Undergraduate Course Descriptions | Spring 2022

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Dell 1 104
Tolchinsky, Raisa

An introductory course in poetry writing, with a primary focus on creating new poems in a workshop setting. Students will study basic poetic terms and techniques and revise and arrange a series of poems for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements. 

002
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM Bryan 235
James, Katherine Anne

003
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM Bryan 328
Hadley, Henrietta

004
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM Bryan 334
Light, Wheeler Mark

005
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM New Cabell 068
Baban, Hajjar

007
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM Maury 110
Adams, Hodges

008
MW 06:30PM-07:45PM New Cabell 064
Dierdorff, Hannah

An introductory course in fiction writing, with a primary focus on creating short stories in a workshop setting. Students will study basic narrative terms and techniques and revise several short stories for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.

003
MW 06:00PM-07:15PM Rotunda 150
Boateng, Nana

005
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM New Cabell 042
McGehee, Laura

006
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM Bryan 334
Olson, Derick

007
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Rotunda 150
Rodriguez Jr., Roberto

008
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM Bryan 328
Horn, Jana

W 02:00PM-04:30PM (Online Synchronous)
Restricted to Instructor Permission
Nystrom, Debra

A weekly 2.5-hour once-weekly class for students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2300. Emphasis is on workshop of students' own poems, with focused writing exercises and written responses to relevant outside reading, as well as class discussions on issues of contemporary poetry. Final poetry portfolio required.

INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION IS REQUIRED FOR ENROLLMENT.  Please request instructor permission through SIS and apply through email.  APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: writing sample of 4-5 poems IN A SINGLE WORD DOCUMENT with a cover sheet including name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit application to Prof. Nystrom at dln8u@virginia.edu . Applications will be considered on a rolling basis as soon as registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. The final deadline will be December 15th. Classes do sometimes fill before the final submission deadline, but an effort will be made to hold a few seats open until after the deadline.

M 02:00PM-04:30PM Brooks 103
Teare, Brian

Powered by the urgent sense that “I have just realized that the stakes are myself/I have no other/ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life” Diane Di Prima read her Revolutionary Letters on street corners, at love-ins, and at protests. After several years of writing and performing her counter-cultural poems and publishing them in small mimeographed chapbooks she gave away for free, Di Prima published the first full-length version of Revolutionary Letters with City Lights Books in 1971. Its fiftieth anniversary edition joins other recently reissued revolutionary titles spanning the 1970s, including June Jordan’s Passion and N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix, whose respective feminist and avant-garde reinventions of the Black Arts continue to challenge and change the conventions of poetry. The reading component of this course will begin with Di Prima, Jordan, and Pritchard in the semester’s first half, and in its second half proceed to contemporary inheritors of their revolutionary work, T’ai Freedom Ford, Juliana Spahr, Douglas Kearney, Joshua Escobar, and Vanessa Jimenez Gabb. The workshop component of this course will begin with short poems written in response to prompts derived from our reading of Di Prima, Jordan, and Pritchard. These prompts will be designed to help us think about the flexible, powerful relationship between cultural critique and poetic form, between revolution and the literal letter. The long workshop portion of the course will offer each of us the chance to expand upon those poems in longer manuscripts. Throughout the semester, in both critical discussions and workshops, we’ll discuss the conceptual, political, and poetic aspirations of the work we read, and explore the possibilities of coming together as poets during a time of great cultural change.

Note: Instructor Permission is required for enrollment. Please request instructor permission through SIS and apply through email. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit application in a single document to Prof. Teare at bt5ps@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis as soon as registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. The final deadline will be December 15th. Classes do sometimes fill before the final submission deadline, but an effort will be made to hold a few seats open until after the deadline.

T 02:00PM-04:30PM Bryan 233
Dove, Rita

Instructor Permission is required for enrollment. Please request instructor permission through SIS and apply through email. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: writing sample of 4–5 poems with a cover sheet including name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit application in a single document to Prof. Dove at rfd4b@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis as soon as registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. The final deadline will be December 15th. Classes do sometimes fill before the final submission deadline, but an effort will be made to hold a few seats open until after the deadline.

R 02:00PM-04:30PM Dawson's Row 105
Marcom, Micheline

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 203
Martin Beecher, Anna

W 05:00PM-07:30PM Dawson's Row 105
Denton, Elizabeth

T 10:00AM-12:30PM Bryan 233
Alameddine, Rabih

What can the literature/art of previous pandemics tell us about how we will write about future pandemics? Will the writing about the AIDS epidemic be able to shed any light on how we will be writing about Covid-19? What are the differences and similarities? 

In this course, we will look at various works that deal with AIDS. We will read across genres: fiction and nonfiction, memoir and poetry, film and theater. We’ll study Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, Thom Gunn’s incredible poems in The Man with Night Sweats, Marlon Riggs’s film Tongues Untied, Susan Sontag’s story The Way We Live Now, among others. 

M 02:00PM-04:30PM Dawson's Row 105
Alison, Jane

W 02:00PM-04:30PM Dawson's Row 105
Marcom, Micheline

W 02:00PM-04:30PM Bryan 233
Petrosino, Kiki

In this seminar, we will focus on renewing our artistic connections to UVA now that we’re back in community together. We’ll read published works of poetry by writers with ties to the University, Charlottesville, & the region. We’ll also think about & explore the physical space of Grounds as a site for reading, writing, researching, & sharing poems. This course will be structured as a small, discussion-based seminar & you’ll have a choice of creative or critical writing projects. Please note: this course is designed for students in the Area Program in Poetry Writing, but open to other students on a space-available basis & after consultation with the Instructor.

Spaar, Lisa

The Capstone seminar is a semester-long investigation of faculty and student-directed, shared texts that allows advanced poetry writing students in the Area Program in Poetry Writing to begin to think beyond the single poem and into ways poetry manuscripts can be organized, to become more deeply aware of their own patterns and evolving aesthetic, and to create new work.   

The course involves a combination of weekly discussion of individual student manuscripts and one-on-one conferring with the instructor.  After mid-term, students are assigned a graduate student mentor, who also offers the poetry manuscript a close reading.  The course culminates in the production by each student of a manuscript of original poetry.   This is course is open only to fourth-year students in the Area Program in Poetry Writing, who must apply for permission to enroll through SIS.

Day and time of the course will be determined once all participants’ schedules are taken into account.

R 02:00PM-04:30PM (Online Synchronous)
Restricted to Instructor Permission
Nystrom, Debra

This workshop is for students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry, and it welcomes students working in the poetry/prose hybrid space as well.   It is open to advanced undergraduate students, MFA fiction students, and graduate English students.  The class will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned reading, with particular attention to issues of craft.  Students will be expected to write and revise six to eight poems, to participate in class discussion and offer detailed notes in response to other students’ work, to keep a poetry journal, to attend several poetry readings, to turn in close-reading responses to three assigned readings, and to participate in a group presentation. 

INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION IS REQUIRED FOR ENROLLMENT.  Please request instructor permission through SIS and apply through email.  APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: writing sample of 4-5 poems IN A SINGLE WORD DOCUMENT with a cover sheet including name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit application to Prof. Nystrom at dln8u@virginia.edu . Applications will be considered on a rolling basis as soon as registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. The final deadline will be December 15th. Classes do sometimes fill before the final submission deadline, but an effort will be made to hold a few seats open until after the deadline.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM Shannon 111
Tucker, Herbert

Literary study that matters arises from close reading and, however wide the range of topics surveyed, never really outgrows it.  This introduction to literary study will focus on poetry, fiction, and drama that, by foregrounding reading itself, challenge us to reflect on what reading entails.  The course is primarily designed for new and prospective English majors; but anybody is welcome who has developed, and wants to deepen, habits of attention to language and the shapes it takes in written art.  Not recommended for the student seeking only to satisfy the Second Writing Requirement.  Numerous short exercises, several mid-length papers, examination.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 328
Fowler, Elizabeth

An Introduction to Literary Studies through stories about King Arthur’s knights, ladies, and lady-knights. We’ll range from Marie de France’s twelfth-century poems to the 2021 film The Green Knight, and from lyric to narrative to cartoons. We’ll develop your ways of seeing, thinking, talking, and writing about literary art in conversation with the questing denizens of the Round Table--and their beasts.

