective practices, how professional organizations like the Society of Actuaries or National Engineering Association suggest their members develop professionally, or how to become a “Mac” person according to Apple’s communications 

Finally, students will engage in a group project that will ask them to form an organization to address a contemporary problem. While organized into groups, students will produce their own contribution (a paper) to the organizations overall goal. However, in addition to creating a document, each student will practice organizational communication within the group setting. Students will be asked to construct memos coordinating the week’s goals for the group, public address via oral presentation, to write status reports, and ultimately turn in a proposal portfolio that brings the individual research papers of each member into a single plan for dealing with the issue. For example, a group with four members may approach the issue of rising obesity in the United States by having group members align individual papers about re-organizing agriculture, the legal status of obesity as a disability, the financial obstacles of affordable organic food, and the sociology of exercise into a single proposal about what to do. 

 

ENGL 310 Introduction to Public and Professional Writing (Professor Poole)

In this course, students learn the rhetorical practices of public and professional writers by engaging in local, real-world writing experiences. Students work with organizations across the Louisville metro area to research local issues and write for public audiences. Throughout the semester, students query the ethics of public writing, practice developing their own voices as professional writers, and reflect on what unique skills and experiences they bring to the 21st century job market.

 ENGL 315-01 Antiracist Media and American Literature (Professor Mattes)

This course focuses on how Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color (BIPOC) strategically use text technologies and publishing media - including manuscript, print, book format, digital networks, and social media - to shape their literatures.

 We will begin with case studies of nineteenth-century Black and Indigenous authorship. Readings include autobiographical works by Frederick Douglass and Sarah Winnemuca (Northern Paiute). We will discover how these writers strategically depict their uses of alphabetic literacy and intervene in white infrastructures of print media in order to negotiate, critique, and dismantle racist ideas about selfhood and sovereignty.

 Later, we will read graphic novels that extend these BIPOC media strategies. These works center on an eighteenth-century massacre of Conestoga Native Americans (Lee Francis and Weshoyote Alvitre’s Ghost River) and a nineteenth-century Virginia slave rebellion (Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner). We will consider how these writers and illustrators of color have developed antiracist compositional practices involving book format and digital design, as well as BIPOC-controlled publishing initiatives.

 Finally, we will turn to works of fiction whose aesthetic elements - including characters, plots and themes - are driven by text technologies. In his mind-bending novel, The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia employs technologies of print such as ink, printing, paper, typography in order to dramatize the multiethnic borderlands of the American southwest; in a final reading, There There, Tommy Orange (Cheyenne/Arapaho) grounds the development of Native American characters in digital technologies such as search engines and social media.

 Taken together, these autobiographies, graphic novels, fictional works, and digital initiatives foreground the vital role of text technologies and publishing media in facilitating BIPOC stories - stories in which people of color are rendered not in genocidal terms of pure victimization, but rather in irreducible and ongoing legacies of survival.


ENGL 369 Minority Traditions in American Literature (Professor Chandler) 

Prerequisite: ENGL 102 or ENGL 105 or the equivalent. This course examines fantasy literature by authors from underrepresented groups, including African, LatinX, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American populations in the United States. We will analyze authors’ uses of the fantasy genre to explore issues of social belonging and exclusion, historical conflict, and ecological crisis. Central to our study will be questions about the literature’s portrayal of personal identity and community. In addition to the readings, work requirements will include short oral and/or multimodal reports, response papers, exams, and steady engagement. Assigned literature may include Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Cherie Demaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Gene Yuen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Daniel JoséOlder’s Shadowshaper, and other recent fantasy fiction.  

 

ENGL 373-03  Women and Global Literature (Professor Lutz)

 This course takes as its focus women novelists and poets who write about women. We will read literature that puts women in the center of a fictional world and explores their need to be seen and heard, to find their place and their rights. Female fellowships and collaborations involved in women’s (and humanitarian) rights will be central, as will intense friendships between women and erotic and sexual connections. Some of our books with be gothic in character, carrying women into haunted, stormy, violent realms where they must make their way. More broadly, the class will explore ideas about gender, sexuality, and race, with a strong interest in women who rebel against societies that marginalize them, especially queer women and women of color.    

