Instructor: Halley Cotton

This class will partner with a local area non-profit to generate writing about Alabama's stunning and often underappreciated natural beauty. Students can expect to explore the outdoors in a variety of ways, learn about Alabama's incredible ecological history, develop working knowledge about Birmingham's utility systems and natural resources, and build writing skills through real-world experience.

Instructor: Aparna Dwivedi

This class will explore literary works that derive from or relate to Birmingham/Alabama. The course will unpack issues pertaining to stories about/in/from Birmingham/Alabama by: 1) exploring how stories determine who we are by studying story shapes: where they come from and how they shape our understanding of people and places; 2) evaluating strategies of impactful storytelling by considering the elements of point of view, voice, humor/tone, and structure in a range of genres from fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, to oral histories, videos, podcasts etc.; and 3) identifying resources for finding stories as well as telling personal stories. Reading materials will include: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg, and The Glass Cabin by Tina and James Braziel; all other materials will be made available to you on Canvas. In each unit, assessments will be based on small group discussion/participation, and one major assignment involving research, collaboration, and presentation using Adobe Creative Cloud applications. Throughout the semester, you will maintain a reflection blog in which you record your response to the reading materials on a weekly basis.

Instructor: Melba Major

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of creative writing. In this class, we’ll explore the genres of flash nonfiction and poetry. Students will develop their unique voices while experimenting with brevity, imagery, and lyricism. A basic premise of this course is that powerful writing often emerges from attentive reading, fearless writing, and rigorous revision. Through close reading of contemporary works, in-class exercises, discussions, and peer feedback sessions, students will learn to craft compelling prose and evocative verse. By the end of the course, students will have a portfolio of original work and a deeper understanding of the creative process. No prior experience is necessary—just a willingness to explore, create, and engage with language in new ways. This course meets Blazer Core Creative Arts with a Flag in Post-Freshman Writing.

Instructor: Cassandra Ellis

This course will serve as a comprehensive introduction to viewing, “reading,” and interpreting classic and contemporary films. It will provide you with a formalist vocabulary (dissolve, mis-en-scene, diegesis) and train you to analyze the language of film with attention to many of the thematic concerns of contemporary film theory, including narrative, authorship, genre, the cinematic apparatus, stars, and the gaze as they intersect with ideological concerns of history, race, gender, and spectatorship. 

Films to be studied* (subject to changes/modifications)

Modern Times, Stagecoach, Citizen Kane, Gattaca, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Gilda, Rosemary’s Baby, Do the Right Thing, Singin’ in the Rain, Saving Private Ryan, Goodfellas, American Beauty, Boyhood, The Crying Game

 

Requirements

Canvas discussions, quizzes, 2 short response papers, creative research project, midterm, final exam

Nothing to Purchase! Get ready to talk about some great movies with your friends!

Instructor: Amy Cates

EH 212 is an introductory survey literature course that invites students to explore sev¬eral literary forms and genres. Throughout these 15 weeks, we will examine works of contemporary prose and poetry to help us understand literature’s role in the human experience.

You can expect to read within, between, and beyond the traditional forms (drama, poetry, and prose) as we explore hybrid genres and contemporary texts (published within the past 10 years) that may challenge your notion of what “liter¬ature” is. You can also expect to exercise your imagination and creativity through a variety of writing tasks.

We will examine how literature continues to evolve and respond to this world we live in through the study of works that capture and examine issues impacting our everyday lives. In turn, our responses to these works will involve lively in-class discussion and thoughtful analyses that will follow us outside the classroom walls and insist we pay attention to how we process all that goes on around us. To boil it all down, we will spend a few hours each week engaging with prose and poetry that help us approach and understand our complicated times, our surroundings, each other, and ourselves.

Instructor: Anamaria Santiago

This course surveys an array of literature produced in the U.S.A. starting from before it was even founded leading to the present day. Particularly, we will examine the process of nation building and identity-shaping that takes place in writing by U.S. Americans throughout the nation’s history. The last several decades especially have been fraught with dramatic social, economic, political, technological, philosophical, cultural, and global changes, and the writing reflects these developments and how they characterize the experience of life in the United States. Inherent in much of U.S. American literature is a quest for defining America and Americanness, and many texts ask some version of the following questions: What does it mean to be American? What are American ideals and values? Do we always live up to those ideals and values? As a relatively young country, how is the reality of America living up to its promise? How does our history inform our present? Who is and who is not American? Where are America’s boundaries? Why are or aren’t these boundaries important? How fixed are the boundaries of national and racial identity? What about the boundaries of other facets of our identities? These questions persistently resonate with the American experience, so we’ll likely also observe how the questions presented in the texts we read reflect and inform our own experiences.