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM New Cabell 411
Modica, John

This introductory-level course takes a critical look at the two course topics: 1. the study of literature and 2. the role of sexuality in our everyday lives. We will read a mix of modern and contemporary fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, criticism, and theory. In our engagement with these readings, we will examine our experiences with art and literature and their relationship to sexuality in its broadest sense: how we think, act, and feel with others. How do formal experiments with language shape the ways we understand sexuality? And how does sexuality shape the form of literature? We will pay attention to these questions with works by Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Walt Whitman, Qwo-Li Driskill, Andrea Long Chu, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Rabih Alameddine, Ching-In Chen, Susan Stryker, Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, and Saidiya Hartman.

This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement and Humanities Area Requirement and counts toward elective requirements for majors/minors in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. You will produce a portfolio of writing tailored to your personal and professional goals: assignments include two essays and six reflection exercises completed over the course of the semester. No prior experience with literature or gender and sexuality studies at the college level is necessary. All course texts will be available for free as PDFs and open-access resources.

MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM Astronomy 265
Hurley, Alison

Jane Austen is everywhere – at movie theaters, on coffee mugs, in myriad sequels, parodies, and re-imaginings of her novels.  How is it that an author whose works are so deeply embedded in her own time remains a contemporary phenomenon?  How is it that novels depicting a remarkably thin slice of a defunct society enjoy such broad appeal?  In this course we will try to answer these questions by “putting Austen in her place.”  We will carefully situate Austen’s novels within a number of specific but overlapping interpretive terrains – literary, political, intellectual, and gendered.  By deeply contextualizing Austen, I believe we will be in a better position to assess her significance in both her world and in our own.  In order to perform this work we will need to develop the skills necessary for reading and writing effectively about texts.  Specifically, we will aspire to read closely, write precisely, argue persuasively, ask good questions, employ strong evidence, and take interpretive risks.

Our readings will most likely include: Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Sorry, no P&P!

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM Shannon 109
Gottschlich, Michelle

TR 2:00PM-3:15PM Bryan 203
Jost, Walter

How does a written poem on a page—its lines now taken out of their historical contexts, its author no longer around to ask, its time past—manage to mean anything at all when spoken aloud? How do words work, anyway (because, after all, they do work)? This course centers on patient close reading of poems of the twentieth century, and what’s in them for us in the twenty-first century, by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens and others. This course satisfies the second writing requirement.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Shannon 111
Arata, Stephen

The broad purposes of this course are to introduce you to ways of understanding texts within the discipline of literary studies and to improve your skills in critical thinking and writing. In addition to fulfilling the Second Writing Requirement, the course can be used complete the prerequisite to the English major. We will spend the semester reading widely in the work of Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest writers in the English language. In addition to three of her novels (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando), our reading list will include short fiction and essays as well as excerpts from her letters and journals. In addition to regular brief writing assignments, requirements will include three 5-6 page essays. The course is designed both for those who have read Woolf before and those who will be reading her for the first time.

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM Shannon 111
Coyoca, David

In this course we will analyze Asian-American, African-American, and Indigenous stories of displacement, (im)migration, and settlement. Through comparative analysis, we will discuss the various intersections between and divergences among these texts, paying particular attention to the shared histories the texts evidence. Our goal is to form interpretive arguments that address the ways in which the texts negotiate ideas about the nation, nation building, and national belonging.

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM New Cabell 191
Swoboda, Jessica

What links novels? How do characters, ideas, themes, and preoccupations resonate across time? Rather than studying influence, this course examines how novels of different historical moments speak to and with one another. We'll focus specifically on (messy) relationships, belonging, identity, and narration in 6 modern and contemporary novels: Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) and Brit Bennett's Vanishing Half (2020), Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten (1909) and Teju Cole's Open City (2011), and Margarita Liberaki's Three Summers (1946) and Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where are You? (2021). Assignments will include occasional reading quizzes and reading reflections and two essays.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Shannon 109
Gelly, Piers

This course will focus on the literary genre of “campus novels,” meaning works of fiction set on and around college campuses (plus some high schools). We will consider why writers might choose campuses as a setting or subject for fiction, and what choices they make in creating these fictive or fictionalized schools on the page.

Texts might include THE ART OF FIELDING, by Chad Harbach; THE IDIOT, by Elif Batuman; THE SECRET HISTORY, by Donna Tartt; THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS, by Micah Nemerever; AS LIE IS TO GRIN, by Simeon Marsalis; REAL LIFE, by Brandon Taylor; LONER, by Teddy Wayne; PREP, by Curtis Sittenfeld; TRUST EXERCISE, by Susan Choi; HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, by J.K. Rowling; the TV shows THE CHAIR and DEAR WHITE PEOPLE; and short fiction by Donald Barthelme, Danielle Evans, and others.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Maury 110
Olwell, Victoria

This course investigates the novel in US literary history. Beginning with works from the early republic and concluding with very recent novels, the syllabus set us up to explore a variety of ways that novels have been written, consumed, and understood to function in public life. So that we can study a wide array of styles and historical moments, the novels typically will be on the short side. Authors will likely include Hannah Webster Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, Nella Larsen, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange, and Ocean Vuong. Assignments will include biweekly short essays, along with two formal essays of 5-7 pages. This is a discussion-based course, so your class participation will be vital.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM New Cabell 415
Kinney, Clare

This course will explore 4 major tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. We’ll contextualize our readings by looking at theories of tragedy ranging across several centuries as we explore the particular kinds of action and transgression that are labeled “tragic,” discuss “tragic knowledge,” and consider the role of gender and (in the case of Othello) race in shaping the dynamics of tragedy. We’ll also give some thought to the interpretation of tragedy in performance. The course will probably conclude with a reading of The Winter’s Tale, a play which invites us to consider what it means to write beyond tragedy.

Requirements: regular attendance and lively participation in discussion, three 5-7 page papers, occasional e-mail postings, and a final examination.

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM Monroe 134
Stephen Cushman, Deborah Lawrence, Paul Freedman

*Does not satisfy the prerequisite for the English major.

What is our relationship to the environment? Physical, chemical, or biological phenomena can be described by environmental scientists, but "problems" are defined by our response to them, contingent on culture, history, and values more than measurements. Solving environmental problems lies in the political sphere, but our debates draw on discourses from literature, philosophy, economics, and ethics. Explore the basis for environmental thought and practice. Crosslisted with ETP 2030 and PLAP 2030.

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Shannon 109
Keyser, Emelye

Shakespeare’s Macduff hopes revenge will be a “medicine” for his “grief”; the scientist Francis Bacon calls it “wild justice”; but in practical terms what a revenge story often translates to is a big old pile of bodies on the stage or the page. In this course we’ll read five plays from the height of the revenge tale’s popularity (ca. 1600), including two by Shakespeare. We’ll also look at some Greek and Roman antecedents, and we’ll follow the theme into 19th- and 20th-century short stories and 21st-century film. Expect ghosts, guts, blinding, bludgeoning, incest, cannibalism, tragedy, tyranny, and some great death speeches. This course is for English majors and non-majors alike--no experience with Shakespearen language, the Renaissance, or literary criticism required.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Monroe 114
Cole, Sarah

The First and Second World Wars transformed European culture and challenged poets, novelists, and filmmakers. Why create art in a time a mass violence and upheaval? How could a film, poem, or literary narrative do justice to the raw experience of war? In this course, we will explore a diverse group of responses from authors in Britain, France, and Germany, ranging from the gritty realism of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to the elegant modernism of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. We will pay equal attention to literary techniques and social identities, examining questions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability in war literature. The seminar will emphasize close reading, active participation, and analytical writing. Requirements include three essays, an in-class presentation, and weekly discussion questions. Among our main texts will be poems by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Paul Celan; novels by Virginia Woolf, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Böll, and Irene Nemirovsky; memoirs by Vera Brittain and Elie Wiesel; and films by Jean Renoir and Louis Malle.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Shannon 109
Spaar, Lisa

We live in an age of easy and ubiquitous self-portrayal. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Zoom, and other digital and cellular “galleries” allow a protean array of venues in which to post, curate, manipulate, and efface visual images and verbal profiles of “the self” with what seems like a faster than real-time alacrity. This proliferation of self-portraiture is so rampant that it’s possible for viewers and readers to become inured to its magic, craft, and power. Since antiquity, literary and visual artists have depicted themselves in their productions, a fascination that has continued unabated into the twenty-first century, spurred by advances in photography, imaging, digitalization, communication, information systems, and the widespread availability of the Internet. In this course we will look at the “selfie” from antiquity to the present, in poetry (from Sappho to Charles Wright and Kendrik Lamar) and visual art (from early Egyptian art through Rembrandt, Dűrer, Vigée-Lebrun, Kahlo, Van Gogh, Picasso, Abbassy, Sherman, Basquiat, Morimura, and others). We will visit the Fralin Museum of Art, make forays into the Studio Art and Drama departments, be visited by poets, artists and others, and in general explore what we can learn from our human fascination with self-portrayal and our compulsion to turn it into art. 