 

ENGL 402 Honors Seminar (Professor Clukey) Cultures of Slavery

This course will examine the legacies of slavery in the twenty-first century United States. We will look at recent literature, film, and other forms of popular culture that reconstruct histories of slavery and track how it evolved into new forms of racialized control that affect the justice system, housing, universities, healthcare, and the environment. We’ll also look at how contemporary writers, artists, and intellectuals are seeking to educate the public at large about the legacies of slavery right now (such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project, Kara Walker’s sculptures and installations, and the anti-racist work of Ibram Kendi), and we’ll consider proposals for the removal of Confederate monuments, reparations, and restorative justice. Our guiding questions include: how do Americans remember the history of slavery within their own families and within the nation? How are cultural memories of slavery mediated by race, class, gender, art, popular culture, and the educational system? How does art—literature, cinema, and visual arts—narrate the reverberations of slavery in our current moment and why does it matter? What role do cultural memories of slavery play in current debates about race, migration, and justice in the United States in general and in Louisville in particular?   

Readings may include texts by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, Jesmyn Ward, Yaa Gyasi, Colson Whitehead, Michelle Alexander, Saidiya Hartman, Harriet Washington, Edward Ball, Kara Walker, etc., and films may includeGet Out, Antebellum, Sorry to Bother You, among others. 

 

ENGL 402-02 Honors Seminar (Professor Kelderman) Indigenous Cities

Since the early 1970s, the majority of Indigenous people in the United States have lived in cities. Yet even today, the predominant cultural image of Indian nations is that they exist mostly in rural areas, on tribal reservations. This course challenges this assumption by exploring how Indigenous people have claimed a place in American cities. We will read fiction and poetry by Native authors including Tommy Orange (Cheyenne/Arapaho), Esther Belin (Diné), and Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux). And we will examine important historical background such as the Relocation Program of the 1950s (which spurred the movement of Native people from reservations to major cities), the emergence of the Red Power Movement in Minneapolis, and the Occupation of Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the process, the course will touch on a range of different topics including Indigenous hip hop; statues of Native American historical figures in US cities; and Indigenous travelers to European metropoles such as London and Paris. Besides literary texts, the course will study films (Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles), music, visual art, historical texts, and a work of cultural anthropology (Renya Ramirez’s Native Hubs). Through this course, you will become familiar with different critical keywords for research in Native American and Indigenous Studies, including tribal sovereignty, settler colonialism, environmental justice, transnationalism, and indigenous feminism.  

 

ENGL 403 Advanced Creative Writing (Professor Strickley)

This course will offer writers an opportunity to further develop the skills acquired in previous workshops and to forge new creative territories. I’ll expect class members to have a basic working knowledge of literary terminology and a general sense of their own talents and priorities as writers, so the focus of this course will be largely generative and students may expect to be challenged to move well beyond prior accomplishments. The genres studied this semester will include poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and playwriting. While I have refrained from adopting a specific theme to guide our work, it is the case that juxtaposing pieces in multiple genres tends to bring forward illuminating insights regarding the various ways in which writers negotiate reader expectations as they pertain genre conventions. Our project, then, will be to utilize every engagement with a text—whether published or peer-produced—to glean craft-oriented insights we may use to push our own work forward.

 

ENGL 407 Writing for Social Change (Professor Poole)

 “What keeps us from writing to make a difference?” This course answers that question and explores writing as both a tool for uncovering social justice issues and a way to advocate for change. Students examine historical and contemporary artifacts—texts, videos, performances, songs—to consider what kinds of writing make a difference in social narratives about identity, equity, and civic responsibility. Throughout the semester, students develop their own voices as public writers.

 

ENGL 413 English Literature from the Beginning to Shakespeare (Professor Rabin) Monsters and Saints

In this course, we will focus on the relationship between the saintly and the monstrous in medieval English literature. Though seeming opposites, these two categories overlapped more that medieval authors were often willing to admit. Tales of extraordinary people (and extraordinary creatures!) gave writers a way to explore “normal” and “abnormal” notions of identity, gender, politics, and the relationship between those who protect society and those who threaten to destroy it. Over the course of the semester we will encounter man-eating swamp monsters, dog-headed saints, knights, outlaws, kings, murderers, giants, werewolves, and a few of those mysterious creatures that go bump in the night…

 

ENGL 423 African-American Literature 1845-The Present (Professor Anderson)

This literature survey will introduce you to the tradition of African American literature, but will also discuss ways that this literature relates to a broader American literary tradition as well as African-American history and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

We will discuss the relationship of literature to the Great Migration, urbanization, the Civil Rights movement, and contemporary literary and social movements. Outcomes will be assessed through essay examinations, essays, a research paper, summaries of scholarship, homework, and class participation.