Instructor: Ronald Guthrie

Over the course of the semester, we will discuss what it means to be human in the 21st century by analyzing science fiction short stories and films from both past and contemporary authors and directors. We will also read several nonfiction pieces, including news stories, to give context to the fictional readings and movies. During the first half of the semester, we will look at works focused on robotics and artificial intelligence with an eye toward the possible ramifications of giving machines “human” rights or imposing laws to control them, especially if they become self-aware. During the second half of the semester, we will focus on cyborgs by examining how society has already adapted and will have to adapt even more to people who are both human and machine in light of the predictions made by speculative fiction and film.

This course will require considerable reading, writing, and classroom discussion. Students should be aware that some of the texts and films include uncomfortable and controversial subject matter such as prejudice and discrimination, religion, sex, drug use, and violence.

Instructor: Aparna Dwivedi

We will use various multidisciplinary methodological approaches to explore the relationship between witch hunts and the processes of land enclosures, economic status, growth of capitalism, rise of medicine etc. After establishing the sociohistorical context of witches, we will go on to study two 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. 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. In addition, we will read Madeline Miller’s Circe, and Maria Tatar’s The Fairest of Them All to explore the role of mythology/folklore/fairy tales in transforming the representation of witches. Apart from these three works, all supplemental materials will be available on Canvas. The semester will be divided into three units; in each unit, assessments will be based on small group discussion/participation, and one major assignment involving research, collaboration, and presentation using Adobe Creative Cloud applications. Throughout the semester, you will maintain a reflection blog in which you record your response to the reading materials on a weekly basis.

Instructor: Jill Clements

Daring sea voyages, feasts in Valhalla, magical runic writing, and a sky made from a giant’s skull. The Viking Age is full of unexpected literary traditions, artwork, cultural customs, and cosmologies, and studying them can enrich and complicate how we see the often-parodied “vikings”—with their goofy horned helmets!—in 21st-century pop culture. This course introduces you to this period and its literature to explore what it meant to “go a’viking,” who went on those overseas trips for raiding and trading, and how these thousand-year-old stories continue to fascinate people today. We will sample a range of Icelandic sagas, early poetry, and Norse mythology, and discuss the (re)uses of “the viking world” in the modern day.

This course also counts for the Ancient, Medieval & Renaissance Studies minor.

Instructor: Shelly Cato

Fundamentals for beginners; emphasis on techniques and style through readings and student's own writing. We will be reading Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley Jones’s collection, Magic City Gospel, UAB Professor Lauren Slaughter’s A Lesson in Smallness, and US Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s The Carrying. In addition, we will write during class and workshop four poems for each student in small- and large-group seminars. Each student will produce a professional portfolio revising three of these four poems for their end-of-semester project.

Instructor: Gale Temple

This class will provide a broad survey of American Indian writing from the colonial period through the present day. We will read creation stories, political tracts, poems, short stories, and novels. Among the issues we will consider are: How does the process of translation affect the way we understand American Indian creation stories? How do American Indian writers offer a different cultural lens through which human beings might perceive the world and their place within it? How have the United States government’s policies towards American Indians influenced the kinds of stories they write, the way they are perceived by the West, and the ways they think about themselves? How do American Indian writers mobilize cultural traditions to create a sense of hope and perseverance for the future? Authors we will study include Sherman Alexie, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Tommy Orange.

Instructor: Jeffrey Bacha

Learn how to self-publish a Zine and strengthen your document design skills. 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

Instructor: Jaclyn Wells

In Tutoring Writing, students will study the complex process of learning to write. 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 articles about writing pedagogy, practical tutoring guides, and real tutors’ published reflections about their work. Course projects will include observation write-ups, tutoring reflections and philosophies, and research about a topic of the student's choice. 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.