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Shannon 111
Kravetz, Rachel

Many esteemed novels of the early twentieth century have been described as “experimental” because they did not follow tried-and-true models. Yet at least one novelist has taken the label to imply that he did not know what he was doing, saying, “I think of experiments as, ‘I’ll try this and see if it works,’ and it may not. I don’t experiment.” With the premise that great writers are in command of their art, this course will investigate some of the unusual qualities to be found in “modernist” fiction. We will read novels in which it is hard to tell who is speaking; with speakers who sound unlike anyone we’ve ever met; with unreal characters; and with taboo subject matter. Writers may include Virginia Woolf, Jean Toomer, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larson, William Faulkner, and Samuel Beckett. One century later, we will consider how their works defy (and fulfill) our expectations of fiction on a case-by-case basis. You will decide for yourselves what modernist writers gained (and risked) by forgoing more ordinary forms and language. Writing will be a means of digging deeply into our novels throughout the course.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Astronomy 265
Casteen IV, John Thomas

This course will examine literary prose in contemporary literature, ranging from more topical nonfiction to the personal, lyric, and experimental essay; it will also include two essay-films.  The idea of the essay—the attempt—requires uncertainty and poise.  How do writers and artists use the expressive potential of this elastic form to navigate the situation of the present?  Students will explore critical approaches to the essay and compose new work of their own.

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM Shannon 109
McBride, Amber

Resistance and the African American fight for equality is woven into the fabric of American history. From the very beginning it is documented that enslaved Africans stolen from their homelands resisted by refusing to eat during The Middle Passage.  We see resistance in the establishment of Black towns and universities, in the speeches of the Civil Rights Movement, the films of the 1980's and current documentaries that all work to pull the eye towards social injustices towards African Americans in American culture. In this class we will read speeches from Malcolm X, watch documentaries like High on the Hog and interact with texts that highlight that resistance, though difficult and taxing, brings about positive change.

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM New Cabell 338
Ard, Devan

No single work has had a greater influence on English literature than the Bible. This course explores the varieties of biblical appropriation in English — from drama and lyric poetry to novel and film — as well as the range of attitudes toward biblical revelation, from ardent belief to skepticism and doubt, that shaped these works. We will learn to read literature in its historical context while thinking carefully about formal and literary innovation across periods. Along the way we will ponder the limits of adaptation and revision; the relation between scripture and politics; and representations of exile and otherness.

No prior knowledge of the Bible or English literature is necessary. We will start at the beginning, with the creation myth in Genesis, and work our way out of Eden.

Other texts may include:

• medieval plays about Mary
• Mary Sidney’s translations of the psalms
• William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
• John Milton, Paradise Lost
• John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, one of the greatest satires in English
• prose and poetry by Christina Rosetti
• Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Wilson 244
Olla, Nasrin

How do novels, poetry, and philosophical texts teach us to relate ethically toward the stranger, the foreigner, or the other? How do we understand different cultures and peoples without reducing them to our already established frames of reference? How do we imagine otherness? This course approaches these big questions by exploring representations of the stranger and the foreigner in African and African diasporic literature. We will look at texts such as Édouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi, Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart alongside reflections on the relation between ‘ethics and aesthetics’ by Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, Elaine Scarry, and Giorgio Agamben.

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM New Cabell 107
Barman, Shalmi

What does the way we work say about who we are? How does human labor transform both the external world and the human subject? How does work feel — alienating, liberating, both? The writers and artists of the long nineteenth century following the Industrial Revolution confronted these questions at a time of rapid technological, economic, and political change. In this course we will read widely across the literature of the period to recover these historical perspectives and evaluate them through the lens of our present moment.

This course fulfills the second writing requirement as well as the 2500-level course requirement for the major. Assigned reading will include poetry (Blake, Wordsworth, the Brownings, Whitman), prose (Dickens, Hardy, Melville, Morris), selected non-fiction, and one dramatic text. You will not need to purchase any texts. Course requirements include two essays, short reading responses, one in-class group presentation, and lively participation.

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM New Cabell 107
Buckley, Alexander

The Victorians are often thought to be traditional to a fault: backward-looking, repressed, and in denial of change. Upon closer examination, however, we might discover a more complex reality. The Victorians are frequently concerned observers of seismic societal upheaval—of globalization and empire, of race, gender, and class, of urban-industrial development and rural decline. In this course, we will study three works of literature to see how Victorian writers register a changing world's shocks, anxieties, and opportunities, and to weigh their relevance to our present. The writers considered might include Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and/or George Eliot.

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Shannon 107
Stec, Justin

Good philosophy often reads like an immersive work of imaginative literature. This course welcomes anyone willing to think critically and collaboratively about the role imagination has played, and continues to play, in shaping the West’s most pressing philosophical concerns. Together, we will read works of philosophical literature and literary philosophy which will push back against the vision of philosophy as a stuffy academic affair.

The reading load will be significant, falling somewhere between 75-125 pages of reading per week, and there will be a strong focus on analytical writing in the service of vigorous classroom discussion. Expect to encounter a mix of philosophers, novelists, poets, and playwrights—Plato, Simone de Beauvoir, Cornell West, T.S Eliot, H.D, Albert Camus, and Jacques Derrida all included. Come to class ready to discuss, argue, and collaborate!

Assignments comprise one short (5-7 pages) close-reading paper, one long (15-20 pages) final paper with a research component, weekly reading quizzes, the chance to facilitate a seminar discussion, and an in-class final exam. Peer-review writing workshops and one-on-one conferences with the instructor are built into the course schedule.

TR 3:30PM-4:45PM
Jost, Walter

This course introduces the many indirect ways that fiction, drama, and poetry shape our character, beliefs, and attitudes toward the world. Reading literature as a mode of action attunes us both to its calculated designs on us and to our own needs for practical resources to lead our lives. We will read texts ranging from song lyrics to the allegorical novel, modern drama, and lyric poem. This course satisfies the second writing requirement.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM New Cabell 309
Goff, Lisa

This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity” on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,” point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and “New Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Barbara Ehrenreich in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network) and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rebecca Solnit, Jia Tolentino, and Sarah Smarsh. We will also consider the rise of “fake news.” A term formerly used to indicate the work of entertainers such as Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, who pilloried the news (and newsmakers) in order to interpret them, “fake news” is now an established practice of the far right, as well as a political slur used to denigrate the work of mainstream (center and left-of-center) news organizations. 

MW 12:00PM-12:50PM Wilson 402
O'Brien, John

William Wordsworth, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, T. S. Eliot: these are some—but not all— of the authors we will be reading and studying together. This class will survey literature in English from around 1800 to the present moment. We will start with the emergence of Romanticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century and trace the emergence of English as a global language and literature in our post-colonial world. Our itinerary will include stops in Britain, the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and India. This course is part of the two-semester sequence of the history of literature in English (along with ENGL 3001) that is required of English majors, but is open to anyone interested in exploring some of the most significant works of literature of the last two-plus centuries. You do not need to have taken ENGL 3001 first; the courses can be completed in any order that works best for you.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM Brooks 103
Smith, Connie Chic

Black English, Negro dialect, Ebonics, Black slang, and African American English Vernacular (AAEV) are just a few of the names that have been used historically to describe the form of communication that occurs among and between many African Americans.  Rickford & Rickford (2000) define AAEV as the informal speech of many African Americans.

Yet, for as long as there have been Africans in America, this form of communication has been assigned the same designation given to individuals who create and have spoken it for generations; inferior and inappropriate.  The belief that AAEV is a derogatory or demeaning manner in which to speak has been ingrained in the psyche of America and Americans.  This ideology has remained intact until recently.