 

ENGL 491  Interpretive Theory: The New Criticism to the Present (Professor McDonald)

This class is an introduction to theories of literature, criticism, and interpretation. Over the course of the semester, you will: 1) learn the basic terms, concepts, and approaches of major schools of 20C interpretative theory; 2) gain an understanding of how these theories have developed over time; 3) practice different critical methods through in-class work. As we read, historicize, evaluate, and practice critical theory, we will participate in debates that lie at the very heart of the humanities. What is literature and how do we read it? Who authors a text’s meaning? And why does it matter? Students will be responsible for two short papers, a midterm exam, and a final exam. 

 

ENGL 480 Digital and Visual Composition (Professor Williams)

If I want to communicate an idea today, I have a range of choices of media and modes of communication available to me. Do I make a video? A podcast? A written document? An infographic? How should I decide what media and modes to use? What are the advantages and disadvantages of choosing between printed words, images, sound, or video? How can rhetorical concerns of audience, genre, and style help me decide, and create, an engaging and effective digital text? The rapid development of digital media over the past two decades has led to new genres and forms  of communication available to us all. In this course we will explore the potential and possibilities of “writing” in the digital age. We will explore the ideas, technologies, and challenges that shape digital and visual composition. We will talk about the role that issues such as mobility, circulation, sampling, and ethics play in how we approach creating digital texts. In addition, we will consider how these digital affordances connect to rhetorical concepts such as audience, genre, and style. We will also create a range of digital and multimodal texts, both to practice composing processes in different media, as well as to reflect on their opportunities and limitations. It’s a chance to explore new ways of composing and communicating, and have some fun at the same time.

 

ENGL 504 Advanced Creative Writing (Professor Stansel) Crafting Connected Stories 

This upper-division fiction course offers students who have already completed introductory and intermediate workshops the opportunity to further refine their craft. The discussion-based class will focus on the craft of short story writing, with a secondary and simultaneous examination of linked, or connected, stories. Through this we will begin to examine strategies for longer narratives, while still practicing the short form. We will read excerpts from several collections of linked stories. Week-by-week, the class will examine different aspects of the storytelling craft, including scene-building, plot and sub-plot development, writing voice, among others. In addition to creating and workshopping short stories, students will work on developing story ideas and structuring approaches for a longer piece of writing. 

 

ENGL 504 Advanced Creative Writing (Poetry) (Professor Maxwell)

In this advanced poetry course, you will compose a lot of new poems, testing out different writing experiments throughout the semester. You will also submit poetry for workshop, receiving feedback from class members and providing feedback to class members as you work toward creating a chapbook (a short book of poems) and a revision portfolio. We’ll read and discuss published work by such writers as Juliana Spahr, Nomi Stone, C.D. Wright, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Harryette Mullen, Layli Long Soldier, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, and Ari Banias. 

 

ENGL 506 Teaching Writing (TBA)

We'll be exploring what it means to teach (and learn) academic writing by reading and responding to some past and recent scholarship on writing pedagogy from the perspective of teaching college-level writing.   In posing and pursuing questions about this scholarship—in journal responses, virtual discussions, and position papers—you should become familiar with dominant ideas and concerns about the teaching of writing and find ways to make use of these in your own thinking about and teaching of writing.   

 

ENGL 545-01 Studies in British Literature of the Romantic Period (Professor Hadley)  Monsters, Mysteries and the Macabre: The Romantic Gothic Novel

Populated by banditti, hero-villains and native heroines, ghostly apparitions, and dark mysterious castles with labyrinthine corridors and damp dungeons, the gothic novel originated in eighteenth-century England and reached an apex in the Romantic period. This course will consider the use of the Romantic gothic novel as a critique of dominant social narratives and cultural ideologies, particularly as they apply to gender and sexuality. Related to these concerns, we’ll examine the role of the supernatural, particularly where it informs the gothic sublime (the experience of “delightful horror”) as an alternative to moral beauty and the picturesque. 

