Remember those heavy literature anthologies from high school full of canonical works written by, mostly, dead white dudes? Well, that is what this class is NOT. This introductory literature course will look at the daring, funny, dark, weird, beautiful, challenging literature being composed by women writers alive and working today. While we will occasionally cast our lens to years past to understand the origin of the poets, novelists, essayists, and short story writers we will encounter, it’s likely that most of the writers we will read have websites, as well as Instagram and Twitter. As we read, we will study secondary and background materials which will supply the specialized vocabulary we will use in our informal and formal discussion. Upon completing the course, students will understand the conventions of literary genres and will have developed their analytical skills through close reading, critical thinking, and scholarly writing about literary texts. What do “our voices” sound like now? Let’s find out together.

In this course, we will explore the rich, diverse, and complicated literary, historical, and cultural heritage of the Magic City through works representing a variety of literary genres (including book-length texts) written by authors associated with the Greater Birmingham area. Our reading will invite us to be curious about our surroundings and to explore the city with fresh eyes—whether we grew up here or only recently started calling Birmingham home. In addition to extensive reading, we will respond to assigned texts from a range of historical periods during class discussions and through formal, informal, and multimodal writing produced individually and as part of a team. We will also leave the classroom at times to experience firsthand the city that inspired (and continues to inspire) the authors we study.

Though often portrayed as a single, unified group, the LGBTQ+ community is filled with diverse—and sometimes competing—voices. We will examine fiction, creative nonfiction, graphic literature, film, documentary, poetry, and social media as we explore queer identities and queer experiences in writings by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, nonbinary, and asexual authors. Along the way we will learn some queer history and consider the impact of social and institutional forces on queer lives—as well as the ways that queer lives can impact society and institutions.

Whether you are gay, straight, ally, or simply curious, this course is designed as an introduction to LGBTQ literature and issues. Students need bring only a willingness to read carefully, discuss openly, and think carefully about the topics and texts at hand. As with other 200-level courses, assignments may include tests, essays, quizzes, and journals.

Taking its cue from Kothari’s, “If you are what you eat, then what am I?” this course will explore the ubiquitous perception of “Asian Food,” the issues of cultural representation and the diasporic experience of Asian immigrants. Food matters not only in terms of what is cooking, but also in terms of who is cooking, where they are cooking ,and who is eating. How does the relationship with food alter with immigration, mobility, and assimilation?

Asian American culinary discourse problematizes the role of food at the center of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. The course will be an invigorating unpacking of such issues; reading materials will range from framework texts like Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader and Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature, to an assortment of literary works, Twitter threads on Chicken Tikka Masala, fusion menus from Asian Food Network, and snippets from TV shows/art/documentaries. All learning materials will be available on Canvas. In terms of major assignments, there will be one essay, a group project, and a final digital project.

After exploring the sociohistorical context of witches, we will go on to study three novels, and parts of the corresponding texts that they derive from, to understand how authors have resisted the established discourse on witches and appropriated the witch narrative from the past to make it relevant in the current context. For instance, we will situate Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem within the context of Arthur Miller’s representation of Tituba in The Crucible, and gather other narratives from around the world in order to consider the many appropriations of Tituba’s voice in present times. The two other novels will be Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and Madeline Miller’s Circe.

Apart from the three novels, all materials (shorter works, podcasts, and film excerpts) will be available on Canvas. In terms of major assignments, there will be a multimodal group project, a midterm exam, and a final essay.

Global warming, urban sprawl, shrinking biodiversity, pollution, viruses from bats...the relationship between humankind and the environment is one of the abiding issues of the modern world. And, at least since the days of Genesis, nature has also been one of the great and recurrent themes of both creative literature and non-fiction prose. In this course we will explore the many expressions of Nature in writing. Through such classic writers as Wordsworth and Thoreau and even Grimms' Fairy Tales, through more modern writers like Rachel Carson, Loren Eisley, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Margaret Renkl and others, and even through national park brochures, nature magazines, and conservation and industry websites, we will consider some of the questions about Nature that have been significant in our history and that have bearing on current environmental discussion:

• Are natural resources here for human use, or do we damage Nature by using natural resources?
• Is Nature simply an uncivilized and perhaps violent chaos that we need to "tame," or is Nature a beautiful, perhaps even spiritual essence with which we should strive to live in harmony?
• Does natural beauty express some genuine moral or ethical values?
• Is there some deeply spiritual quality in Nature that we need to protect, or is Nature just our name for a set of biochemical and mechanical processes that are indifferent to human desires?
• Why do people spend energy and time working to buy things like cars and houses...and then spend their weekends fishing, or camping, or hunting, or "getting back to Nature?" 

