Course Descriptions

Pedagogy (graduate)
I’ve taught this course twice to students who were primarily teaching composition for the first time–but also students teaching technical writing, students who hadn’t yet taught, and students with teaching experience who are interested in composition theory. This most recent syllabus is organized around recent (~2013 forward) work published in leading composition journals; we used composition history to fill in gaps in our understanding as we saw them appear. This attention to the recent helped new instructors think hard about praxis while also understanding the use value and contours of composition theory.

Reproducing Literature: Introduction the the Major (300 level / introductory)
This course, designed for new majors (first-year students, transfer students, and transfers into the major) examines the question of what it means to be an English major through attention to the issue of *reproduction* in literature and rhetoric. We examine the reproduction of bodies, worlds, and histories, and attend to these questions through readings and projects in literature and literary analysis, rhetoric and rhetorical analysis, and creative writing.

Rhetoric of Style (300 level)
This course examines the function of style in writing and rhetoric by looking at writing about health. Because this course tends to attract students who are either interested in becoming K-12 teachers or who are earning professional and technical writing certificates, the course’s instruction also has a focus on pedagogy and on a wide range of genres.

Advanced Composition (200 level)
This course, designed for majors and non-majors, aims to introduce students to a wide range of writing possibilities. Through repeated practice, numerous reflective exercises, and a final portfolio, students grow to learn more about themselves as writers and about the options available to them. Students in this course choose their own model texts to grow intimately familiar with throughout the semester, providing a range of examples for them to look at and reflect on as they write.

Material Rhetorics of Health and Medicine (graduate; course description)
This graduate level course is concerned with the question of how the rhetorics of health and medicine relate to materiality. Through readings in rhm, rhetoric of science, feminist science studies, and feminist new materialism, students consider how we define the material and how that definition colors our access to and understanding of care and health.

Viral Agents: Constructing Ebola in Literature and Culture (400 level)
Taught last during the Ebola crisis of 2014, this course asks students to consider the question of epidemic in relation to literature and the humanities. Through an interdisciplinary examination of novels, songs, films, scientific articles, and rhetorical texts, we think about questions of care, embodiment, and racializations of disease.

Eating Our Ecology: Environmental Writing and Food Literature (100 level)
This course, which features several field trips to local farms, asks students to think about the sources of their food in relation to contemporary food writing. Students explore cookbooks and recipe blogs, track the sources of all their food for a day, tour and work on local farms, and participate in group potlucks and meals. Through this process, and while reading contemporary novels and memoirs about food culture, they consider questions of how food culture and farming are rhetorically constructed, how they connect to rhetorical constructions of ecology, and how experience and reflection effect our sense of what it means to eat.

Introduction to the Health Humanities (100 level)
In this introductory course, students explore what we refer to as the health humanities. Through a variety of texts and genres (including graphic medicine, rhetorical works, novels, artwork, and a wide range of other works), students consider contemporary health issues and how the humanities may help us approach these issue with new kinds of care and deliberation.

Rhetoric of Health and Gender (300 level)
Students in this course think about how health and gender interrelate. Through thinking about how gender and health are rhetorically constructed, students build knowledge of several fields and apply rhetorical methods to health case studies.

Writing in the Health Professions (graduate)
This course asks students to consider the role of writing in medicine and health. Through careful study and participation in the crafting of common genres in health and medicine, students consider how writing constructs knowledge and become familiar with how to write successfully in these genres.