 

ENGL 544 Studies in Restoration and 18th Century British Literature (Professor Ridley)  Re-drawing the World: Imagining New Worlds

Anglo-American scholars refer to a “long eighteenth century” (c.1660-1830) encompassing everything from the Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 through to the late Romantic period. Trying to find a way through the best part of two centuries, the course will focus on a single theme - the idea of scientific and geographic discovery – for this is the period during which the Pacific was finally mapped, Australia was colonized by Europeans and circumnavigated, and the modern map of the world was drawn. The class will look at a variety of fictional and non-fictional works from the period which show British men and women of different classes writing about their encounters with a range of others, all of whom have their own cultures and beliefs. Texts studied will represent the well-known and less well-known, fiction and non-fiction, written and graphic works, and will include Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, called The Blazing World (1668); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719); Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726); Joseph Banks, excerpts from The Endeavor Journal (1768-71); and Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, Denmark (1796). We’ll also look at maps of the real and imaginary; illustrations of flora and fauna; considerations of new worlds opened up by both the microscope and telescope, by ballooning and cave exploration, and realms revealed by the new sciences of meteorology and geology.  By the end of the course, we’ll hopefully have gained an overview of the socio-political issues driving exploration during the period, and of the range of literary forms and material culture to which exploration gave rise.

 

ENGL 551 Special Topics in Literature in English (Professor Clukey) Literature at the End of the World

T.S. Eliot once said that the world ends “not with a bang but with a whimper”—I guess he wasn’t a fan of speculative fiction, a genre in which the world of ends with gory pandemics, whirling seas, slimy oil slicks, the grotesqueries of bio-engineering, inevitable nuclear war, marauding alien invaders, swarms of attacking insects, the rot of extinction, and even carnivorous plants run amok. This class will examine dystopic, apocalyptic, gothic, and science fictional texts about ecological catastrophe. We’ll consider how these genres imagine the world’s end; humanity’s relation to non-human animals and the natural world; the emergence of climate change, the Great Acceleration, and the Anthropocene; and whether or not writers allow for hope, recovery, or futures beyond environmental and social collapse. Possible readings include: Mary Shelley The Last Man, H.G. Wells The Time Machine, Octavia Butler Dawn, Cormac McCarthy The Road,  Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Ashley Dawson’s Extinction, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and Roy Scranton Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, among other possible texts.


This class will be of particular interest to students interested in environmental studies, climate change, twentieth-century literature, and speculative literatures and media.

 

 

ENGL 581 Studies in Renaissance Drama (Professor Stanev) Cash and Monsters

“Cash and Monsters” will examine an intriguing set of relationships between stage, street, performance, and ideas of economic migration, capital enterprises, credit, aliens and alienation, fashion, expression, transgender identities, anatomies, anomalies, monstrosity, parody, and sexuality. The main questions that we will pursue address the ways in which drama in the age of Shakespeare negotiated specific identities that often opposed domestic to foreign, familiar to exotic, native to accented, and proper to monstrous, depicting the social landscape in fluid, almost unfamiliar terms, unleashed by the sweeping currents of foreign labor, proto-capitalism, consumerism, and the disintegration of stable social markers of self, gender, and status. The learning outcomes of this class will aim to generate: 1) enhanced understanding of the material and cultural conditions of play-acting and play-going in the English capital around 1600; 2) awareness of the economic and “monstrous” enterprises, affecting space, markers of self, history. and social structures; 3) appreciation for a vibrant and rich body of works that created distinct themes and dramatic techniques. The learning outcomes will be assessed through one shorter analytical essay and one longer research paper, as well as through regular Discussion Board posts. Graduate students will be additionally responsible for compiling a brief research database, as well as for preparing an abstract that could double as a conference proposal.

 

ENGL 599 Texts and Technologies (Professor Kelderman) From Print to Podcast: Cultures of Reading in America

How does Oprah’s Book Club create bestsellers and launch writers’ careers? How have podcasts and streaming television changed our habits of cultural consumption? And what kinds of cultural exchange do we take part in when we share texts and reading lists over social media? This course examines how different media and technologies shape our ideas about books, authorship, and reading. We will explore such topics as controversies in the publishing industry; the recovery of “forgotten” works of literature; class and gender ideologies in romance novels; and the shift to digital technologies in writing and publishing. And we will examine the relation between reading practices and different subcultures in American society, including those shaped by issues of class, race, gender, LGBTQ identity, and indigeneity. Some of our readings will be works of scholarship, such as Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print and Nazeera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. But we will also study works of literature that have a particularly fascinating publication history, such as John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. Finally, through meetings with authors, archivists, a publisher, and an independent bookseller we will further explore how cultures of reading and writing are sustained in 2021. Assignments will consist of several short response papers and a longer research paper. This course also provides the opportunity to polish a portfolio of your own work, with an eye on your future plans in the profession or graduate school.