There are as many questions about Nature as there are nature writers fascinated by its marvelous, terrible, necessary beauty. This course will consider writing about nature from a very wide perspective--everything from reverent celebrations of natural beauty to hard-headed scientific essays that "explain" nature. In the process, students will come to a deeper understanding and clarification of our thinking about Nature as well as an enriched enjoyment and understanding of writing about Nature.

In this class we’ll read about dogs. We’ll learn about the history of the complex bond between humans and dogs, and we’ll explore a range of texts that use dogs as symbols, voices, characters, or inspiration. We’ll examine how the dog has been “constructed” (literally and figuratively). We’ll analyze texts to understand how they work as literature, and we’ll ponder what this literature teaches us about dogs, as well as what it reveals about humans through our relationships with dogs. This investigation will also provide entry into various social issues and ethical questions involving dogs. Ultimately, the literature this semester will help us better understand our personal, cultural, and ethical relationships with dogs, and it will encourage us to reevaluate how we (humans and dogs) inhabit each other’s worlds—both real and imagined.

This course is designed to teach students to read and write well in senior level literature courses. I teach writing as a craft. Students will also learn MLA documentation, library research techniques, scansion, literary terms, and some critical theory. Although students may write their final research papers on a number of different texts, the class will read poems, a play, and a novel together and explore different critical approaches to those texts.

This is an undergraduate workshop in the writing of creative nonfiction. From memoir to personal essay to literary journalism, our objective will be to explore the range of possibilities in writing creative nonfiction. In addition to free-writes to capture voice, we’ll discuss different authors in creative nonfiction through Dinty W. Moore's book, The Truth of the Matter. From Joan Didion to Joseph Mitchell to Roxane Gay to Cheryl Strayed to James Baldwin to Sandra Cisneros to Richard Rodriguez to Heather Sellers to Rebecca Skloot to Ta-Nehisi Coates to Imani Perry, we will be reading a range of authors working in the field of creative nonfiction, including graphic memoirs by Allie Brosh and Alison Bechdel.

Students will also be expected to submit their work to professional literary journals along with proof of submission. Weekly workshop discussions of student-written work will be a major part of the workshop as well the necessary revisions to shape the material. Flannery O'Connor wrote, "Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days." Joan Didion wrote: “We tell our stories in order to live.” With the words of O'Connor and Didion in mind, this seminar will focus on finding our voice in our own personal narratives and discovering place as character and how a strong sense of setting breathes both life and voice into creative nonfiction.

This seminar will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and writing prompts. We’ll also be doing some writing-in-place workshops in areas of Birmingham, including the archives of the Birmingham Public Library.

This course is designed to help students develop the ability to write and design documents using computer aided publishing technologies. In this course, students are given the opportunity to improve their critical thinking skills as they relate to planning, writing, and revising the content and design of dynamic documents. Students will also explore a number of industry standard content management and publication tools used by working professional and technical communicators. No prior experience with any type of technology is required for this course.

Reading six of Shakespeare’s plays together, the class will think about how the plays can be staged and interpreted. We will watch different versions of scenes and compare them to the texts. Through reading and listening to Shakespeare’s language closely, students will gain comfort with Shakespeare’s rhythms and his syntax. Discussions will focus particularly on how Shakespeare gives characters individual voices and how interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters have changed over time.

Plays to be read may include Henry V, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and King Lear.

Three short paper assignments will include options such as writing about how one might direct a scene.

Students will study the complex processes of learning and teaching writing. Students will also learn practical strategies for teaching writing one-on-one. The course will balance reading and discussion with hands-on experience and observation in the University Writing Center. Course readings will include scholarly articles about writing pedagogy, practical tutoring guides, and real tutors’ published reflections on their work. Course projects will include observation write-ups, tutoring reflections and philosophies, and an academic paper appropriate for presentation at a tutoring conference. Undergraduate students must take this course to qualify for employment in the University Writing Center; however, due to a limited number of available positions, taking EH 401 does not guarantee employment in the UWC.

We will write in received forms and modes; we will write about those who write in form; we will think in form; we will talk in form; we will walk in form; we will eat and drink in form; we will waller around in forms as if they were forty pounds of pudding in the trunk of a '72 Dodge Dart Swinger Special, and then we will dream about said wallering. By the time you leave this class, you will be scanning everything from turkey flirts and alley caterwauls to the Apostles’ Creed and Cartman’s ramblings. You will find yourself intoning rhymes for exegesis, placebo, monkeyshines, and Luca Brasi.

When most of us say, “I love books,” we are usually referring to the contents of books. This course is not about what’s inside books in the sense of what they mean or of what the words on the page say. Instead, this is a course about books as objects, as material artifacts. The book is one of the most transformative inventions in human experience, and we’ll spend a semester tracing its fascinating history. We’ll start with stone inscriptions, runes, and scrolls; spend a lot of time with medieval manuscripts; and then learn about the astonishing impact of the printing press. Along the way, we’ll also consider the material substances that make up books: paper, ink, bindings, etc. Students will get to work with rare books in the Reynolds Historical Library, and we’ll hear presentations from librarians, artists, writers, and scholars about books as objects.