Instructor: Cynthia Ryan

Sign up for a delectable journey through writing and food in all its forms, from food blogs to recipe books to food memoirs to cooking vlogs to food essays to menus. Through readings, discussions, and food experiences, we'll address the following:

• How writing can improve your understanding of food and how your experiences with food can feed your writing
• How writing and food varies across cultures and time periods
• How the senses and memories collide physiologically and psychologically with food experiences
• Why and how writing and food responds to social change
• When to broaden and/or narrow writing and food topics for marketability
• Where and how to pitch and write for food-related publications
• How writing and food is about so much more than writing and food

You'll need to purchase one text for the class: Molly Watson's Beyond Delicious: How to Write about Food. Other readings will be provided by your instructor or available through library databases.

Assignments for the course include a food writing journal, a researched food narrative, and a multimedia final project focused on writing and food. Graduate students will complete additional requirements. 

Instructor: Kerry Madden-Lunsford

This workshop will focus specifically on writing stories for young people. Students will be presented with a broad range of children's authors from picture books to early readers to middle-grade to young adult novels. From Maurice Sendak to Sandra Cisneros to James Marshall to Kwame Alexander to Judy Blume to Sophie Blackall to Jerry Craft to Nikki Giovanni 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. Students will write three picture books, including a draft of a fractured fairy tale and/or a nonfiction picture book, 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. Visiting authors and editors in the industry will visit the workshop to discuss writing and children's literature.

Instructor: Gale Temple

In this class we will survey a variety of North American writings from the colonial era through the early nineteenth century, a historical period that gave rise to many of the core values that continue to influence life in the United States today. For example, how should the values of Christianity be reconciled with those of a free-market economy? How should the concept of “freedom” be defined, and what sorts of limits should be placed on popular enfranchisement? How should the role of men in the new Republic differ from that of women? To what extent should Americans embrace the “melting pot” ideal, and how compatible is a melting pot with racial, ethnic, or religious difference? Is there even such a thing as an “American,” and if so, what are the defining traits of such a being? These questions had their genesis during the period we will study, and they continue to shape the political, economic, and social climate of the United States today. Early Americans dealt with these questions in ways that were sometimes unethical and often contradictory. It is my hope that in this class we can work our way back through the contradictions in order to arrive at some of the motivations, hopes, and anxieties behind them. Writers we will study include Susannah Rowson, Unka Winkfield, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown, and Robert Montgomery Bird.

Instructor: Jill Clements

This course is an exploration of dominant themes in the art, literature, and history of the Middle Ages. This semester we will be looking at medieval textual and visual culture through the lens of monstrosity and otherworlds, exploring how the seemingly discrete categories of “human” and “monster” are defined or employed in these artifacts. Students will have the opportunity to examine how medieval authors used the monstrous in a number of genres (from saints’ lives to epic poetry to romances), each presenting distinct physical, geographical, and ideological boundaries for “self” and “other.” In addition to examining the monstrous bodies, behaviors, and landscapes in these texts, we will consider how the boundaries between human and monster are blurred through hybridized characters and marvelous acts, and the social commentary that is implicit in a text’s distinction between what is human and what is not. 

This course also counts for the Ancient, Medieval & Renaissance Studies minor.

Instructor: Alison Chapman

Sometime in the late 1650s, the blind poet John Milton began writing to “justify the ways of God to man.” Specifically, he was trying to understand why there is evil in the world and why God allows suffering and death. The resulting poem, Paradise Lost, retells the fall of Adam and Eve, although Milton does not confine his imagination just to the Garden of Eden. The poem also includes the landscapes of Heaven and Hell, and the vast, wind-battered realms of Chaos. Paradise Lost is widely considered to be the single greatest poem in the English language, and our main goal this semester will be to read it in its entirety. Along the way, we will sample other works by Milton and his contemporaries in order to develop a broader sense of seventeenth-century ideas about gender, theology, justice, ecology, and politics.

Assignments for undergraduates will include a number of low-stakes reading responses, two short papers (which may include creative or multimedia work), and a final exam. Graduate students will write a longer final essay in place of the exam and make a presentation to the class.

Instructor: Daniel Siegel

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 were published serially, so a reader might be in the middle of eight or ten novels at once.

In this class, we’ll read and enjoy novels by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, alongside an armful of magazine stories. 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, up to 200 pages a week. 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 Rhetoric Made and Transformed Our World

Instructor: Chrisopher Minnix

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. We will take a fascinating journey into the intellectual history of rhetoric, the art of public discourse and persuasion. 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. 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 also how to critically analyze rhetoric in action, from its portrayal in ancient epics and drama to its use in political discourse. No prior knowledge of the ancient, medieval, or early modern 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.