This course examines the communicative practices of AAEV to explore how a marginalized language dynamic has made major transitions into American mainstream discourse.  AAEV is no longer solely the informal speech of many African Americans; it is the way Americans speak.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM Bryan 235
Rush, Rebecca

In this survey of The Canterbury Tales, we will dig into two central Chaucerian concerns: desire and character. As we read Chaucer’s sketches of the “sondry folk” pilgrimaging to Canterbury and their variously merry and grave tales, we will consider how he portrays in the pilgrims an array of longings and habits. We will debate about when he depicts longing as vivacious, natural, and fundamental—the very “roote” of life—and when he represents it as ridiculous, tragic, or cruel. Examining the portraits of human desire presented by Chaucer will require us to reckon with the shocking, the controversial, and the brutal aspects of his art. Chaucer’s portraits will also push us to think deeply about how he imagines character: How does he paint a picture of the Pardoner or the Wife of Bath? What does he think we need to see and hear in order to come to know them? We will approach Chaucer’s art with seriousness and his language with rigor, but we will also enjoy the unique pleasures of his storytelling and his ability to craft tales that feature a husband sleeping in a barrel, a knight charged with moving all the rocks in Brittany, a tryst in a pear tree, and several well placed farts.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM New Cabell 058
Kinney, Dan

In this course we will study the the interconnections between Milton's literary career and the general political and cultural ferment of Civil War England. We will sample the dizzying range of generic innovations and experiments that inform Milton's work from short early lyrics and prose pamphlets through Paradise Lost. Class requirements, lively participation, one short and one longer paper, and a final exam.

MW 12:00PM-12:50PM Monroe 130
Maus, Katharine

This course deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career as a playwright, in which he was mainly writing tragedies and romances.  ENGL 3271, the fall semester course, deals with the first half of Shakespeare's career, in which he was mainly writing histories and comedies.  You may take either or both courses; neither is a prerequisite for the other.
2 50-minute lectures and 1 50-minute discussion section per week.

Requirements: 3 five-page papers, a final exam emphasizing material covered in lectures and section meetings, and regular short assignments made by section leaders.

This course does not automatically fulfill the Second Writing Requirement, but it may be tweaked to do so.  See me in the first few weeks of the semester if you are interested in this option.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Gibson 242
Wall, Cynthia

In 1775, the German physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg declared that England had the best novels because England had the best roads. Daughters could escape from their fathers; sons could strike out on adventures; young ladies could make Entrances into the World; criminals could flee their crimes; highwaymen could make their fortunes. This course will explore the ways that eighteenth-century British novels themselves explored time and space, country and city, roads and inns, carriages and ships, in the fiction of Jane Austen, John Bunyan,  Frances Burney, Francis Coventry, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias Smollett.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Maury 110
Cantor, Paul

This course deals with the interplay between literature and British imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Topics covered include orientalism and the representation of the foreign, the ideology of imperialism, literary critiques of imperialism, the impact of imperialism on domestic life in Britain, the problem of heroism on the imperial frontier, the intersection between fiction of empire and other genres (such as science fiction, horror stories, and detective fiction), as well as the relationship between late Victorian popular culture and serious fiction, especially the emergence of literary modernism out of fiction of empire. Authors studied include Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Course requirements include two short papers and a final examination.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 235
Pasanek, Bradley

This is a course for English majors (and other students) that introduces the basics of computer programming, text analysis, text encoding, and statistics as experimental methodologies that promote new kinds of reading and interpretation. The aim is to move from "computation into criticism." We’ll work, primarily, with a Shakespeare play, poetry by William Blake, and a Jane Austen novel. Students will find these works at the bookstore alongside manuals on Learning Unix and Text Analysis with R. No prior familiarity with coding or the language R required: we’ll be moving slowly, covering the basics. Advanced Computer Science majors will not be turned away, but they will be required to recite poetry aloud in front of their peers and show an interest in Emma Woodhouse’s misprisions.

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 235
Baker, Peter

In this course we'll read a selection of works from the European Middle Ages, concentrating especially on those in which the themes of love and death intersect. Readings will include such works as Beroul's Tristan and The Saga of Kormak the Skald as well as selections from such longer works and collections as the Mabinogion, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and The Nibelungenlied.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 235
Arata, Stephen

In this course we will read novels (all superb examples of narrative art) drawn from a wide range of cultures and countries. The overarching goal is to engage with these works not from the perspective of their separate national traditions but with an awareness of the novel as a thoroughly transnational literary form, bound up in networks of authors and readers stretching around the globe. Likely candidates for the syllabus include Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte (England), Walter Scott (Scotland), George Sand and Gustave Flaubert (France), Mikhail Lermentov (Russia), Multatuli (Denmark), Benito Pérez Galdós (Spain), Machado de Assiz (Brazil), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (India), and Mary Prince (Bermuda). Course requirements will include two 5-6 page essays, a final exam, and a handful of shorter writing assignments. All the readings will be in English.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM New Cabell 032
Hart, Kevin

This seminar introduces students to a range of American poets living and working, for the most part, in the first half of the twentieth century. We shall read Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. Of particular interest are the ways in which these poets respond to the challenges of modernism in its various inflections — especially high modernism and low modernism — and their relationships, real or imagined, with Romanticism in its several modes.  In addition to poems by the authors, we shall also read some of their prose and letters to see what light is cast on their writing and its contexts.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM Bryan 328
Edmundson, Mark

The mid-twentieth century in America sees and explosion of excellent poetry. More different kinds of consequential poets, more different sorts of poems than the nation had seen before. We’ll start with the understated genius, Elizabeth Bishop, and move on to Robert Lowell, inspired early prophet of the sorrows of American empire. Then on to others: the daring, ever fertile Sylvia Plath; superb political and erotic poet, Adrienne Rich; Robert Hayden, poet of African American grief and hopes;  Allen Ginsberg, author of the culture-shaking Howl. There will be encounters too with the hyper-perceptive Gwendolyn Brooks; visionary Amy Clampitt;  Southern sage James Dickey; James Merrill, perhaps America’s most sophisticated poet; and gritty, tender James Wright. A mid-term quiz, a final quiz, and a paper at the end on the poet you care about most.

MW 11:00AM-11:50AM Wilson 301
Levenson, Michael

Cross-listed with GSGS 3030.

Global Cultural Studies offers an interdisciplinary approach to world cultures during the decades just before and after this new millennium.  Engaging a wide variety of media (including film, popular song, avant-garde art, memoir, political philosophy), the course addresses recent conditions of China, India, North and South Africa, and the Middle East.  Important events – such as the global plight of refugees, the rise of China as super-power, the place of Gandhi in present-day Indian politics, the aspirations and failures of the Arab spring  – will be some of our focal points.  At every stage we consider the making of our present-day world since 1945 and the urgent issues that inform it: the campaign for international human rights, the independence movements in Africa and Asia, the resurgence of religious faith around the world, the crisis of the environment, the plague of Covid, the rise of authoritarian nationalism.

MW 01:00PM-01:50PM Gilmer 390
Levenson, Michael

Cross-listed with GSGS 3030.

Global Cultural Studies offers an interdisciplinary approach to world cultures during the decades just before and after this new millennium.  Engaging a wide variety of media (including film, popular song, avant-garde art, memoir, political philosophy), the course addresses recent conditions of China, India, North and South Africa, and the Middle East.  Important events – such as the global plight of refugees, the rise of China as super-power, the place of Gandhi in present-day Indian politics, the aspirations and failures of the Arab spring  – will be some of our focal points.  At every stage we consider the making of our present-day world since 1945 and the urgent issues that inform it: the campaign for international human rights, the independence movements in Africa and Asia, the resurgence of religious faith around the world, the crisis of the environment, the plague of Covid, the rise of authoritarian nationalism.

MW 10:00AM-10:50AM Monroe 134
Chong, Sylvia

Cross-listed with AMST 3180

An interdisciplinary introduction to the culture and history of Asians and Pacific Islanders in America. Examines ethnic communities such as Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, and Native Hawaiian, through themes such as immigration, labor, cultural production, war, assimilation, and politics. Texts are drawn from genres such as legal cases, short fiction, musicals, documentaries, visual art, and drama.

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM New Cabell 032
Krentz, Christopher

This class offers a wonderful way to sample some of the accomplished writers of American fiction since 1840.  We will read about one short novel a week, exploring whatever topics come up, including language and narrative form; the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States; gender relations; love and its complications; small towns and urbanization; our relationship with the natural environment; and notions of Americanness.  Syllabus is still being finalized, but we may read authors such as Melville, James, Jewett, Crane, Wharton, Larsen, Faulkner, Bradbury, Roth, Reed, MacLean, Smiley, and Otsuka.  Requirements will include thoughtful preparation and participation, two 6-page essays, a midterm, and a final exam.

Online Asynchronous
Livingood, Jeb

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM Brooks 103
Parker, John

Working more or less chronologically we'll cover some of the major lyric poems in English from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.  Our central goals: to learn to read poetry as carefully as possible; to gain a sense of "period" or "movement" where something of that sort may be discerned; to develop an analytic prose style adequate to the challenges of complicated literature.