Assignments may include weekly journals or blog posts, two tests, and a final project in which students research one aspect of book history and present this research in digital form, using Adobe’s Spark web publishing tool. MA students will do a longer research project into book history and read more extensively about book history and bibliographic theory.

This class will look at movies from different cultural contexts, both within the United States and internationally. The course will introduce you to a number of films and artists that you may not have encountered before, and we’ll think together about the ways that these movies deal with questions of identity, difference, and belonging. We’ll also practice analyzing movies as works of art and appreciating the nuances of visual storytelling. Filmmakers will likely include Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, Agnès Varda, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Barry Jenkins, Claire Denis, Jane Campion, Pedro Almódovar, Asghar Farhadi, and others.

You are welcome and encouraged to take the course even if you’ve never studied film before! Every week students will view films outside of class and write informal weekly responses. You’ll also learn how to use video editing tools to create your own documentary analysis, and for your formal work you’ll produce three “video essays.”

This workshop for juniors and seniors and graduate students will focus specifically on writing stories for young people. Students will be presented with a range of children's authors and genres from picture book to early reader to middle grade to young adult. From Maurice Sendak to James Marshall to Kwame Alexander to Judy Blume to Jaqueline Woodson to Linda Sue Park to Rainbow Rowell to Laurie Halse Anderson to Gary Paulson to Irene Latham to Pam Muñoz Ryan, students will read a range of stories and styles and learn about writing for children both in fiction and nonfiction.

Students will write three picture books, including a fractured fairy tale, one chapter of a middle-grade novel, and one chapter of a young adult novel. They will also be expected to revise their work based on feedback in the workshop. A visiting author will come to the workshop during the semester either in person or via zoom to discuss writing and children's literature and publishing today The class will culminate in a visit to Epic Magnet or Glen Iris School near campus for UAB students to read their stories developed in the workshop to the children in grades K-5 at Epic.

Unlike a course titled “American Literature” or “Shakespeare,” when we name a course “Women’s Literature,” we are invoking two bodies: a body of literature and the writer’s gendered body. This course will focus on those two bodies. We will read various theories of the body, and we will explore how notions of the body inform a body of literature by women. We will grapple with questions like: How does our literature shape bodies and how do bodies shape literature? What happens to human bodies when represented in bodies of literature that do not conform to dominant cultural norms? What makes a body gendered, and do bodies of scientific literature have the potential to change our conceptions of the gendered body? While our goal is not to fully answer all of these questions, I hope that we will come away from the course with intriguing ideas concerning the complex relationship between gender and literature.

Required texts:

• Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
• Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
• Casey Plett’s Little Fish
• Naomi Alderman’s The Power
• Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick’s Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader

Course assignments will consist of short essays as well as a digital research project.

Note: This course fulfills the theory requirement for the Literature concentration.

In this course, we will examine how medical knowledge and practice are “written”—or constructed—according to particular socio-historical values. Overarching institutional assumptions and norms as well as specific texts and practices will be considered in our study of medical discourse, including:

• examination of historical influences on the biomedical model privileged in Westernized medicine
• analysis and critique of “mediated” medicine, identifying frames and other presentation devices that influence how the human body, states of health and illness, and the field of medicine—its scope and authority—are represented to specific audiences
• evaluation and composition of texts situated in particular cultural contexts (e.g., health campaigns)
• introduction to working terminology in the investigation of and contribution to medical discourse

Required Text: Skloot, R. (2010). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Paperbacks (imprint of Crown/Random). Several editions of this book exist. Please purchase this specific version.

The years between 1820 and 1870 gave rise to some of the most significant economic and cultural transformations in the history of the United States. Phenomena like the opening of the Erie Canal, the development of the railroad, the invention of the telegraph, unprecedented Westward expansion, and the entrenchment of capitalism, inspired Americans with a tremendous sense of hope and promise about the nation’s future. That optimism was tempered, however, by anxiety over just exactly what kind of society those changes would ultimately create. Institutions and practices such as slavery, Native American “removal” and genocide, and the continued disenfranchisement of women, represented what many felt was a profoundly unethical corollary to the much ballyhooed “progress” of the day. Would the United States fulfill the promise of its democratic ideals? Or would new developments instead create a land of shallow, opportunistic, self-serving individualists who shun traditional ideals in favor of wealth and power?

In English 462/562 we will investigate how writers of this period in American history addressed these important questions, and we will further attempt to mine their significance to our lives in the present day. We will cover writers such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Jacobs, T. S. Arthur, and Herman Melville. Course requirements for graduate students will include a midterm essay, an archival research assignment, and a final term paper.