W 05:30PM-08:00PM Bryan 203
Woolfork, Lisa

Sally Hemings University: CONNECTING THREADS offers a space in which to re-frame “Mr. Jefferson’s University” as a site that destabilizes the dominant narrative of the university as Jefferson’s primary property. Working in conjunction with Charlottesville artist Tobiah Mundt to examine the threads that connect UVA and the City. For many Black folks in Charlottesville, for example, the University is an extractive, dominating, and harmful institution. The work of Sally Hemings University: Connecting Threads relies upon de-centering UVA as savior or primary expert. This community-engaged course is neither service nor charity: it is solidarity.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM New Cabell 209
Wall, Cynthia

Gothic literature burst onto the scene in the eighteenth century with ruined castles, ethereal music, brooding villains and surprisingly sturdy heroines, all performing as metaphors of our deepest fears and fiercest resistances. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the gothic continued as a genre of cultural anxiety. This seminar will survey gothic literature through both history and genre: the classic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818); 18thC German vampire poetry and poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Sylvia Plath; the plays of Matthew Lewis and Richard Brinsley Peake; and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. And we will ask ourselves: What are we afraid of?

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM Shannon 108
Edmundson, Mark

We’ll read with care and imagination what are perhaps the two greatest long poems in the English language, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.  Both are works of palpable genius, but of very different kinds. Milton’s poem is committed to hierarchy, order and degree. In his cosmos, justified subordination and command are the highest ideals. His world at its best is firmly and yet in its way flexibly ordered. He is a brilliant exemplar of true conservatism. Whitman is much different. “Unscrew the locks from the doors / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jams,” Walt chants. Whitman wants to dissolve all needless boundaries in the interest of perfect democratic equality. He wants to undo the barriers between old and young, rich and poor, women and men. And he does so, at least imaginatively, in Song. We’ll read the poems for what they are in themselves. But we’ll also consider them as brilliant exemplars of the progressive mind and its conservative counterpart. Students may be surprised as to where they fall in this mapping. With any luck, we’ll find ourselves, in the words of the Whitmanian, Wallace Stevens, “more truly and more strange.”  A mid-term paper, a final essay, and some short writing assignments. 

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 328
Fowler, Elizabeth

This seminar will venture into the great, anonymous poem in Middle English, as well as, in romance fashion, getting lost in some intriguing asides—other medieval versions of Gawain, a film or two, some investigations of the imagery (what’s a medieval castle? shield? map? subtlety? horse? chapel? landscape?). Our conversations will emphasize medieval material culture and its ability to support and generate the virtual reality of the poem. Some experience in reading Middle English probably essential.

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM New Cabell 068
Kinney, Clare

Hamlet is the most celebrated Shakespearean play; it is also perhaps the most mysterious and elusive.  It has a huge afterlife in both elite and popular culture; it has been reinterpreted, appropriated and adapted by commentators and creative artists to serve very different agendas at various historical moments.  In this seminar we will first (re)read the play very carefully before exploring the resonance of its reshaping in a variety of media.  We’ll look at dramatic reinventions  (e.g. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead); novelistic reinventions (e.g. John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius), cinematic reinventions (e.g. the Hamlet movies of Almereyda and Olivier); we’ll also pay attention to global Hamlet and to the critical reception of the play.  Why does this particular play provoke so many creative reinventions?  And what do its more subversive rewritings suggest about the cultural forces underlying the apparently unceasing need to revisit and/or “correct” and/or supplement Shakespeare’s project?

Course requirements: regular attendance and lively participation in discussion, an oral presentation, one very short and one long paper, a portfolio of e-mail responses.

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM Maury 113
Cantor, Paul

This course will study the impact of science on nineteenth-century literature and in particular the development of science fiction as a genre, with emphasis on the epoch-making works of H. G. Wells. We will examine the ways in which science posed a challenge to literature and called into question the very notion of artistic truth. But we will also consider the ways in which science served as a new form of inspiration for fiction writers, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. One of the main subjects of the course will be the impact of Darwin and Darwinism. We will discuss the relation of science to the Victorian crisis of faith and also explore the interrelation of science and the British Empire. Writers studied will include Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edwin Abbott, and Arthur Conan Doyle. One class presentation, one long paper, and class participation.

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM New Cabell 132
Parker, John

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century.  Moving through much of the New Testament, from the Gospels to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the New Testament; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible is needed or assumed. It can be taken before or after the Bible Part 1: The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, taught by Professor Stephen Cushman. 

T 03:30PM-06:00PM New Cabell 056
Ganguly, Debjani

The course will explore the emergence of speculative fiction as a global literary form in our contemporary age. Broadly encompassing the genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror and alternative history, speculative fiction is any kind of fiction that creates a narrative world which may or may not resemble the world we live in. This kind of fiction embodies alternative ideas of reality including magic, space or time travel, alternative realities, or alternative histories. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of speculative fiction from Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific that figure alternative futures for peoples oppressed by centuries-long colonialism. The rapid proliferation of digital technology and the accelerating effects of anthropogenic climate change have given a new edge to this body of fiction. We will study the emergence of counter-factual utopian and dystopian narratives, Afrofuturism and animism, and apocalyptic fiction on environmental collapse through a range of exciting works. The goal of this course is to understand the rise of speculative fiction as a literary form and a mode of world-making that captures cataclysmic shifts in human and non-human worlds that can no longer be comprehended by social, political, and moral frameworks of our recent past and present.

Primary Texts

W 03:30PM-06:00PM Shannon 111
Seitz, James

This course will explore the evolution of memoir since the mid-twentieth century. In addition to reading several remarkable memoirs, we’ll examine various theories of autobiographical writing and criticism of the memoir as a genre. Students should also expect that, along with writing about what they read, they’ll have the option of writing about their own lives for at least one assignment, in order to learn about the creation as well as the interpretation of memoir.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Maury 113
Ramazani, Jahan

How does poetry articulate and respond to the globalizing processes that accelerate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In this seminar on modern and contemporary global poetry in English, we will explore the world in poetry and poetry in the world. The writers we will read range from modernists like Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, and McKay to postcolonial poets of Ireland, India, Africa, Britain, and the Caribbean, such as Walcott, Heaney, Goodison, Philip, Kolatkar, Okot p’Bitek, Okigbo, Daljit Nagra, and Kei Miller. Among requirements are active participation; reading quizzes; co-leading of discussion; and two substantial papers involving research and close reading. Our texts will be from volumes 1 and 2 of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, third edition, as supplemented by other poems and critical texts.

T 05:00PM-07:30PM New Cabell 036
Ross, Marlon

This seminar focuses on the tumultuous life and diverse works of James Baldwin, whose intellectual influence is still palpable in today’s discourses about race, sexuality, social activism, national belonging, and exile. We’ll study major works from each of the genres that Baldwin engaged, including the novel, short story, drama, poetry, journalism, and the essay. In addition to Baldwin’s works, we’ll explore him as a “spokesman” of the Civil Rights movement, and how his high visibility as a public intellectual whose appearances on the new medium of television helped to shape his “celebrity” status. Among the works to be examined are the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Just Above My Head (1979); plays The Amen Corner (1954) and Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964); selected poems from Jimmy’s Blues (1983); selected short stories from Going to Meet the Man (1965); essays from Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976); and the children’s book Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976). To comprehend Baldwin’s impact in his time and in our own, we’ll sample some works where his influence is especially compelling, including: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1965); eulogies for Baldwin by Toni Morrison and Ossie Davis (1987); Darieck Scott’s 1996 novel Traitor to the Race; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 nonfiction book Between the World and Me; the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2017); the 2018 feature film based on his 1976 novel If Beale Street Could Talk; and a variety of critical essays on Baldwin’s works. Assignments include: two short critical essays, a team class presentation, and a final research paper.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM New Cabell 395
Kong-Chow, Janet

This research seminar explores the significance of American race and ethnicity within environmental humanities, crisis, and activism. Beginning in the mid-20 th century, we will consider the emergence of contemporary U.S. environmentalism, and relationships between space, landscape, built environments, and identity formation, belonging, as well as public health, legislation, and sustainability.