Old English was spoken and written in England between roughly 500 and 1100 CE, and has survived in a wide range of beautiful and evocative texts, from simple inscriptions on stone crosses to the epic poem Beowulf. In this language and translation course, you will encounter some of the very oldest literature in the English language—the tales of kings, exiles, heroes, saints, and monsters that have inspired such writers as Milton and Tolkien. Because Old English is like a foreign language to Modern English speakers, the course will begin with the basics of Old English grammar and translation practice before moving on to more in-depth study of selected prose and verse texts. Students will also have the opportunity to examine Old English writing in its original manuscript context and to consider how we encounter these texts today through the processes of transcription, translation, and interpretation.

Note: This course counts as a Pre-1800 course, and can count as an elective for Linguistics concentrators.

The literature of the romantic period presents one of the major turning points in Western social, political, and literary culture—this was the age of revolutions (the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, etc.) in which a recognizably modern world was born.

The chief aim of this course is to help students become conversant with the canonical works and the canonical writers of the Romantic period: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats. These writers—the poets are frequently called the "Big Six"— dominated the discussion of Romanticism through much of the 20th century; a knowledge of their work is essential to students of the period. At the same time, however, recent criticism has raised a number of compelling reasons to question both the legitimacy and the effects of the dominance of the writers traditionally labeled as the "major" or canonical romantics. There are a number of approaches to this emerging critique of canonical Romanticism, and I have included a few works such as Charlotte Smith’s sonnets and Beachy Head, Byron's Don Juan, Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (themselves canonical texts, though romantic misfits) in order to introduce this critique.

As a result, students should emerge from the class with a comprehensive grasp on the traditional definitions of romanticism as well as a heightened critical sense of the significance—and the limitations—of these traditional definitions.

Victorian England was a culture of reading. Readers of every social class devoured newspapers, pamphlets, scandal sheets, sermons and tracts, histories and memoirs, collections of poetry, and above all fiction. Novels—endlessly innovative and outrageously long—flooded the market. Many of these came out periodically, so a reader might be in the middle of eight or ten novels at once.

In this class, we’ll read and enjoy some of the great novels of the period, by writers like Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and others. As we go, we’ll learn about Victorian reading practices and we’ll think about our own. Students will keep close track of the story, of your reactions and predictions, and of the passages that you especially enjoyed; a big part of the class will be a detailed response log, which you’ll eventually shape into a formal project. Students will also write two essays.

Here’s the one iron-clad rule: because this class is so focused on the reading experience, students will be required to keep exactly on pace with the reading and discussions: no reading ahead and no falling behind. The reading will be substantial, usually 200 pages a week and sometimes more. So only take this class if you can commit to reading every word of every page of these wonderful, bloated Victorian novels.

Secondary Title: How to Win Friends and Influence People from the Ancient World to the Sixteenth Century

This seminar in classical to early modern rhetoric is for any student interested in how our understandings of democracy, community, culture, and persuasion emerged and why they are still important. Our journey will take us to the beginnings of Greek democracy, to the Roman republic, and to the dynasties of ancient China. We will then journey to the “House of Wisdom” of ancient Baghdad, to the Byzantine world, and to the Christian monasteries and early universities of Europe, to the voyages of the great book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini, who rediscovered Quintilian’s complete Institutes of Oratory. Our voyage will end in the early modern period, with the intense, and at times violent, debates over rhetoric’s identity and its use in education.

We will not simply learn about rhetoric as a theory of persuasion, but learn to critically analyze rhetoric in action, from its portrayal in ancient epics and drama to its use in historical and contemporary political discourse. We will also take advantage of recent work by digital humanities scholars to visualize what some of the key spaces of rhetorical discourse in the ancient world looked like. No prior knowledge of the ancient or medieval world or rhetoric is necessary for this course. The history of rhetoric is bound up tightly with the history of art, literature, religion, science, and philosophy, and the course should be equally interesting and fascinating whether your graduate concentration is Rhetoric and Composition, Literature, Linguistics, or Creative Writing.

This class will introduce you to the MA Program in English at UAB. We will discuss the reasons for pursuing a Masters degree and the worlds this degree can open up for you. In addition, we will discuss what it means to be a Masters student--what is expected of graduate students, what differentiates graduate students from undergraduate students--and how universities and departments are structured. We will also discuss the specifics of UAB’s program. The class is designed to help you begin the process of becoming a professional in the field of English.

Masters students are on their way to becoming the peers of their professors. This new status requires you to adjust your outlook on the field you have chosen to study—to write and read and teach as your professors do, and to understand the academy and the field as they do. Beginning the process of becoming a professional is much easier when you are part of a community engaged in that process. This class is also a way of establishing that community.