R 05:00PM-07:30PM New Cabell 036
Grandison, Ian

This interdisciplinary seminar uses the method of Critical Landscape Analysis to explore how everyday places and spaces, “landscapes,” are involved in the negotiation of power in American society.  Landscapes, as we engage the idea, may encompass seemingly private spaces (within the walls of a suburban bungalow or of a government subsidized apartment) to seemingly public spaces (the vest pocket park in lower Manhattan where the Occupy Movement was launched in September 2011; the Downtown Mall, with its many privately operated outdoor cafés, that occupy the path along which East Main Street once flowed freely in Charlottesville; or even the space of invisible AM and FM radio waves that the FCC supposedly regulates in the public’s interest).  We launch our exploration by considering landscapes as arenas of the Culture Wars.  With this context, we unearth ways in which places are planned, designed, constructed, and mythologized in the struggle to assert and enforce social (especially racial) distinctions, difference, and hierarchy.  You will be moved to understand how publicly financed freeways were planned not only to facilitate some citizens’ modern progress, but also to block others from  accessing rights, protections, and opportunities to which casually we believe all "Americans" are entitled.  We study landscapes not only as represented in written and non-written forms, but also through direct sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience during two mandatory field trips to places in our region.  In addition to informal group exercises and individual mid-term exam, critical field trip reflection paper, and final exam, you are required to complete in small groups a final research project on a topic you choose that relates to the seminar.  Past topics have ranged from the racial politics of farmers’ markets in gentrifying inner cities to the gender--and the transgender exclusion—politics of  universal standards for public restroom pictograms.  Students showcase such results in an informal symposium that culminates the semester.  Not only will you expand the complexity and scope of your critical thinking abilities, but also you will never again experience as ordinary the spaces and places you encounter from day to day.

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Astronomy 265
Hart, Kevin

Cross listed with RELG 4810, ENGL 5830.

This seminar focuses on the writings of two important modern poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill. The one is Catholic, and the other questions religion at every level while also remaining open to the possibility of faith. Each poet raises major theological issues: belief, doubt, ecstasy, martyrdom, revelation, transcendence, and theodicy, among them. We will read, as closely as possible, some poems and prose writings by each poet, consider their theological contexts, and examine the ways in which theological issues are folded in their poems. Students will write two essays, one on each poet.

Kuhn, Mary

Directed research leading to completion of an extended essay to be submitted to the Honors Committee.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM Bryan 203
Baker, Peter

A reading of the classic poem in Old English. Students must have taken ENGL 5100, Old English, or its equivalent at another university.

TR 12:35PM-01:50PM Bryan 233
Rush, Rebecca

What is poetry? What sets it apart from other modes of writing, thinking, imagining, feeling? What are the distinctive tools at the poet’s disposal? How do these tools work, and how can we describe their workings? Should poetry be plain or intricate, delightful or didactic, passionate or rational, heavenly or human? In this course, we will explore the many Renaissance responses to these questions by reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse alongside early modern poetic manuals. We will inspect a range of poetic styles and genres, beginning with a deep dive into Shakespeare’s sonnets. Other readings will include sonnets by Petrarch, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth; epyllia by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe; country house poems by Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, and Andrew Marvell; odes by Ben Jonson, John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell; and poems about ecstatic love by John Donne and Katherine Philips. This course is open to undergraduate and graduate students.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM Shannon 109
Olla, Nasrin

What is postcolonial critique? Is it a way of reading a text? Does it refer to the processes of historical decolonization in places like Africa, India, and the Caribbean? Or is it a practice of critical thought that can be used to think across multiple spaces and times? In this course, we will approach these questions by reading a wide range of writers including Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Édouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Susan Buck-Morss, and C. L. R. James. The final project invites students to reflect upon the themes of revolutionary thinking, the global and universal, and questions of ethics.

MW 12:35PM-01:50PM Bryan 233
Kuhn, Mary

This course examines how botanical projects and their cultural representations shaped the material and political landscapes of empire. In particular, it focuses on the English, French, and American imperial states in global context. Combining literary analysis with environmental history and the history of science, we'll explore the intertwined social and ecological impacts of imperialism. A wide range of sources, from poems and novels to seed catalogues, herbariums, and UVa’s gardens, will help us to see how the workings of empire in the 18th and 19th centuries shaped today's ideas about the environment.

W 10:00AM-12:30PM Dawson's Row 105
Cushman, Stephen

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the Bible; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible needed or assumed.

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Astronomy 265
Hart, Kevin

Cross-listed with RELG 4810 and ENGL 4590.

This seminar seeks to develop a close reading of major religious poetry by two major religious poets.

F 02:00PM-03:00PM (Online Synchronous)
Fowler, Elizabeth

This one-credit, pass/fail seminar meets online most Fridays at 2 for an hour and brings together students from many departments and disciplines who are interested in the intersections between religion and literature in their work. All are welcome, MAs and PhDs; our syllabus is student-driven and often invites guests from around the university, offers a place to bring in objects of study (following our rule of fewer than 10 pages of reading per session), and is ongoing from semester to semester, giving a home to scholars who prize comparatism, lack of boundaries, and warm collegiality. Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, French, Spanish, Arabic, English, more--it’s all in our purview.  Meets together with RELG 5821, its Religious Studies counterpart. This is home base for the master’s program in World Religions, World Literatures as well as for other graduate students whose work makes it a touchstone. Write Elizabeth Fowler for more information: fowler@virginia.edu.

Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

ENWR 1506-001 - Writing about Identities

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM New Cabell 042
Kostelnik, Kate

ENWR 1506-002 - Writing about Culture/Society

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM New Cabell 038
Chantell, Claire

ENWR 1506-003 - Writing about Culture/Society

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM New Cabell 038
Chantell, Claire

ENWR 1506-004 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing & Concepts of Creativity

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM New Cabell 042
Sullivan, Patricia

ENWR 1506-005 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing & Concepts of Creativity

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM New Cabell 042
Sullivan, Patricia

ENWR 1506-006 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM New Cabell 038
Coyoca, David

ENWR 1506-007 - Writing about Identities

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM New Cabell 042
Kostelnik, Kate

ENWR 1506-008 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM New Cabell 038
McBride, Amber

ENWR 1506-009 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM New Cabell 038
McBride, Amber

Approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

ENWR 1510-001 - Writing & Community Engagement

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 330
Smith, Kevin

ENWR 1510-002 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Shannon 109
Keyser, Emelye

ENWR 1510-003 - Writing & Community Engagement

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 310
Gelly, Piers

ENWR 1510-004 - Writing about the Arts - Writing the Aesthetic Experience

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM Bryan 310
Foody, Kaelin

ENWR 1510-005 - Writing about the Arts

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM New Cabell 044
Fowler, Charity

ENWR 1510-006 - Writing about Culture/Society - Your Fave is Problematic: Pop-Culture Criticism in the 21st Century

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 312
Wallace, Vallaire

ENWR 1510-007 - Writing about the Arts - Writing about Dreams

MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM Bryan 310
Benson, Austin

ENWR 1510-008 - Writing & Community Engagement

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM Bryan 310
Gottschlich, Michelle

ENWR 1510-009 - Writing about Identities

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM Bryan 332
Thomas, Rebecca

ENWR 1510-010 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 330
Driver, Keith

ENWR 1510-011 - Writing about Culture/Society

MWF 03:00PM-03:50PM New Cabell 211
Ard, Devan

ENWR 1510-012 - Writing about Culture/Society

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM Bryan 312
Casteen IV, John Thomas

ENWR 1510-013 - Multilingual Writers

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM Bryan 334

ENWR 1510-014 - Writing about Culture/Society

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM Bryan 310
Ard, Devan

ENWR 1510-015 - Writing about the Arts

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 332
Ireland, Casey

ENWR 1510-016 - Writing about Culture/Society

MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM Bryan 332
D'Errico, Jon

ENWR 1510-017 - Writing about Culture/Society

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM New Cabell 411
Burke, Jordan

ENWR 1510-018 - Writing about Culture/Society

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM New Cabell 411
Burke, Jordan

ENWR 1510-019 - Writing & Community Engagement

MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM Bryan 310
Gottschlich, Michelle

ENWR 1510-020 - Writing & Community Engagement

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 310
Gelly, Piers

ENWR 1510-021 - Writing about Culture/Society

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 330
Wallace, Samantha

ENWR 1510-022 - Writing & Community Engagement

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 310
Donovan, Devin

ENWR 1510-023 - Writing about Culture/Society - Attention, Distraction, and the World Beyond Your Head

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 312
Thompson, Annie

ENWR 1510-024 - Writing & Community Engagement - Writing as Storytelling

MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM Bryan 332
Kluever, Molly

ENWR 1510-025 - Writing about the Arts - Story(re)telling: Adaptation & Reimagining of Enduring Narratives

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM Bryan 332
Pratt Pardes, Gahl

ENWR 1510-026 - Writing about the Arts - Writing about Television

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM Bryan 310
Griffin, Cristina

In this class, we will practice critical inquiry and hone our writing skills by engaging with one of the most familiar aesthetic forms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the television show. As we read, watch, discuss, and write about television together, our goal will be to approach this familiar form with a fresh perspective, not taking anything about television for granted. How do the formal elements of television shows—their genres, storytelling capacities, narrative features, and serial formats—build compelling worlds? How can we approach these tv worlds analytically while also valuing the emotional impact of television? How do television shows critique and generate culture? How do shows build arguments about experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and class? Over the course of the semester, we will read scripts that turned into episodes, read critical writing about television, and of course we will also watch a variety of tv episodes. But more than anything, we will write about television: we will build up our capacity to analyze television and then turn that inquiring perspective onto our own writing. If television shows build worlds out of words—and if those worlds can and do have a giant impact, for better or worse, on the world we live in—then we will take seriously how we can develop our own writing and re-approach our practices of world-building and meaning-making through our words.

ENWR 1510-027 - Writing about the Arts

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Shannon 111
Kravetz, Rachel

ENWR 1510-028 - Writing about Culture/Society - Attention, Distraction, and the World Beyond Your Head

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 312
Thompson, Annie

ENWR 1510-029 - Writing about Culture/Society - The Grass Class: Writing Between the Human and Nonhuman

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 310
Dierdorff, Hannah

ENWR 1510-030 - Writing about the Arts - Writing about Film

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM New Cabell 415
Kessenich, Marissa

ENWR 1510-031 - Writing about Culture/Society

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM Bryan 332
D'Errico, Jon

ENWR 1510-032 - Writing about Culture/Society

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 330
Wallace, Samantha

ENWR 1510-033 - Writing about Science & Tech

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM Bryan 312
Shaman, Cory

ENWR 1510-034 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM Bryan 310
Johnson, Lindgren

ENWR 1510-035 - Writing about Identities - Write Your Way: Owning Your Process, Perspective, and Personality

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM New Cabell 207
Murray, Janice

ENWR 1510-036 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 334
Walker, Jessica

ENWR 1510-037 - Writing about Science & Tech

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Bryan 330
Shaman, Cory

ENWR 1510-038 - Writing about the Arts

MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM Bryan 334

ENWR 1510-039 - Writing about Culture/Society - Trash Talk

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 334
Marbut, Kyle

ENWR 1510-040 - Writing about the Arts

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 332
Ireland, Casey

ENWR 1510-041 - Writing about the Arts - Points of View

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Bryan 332
Davis, Matt

This course is intended to help you develop writing skills that will help you succeed while you are at UVA and also after you graduate. The theme for this section will be "points of view" in fiction. We will read and write about short stories, with a special focus on different ways of narrating a story. The fiction readings will be taken from a classic but rather unusual anthology, Points of View, in which the stories are classified according to the mode of narration used in the story. One section of the anthology contains "interior monologues," in which we seem to be inside the main character's head, hearing his or her thoughts in live time; another section contains "dramatic monologues,"in which we seem to overhear the narrator speaking aloud to another character; a third, letters written by the characters; a fourth, diary entries; and so on. We will look at eleven modes of narration and study two examples of most modes, reading about twenty stories in all.

You will complete six substantial written assignments -- three narratives and three argumentative essays. For the narratives, you will be asked to use one of the modes of narration we have studied to tell a story. The narratives should be appx. 3-6 pages in length. (Longer is not necessarily better.) Each narrative will be written once, without opportunity for revision. For the argumentative essays, you will be asked to write an essay with a thesis and supporting textual evidence. Each essay should be appx. 4-7 pages long, but quality of writing, thinking, and argumentation are more important than length. The argumentative essays will be drafted, workshopped, and revised. In addition, you will learn some principles of composition, complete some exercises related to writing, and complete a library assignment.

ENWR 1510-042 - Writing about Culture/Society - Trash Talk

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 330
Marbut, Kyle

ENWR 1510-043 - Writing about Science & Tech - Humans, Animals, and Machines

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Bryan 334
Rodriguez Jr., Roberto

ENWR 1510-044 - Multilingual Writers

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM Bryan 334

ENWR 1510-045 - Writing about Identities

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 332
Ceraso, Steph

ENWR 1510-046 - Writing & Community Engagement

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM New Cabell 036
Curley, Anastatia

ENWR 1510-047 - Writing & Community Engagement - Writing Home

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM New Cabell 287
Retica, Rachel

ENWR 1510-048 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 334
Walker, Jessica

ENWR 1510-049 - Writing about Culture/Society

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 330
Wallace, Samantha

ENWR 1510-050 - Writing about the Arts

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Bryan 312

ENWR 1510-051 - Writing about Culture/Society

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM New Cabell 411
Burke, Jordan

ENWR 1510-052 - Writing about Identities

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Bryan 332
Tolchinsky, Raisa

ENWR 1510-053 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Bryan 330
McNamara, Wyatt

ENWR 1510-054 - Writing about Identities

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Bryan 310

ENWR 1510-055 - Writing about Culture/Society - Genealogies of Modernity: How the World Became Modern

MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM Bryan 330
Zimmerman, Daniel

ENWR 1510-056 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Place

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM Shannon 108
Davis, Peyton

ENWR 1510-057 - Writing about Identities

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM Bryan 332
Thomas, Rebecca

ENWR 1510-058 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Bryan 334
Walker, Jessica

ENWR 1510-059 - Writing about Identities

MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM Bryan 330
Thomas, Rebecca

ENWR 1510-060 - Writing about Identities - Writing about Horror through Identity & Social Justice

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Shannon 108
Viechweg, Seanna

ENWR 1510-061 - Writing about Identities - The Art of Journaling

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM New Cabell 211
Adams, Hodges

ENWR 1510-062 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Bryan 310
Johnson, Lindgren

ENWR 1510-063 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing Home(s)

MW 06:30PM-07:45PM Bryan 312
Patel, Nehali

ENWR 1510-064 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing the Unlikeable Female Character

MW 06:30PM-07:45PM Bryan 310
Smith, Palmer

ENWR 1510-065 - Writing about the Arts

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM New Cabell 056
Kravetz, Rachel

ENWR 1510-066 - Writing about Culture/Society

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM New Cabell 044
Keyser, Emelye

ENWR 1510-068 - Writing about Digital Media - Decoding Digital Writing

TR 06:30PM-07:45PM Bryan 310
Stephens, Samantha

ENWR 1510-069 - Writing about the Arts - Story(re)telling: Adaptation & Reimagining of Enduring Narratives

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM Bryan 332
Pratt Pardes, Gahl

ENWR 1510-070 - Writing about the Arts

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 332
Ireland, Casey

ENWR 1510-071 - Writing about Identities - History and the Self

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM New Cabell 068
Sophronius, Jeddie

ENWR 1510-072 - Writing about Culture/Society - Experimenting with the Essay

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM New Cabell 115
Jayne, Ian

ENWR 1520-001 - Writing about Food Justice

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM New Cabell 411
Stephenson, Kate

ENWR 1520-002 - Writing about Housing Equity

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM New Cabell 411
Stephenson, Kate

ENWR 2510-001 - Writing about the Arts
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM Bryan 330
Fowler, Charity

ENWR 2510-002 - Writing about Science & Technology: Visualizing Science

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM Bryan 332
Fountain, Kenny

This ENWR 2510 course will focus on writing about science, as we investigate the roles description, observation, and visualization (mental and physical) play in the work of science and the communication of scientific research. To do this, we will read actual scientific research articles as well as essays on the history and rhetoric of scientific practices. The three major writing projects for this course require you to practice some of the analytical and communication skills crucial to engage in academic research and to write for both academic and popular audiences. In completing these three major writing projects, you will have an opportunity to practice your own skills of observation and research, collecting and evaluating evidence, and communicating insights and arguments.

ENWR 2510-003 - Writing about Identities

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM Bryan 334
Seitz, James

ENWR 2510-004 - Writing about Identities: Writing Regret and Repair

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM Bryan 312
Carey, Tamika

If the old saying is true and everyone actually makes mistakes, then why are apologies so hard to write and why are some apologies more easily dismissed than others? This section of ENWR 2510 explores these questions about regret and repair from an identity-based perspective to strengthen your methods for writing. Said differently, we will consider how class, race, gender, and other identity markers influence public perceptions of error and impression management. We will also investigate social expectations of how regret should be expressed. In doing so, we will pursue the goal of this course, which is to cultivate and refine your analytical reading techniques, invention processes, composing practices, and strategies for revision and publication. 

ENWR 2510-005 - Writing & Community Engagement

M 06:00PM-08:30PM Bryan 334
Parks, Stephen

001 - Writing AI, You, and Me
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 312
Sullivan, Patricia

How has technology changed the way we talk and write about ourselves as humans? This intermediate writing course explores the language we use to describe, understand, and debate the effects of technological advances on society and on our concepts of the human. We will consider issues such as artificial intelligence (AI) and art, AI and labor, the posthuman, surveillance, among others.  All majors are welcome. No special knowledge is necessary; just bring your sense of curiosity and a willingness to write. As a class, we may read literature, popular nonfiction essays, scholarly research, and watch the occasional science fiction film or scientific documentary. I will invite you to compose a variety of texts -- reflective, analytical, exploratory, argumentative – and conduct some original research. Through class workshops, peer reviews and individual conferences, you will develop your metacognition of your writing processes, explore the rhetorical options available to you, consider the consequences and implications of specific rhetorical strategies, as well as broaden your sense of the resources available to you in and beyond academic contexts. Students will write weekly in short and long forms and have regular opportunity to revise with feedback from peers and professor through peer reviews, workshops, and conferences. This course fulfills the SWR and WE requirement.

002 - History and Culture of Writing at UVA

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM Bryan 330
Nobles, Heidi

The University of Virginia, founded in 1819, began with a rich history of writing and writers; that tradition continues today. But with so many different writing activities taking place across Grounds and across time, we may not fully appreciate what all this culture means.

In this course, you will both research and contribute to the culture of writing at UVA. You’ll have a chance to read the (mostly unpublished) writing of past students and faculty, to see where we’ve come from.

You’ll investigate current writing activities across Grounds, helping put together a puzzle that reveals what and how we’re writing today. And finally, you’ll create your own original writing to add to our university archives, making your mark for future generations to read. Through this hands-on literary adventure, you will gain a holistic sense of UVA's rich writing culture and your place, as well.

003 - SCI & Medical Communications

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM Bryan 312
Allison, Kiera

004 - Writing the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA​

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM Bryan 312
Kostelnik, Kate

In this writing course we’ll contribute to conversations of race and history at UVA through self-designed writing projects. The first part of the course will be an inquiry into the history of enslaved laborers at UVA and how the writers of the Declaration of Independence framed our country—particularly in terms of equality, individual liberty, and the institution of slavery— (texts: Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration, Sullivan’s Commission on Slavery and the University, excerpts from Nelson and Harold’s Charlottesville 2017, and excerpts from Nelson and McInnis’s Educated in Tyranny). Next, we will look at how writers speak back to silences and suppressed narratives (texts:  Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, Petrosino’s White Blood, and Sharpe’s In the Wake). Throughout the course, we’ll look at current conversations about racial justice at UVA and beyond as well as community responses compiled by the Institute for Engagement and Negotiation[1] (IEN) in designing and executing the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers[2]. In the final month of the course, we will design and complete projects that speak back to these issues of race at UVA and/or further the goals and aspirations the IEN identified in crafting the memorial: 

• Prominent and highly visible 
• Powerful and Educational Experience 
• Emotional Experience through Representation 
• List known names of Enslaved 
• Forge Connection with Community 
• Ongoing Memorialization Process 
• Distributed or Multiple Linked Locations Express the Dualities of Enslavement  
• Incorporate the Sounds and Songs of Enslavement  
• Show Pain of Bondage and Hope for the Future[3] 

005 - Vegan Writing

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 310
Johnson, Lindgren

What does it mean to write vegan? “Plant-based” cookbooks and PETA pamphlets might come to mind. But what happens when we approach veganism not just in terms of diet or even the essential work of animal liberation but as a deeper and wider foundation for thinking in ethical relation to all species, including our own, and the broader environment? What is the writing that organically emerges out of this foundation? 

This class will explore what becomes possible to think and write when we assume a foundation of vegan nonviolence. This shared commitment will allow us to see violence that we have been taught does not really count as violence, and we’ll ask why and how the larger culture continues to discipline all of us to think, write, and act in ways that destroy others’ relations, cultures, and lives, dulling our intellectual and ethical capacities and impoverishing our own lives in the process. The other and exciting side of the coin, then, is how vegan nonviolence opens us up to worlds and lives that otherwise could not be apprehended, and we will explore how vegan writing animates rather than destroys lives, even as it does not presume to know those lives fully. Many of our readings, which will include a range of material (children’s literature, scientific articles on animal cognition, philosophy, critical race theory, agroecology, film theory, literary criticism, and more), will attend not only to vegan thinking and writing but to the experience of living vegan, which can be isolating, and the class will be a space of support for those who experience such isolation. We will conclude the semester with independent projects that will give you room to go your own direction but that will also receive the benefit of class feedback in a workshop environment.  

We will not be approaching veganism, then, as a solution simply to be applied to inherently violent systems (the “Go Vegan!” mantra) but as an ethical and intellectual foundation that yields revolutionary thinking and writing regarding, among other things, other-than-human autonomy and sovereignty, gender and racial equality, environmental health, equitable land access, and prison abolition. Rather than narratives and systems of lack, punishment, and violence, how can we create narratives—and out of these narratives, systems—of plenitude, support, and love?

The class is open to all who are interested in doing the kind of work described above—no previous experience with vegan thinking required! Instructor permission (one paragraph describing why you want to take the course) is required for enrollment but is simply aimed at ensuring that everyone understands the nature of the course and will allow us to check in with one another before the semester begins.

006 - Rewriting Yourself: Literacy & the Brain

MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM Bryan 330
Nobles, Heidi

What do we know and what are we still learning about writing and the human brain? Literacy has dramatically reshaped the human brain over millennia. Yet as literacy itself evolves, we still lack satisfactory data on how writing (and its counterpart, reading) affects our neurology and cognition--and therefore, how literacy affects who we are as humans. In this reading- and writing-intensive course, we will read a range of work on literacy and cognition, including technical and popular treatments of issues such as reading and neural development, brain function during writing tasks, brain activity connected to other creative tasks, and more. We’ll read work from creativity experts, neurologists and cognitive scientists, psychologists, mental health practitioners, computer scientists, and professional writers and editors, all in trying to understand the relationship between literacy and our minds. Reading assignments will include 1-4 extended “read-in” activities; writing assignments will include a combination of creative, reflective, and research-based projects. By the term’s end, you should have an enriched sense of yourself as a reader and writer, and how your literacy practices play into your larger identity.

Note: This class welcomes students with multiple interests and backgrounds for interdisciplinary discussions about how reading and writing affect us all. Students with prior experience in or specialized interest in the brain will be able to dive deeper; students who are more inclined toward the arts and humanities can also expect engaging readings and lively writing assignments.

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM New Cabell 036
Driver, Keith

No fake news here, but rather progressive exercises in developing the news-writing style of writing from straight hard news to "soft" features. Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

001
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM Bryan 203
Kelly, Brian

002
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Bryan 203
Kelly, Brian

001
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM Bryan 312
Allison, Kiera

002
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM Bryan 312
Allison, Kiera

003
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 310
Donovan, Devin

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM Bryan 312
Shaman, Cory

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM Bryan 330
Smith, Kevin

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM Bryan 312
Stephenson, Kate

Why is everyone suddenly going to Iceland? Why do we travel? What is the difference between a traveler and a tourist?  Using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore the world of travel writing.  Since we all write best about subjects and ideas we are passionate about, we will work together to generate interesting questions about the role of travel in our culture, as well as about specific books and essays. We will also investigate the world of tourism and consider the many ethical issues that arise in the exploration of our modern world. Throughout the course, we will ponder questions like:

• What is the relationship between travel writer, reader, and inhabitant? How can we use writing to navigate the relationship between writer, reader, inhabitant, and place?
• What is the role of “outsider” in travel writing?
• How does travel writing encourage us to see ourselves differently?
• How can we use the very best of travel writing—the sense of discovery, voice, narrative suspense—in other forms of writing, including academic essays?
• Can travel writing evoke political and social change?

As the semester unfolds, I hope we will revise and refine our views, paying close attention to how we put words together to write powerfully and engagingly about travel.

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM Bryan 330
D'Errico, Jon

Develops proficiency in a range of stylistic and persuasive effects. The course is designed for students who want to hone their writing skills, as well as for students preparing for careers in which they will write documents for public circulation. Students explore recent research in writing studies. In the workshop-based studio sessions, students propose, write, and edit projects of their own design.