Undergraduate courses and graduate seminars that I have designed and recently taught include:
Fall 2023
HUM 490 / 590: Environmental Justice
Course Description: This team-taught, advanced, interdisciplinary humanities course is linked directly to the Miami University Humanities Center’s year-long John W. Altman seminar in Environmental Justice (2023-24). Our key question will be how the humanities can contribute to justice at a time of global environmental crisis, knowing that the answer to this question varies based on the social and historical conditions of those impacted differently by environmental degradation. Across the course of the semester we will draw upon texts from multiple disciplines, fields, time periods, and genres to produce our own understandings of justice and other concepts central to the goals of collective surviving and thriving during a period of unprecedented human-driven planetary climate change broadly known as the “Anthropocene.” Such concepts will include “environmental racism,” “climate justice,” “slow violence,” “treadmill of production,” “postgrowth,” “decolonial ecology,” “kinship,” and “staying with the trouble,” Donna Haraway’s call to forge unexpected collaborations and combinations that counter the damage of human exceptionalism with multispecies alliances. Readings will include short selections from secondary sources in numerous fields—including literature, sociology, history, environmental history, Black studies, and Indigenous studies—alongside primary texts from many cultures, time periods, and genres, including poetry, documentary film, creative nonfiction, novel, and essay. Many readings will be drawn from work by speakers who come to campus for the Altman Seminar.
Fall 2022
ENG / IES 264: Literature & Environment
Now we must try to figure out how to survive what’s coming at us. And that survival begins with words.
— Bill McKibben, Eaarth (2010)
Course Description: Major scientific organizations agree that climate change has begun, bringing rising seas, polluted air, higher temperatures, the permanent loss of many species, and other alterations that are changing the way we live. “Now we must try to figure out how to survive what’s coming at us,” writes environmentalist Bill McKibben, “And that survival begins with words.” If words are key to human survival in an era of climate change, then the study of language and literature matters now more than ever. Accordingly, ENG / IES 264 asks: What can words do at a time of environmental crisis? How can literature help us perceive, understand, analyze, narrate, and respond within a continually changing natural world? To answer these questions we will explore environmental writing across different time periods, communities, and genres, including poetry, creative nonfiction, essay, short story, and novel. Our focus will be upon the narrative techniques, metaphors, imagery, language, and other literary devices through which writers reflect upon the meanings of nature, ecology, environmental justice, and human-nonhuman relations as these meanings change among different human communities over time. Part 1 of the course introduces students to key concepts in the study of literature and the environment, including nature, ecology, Anthropocene, and environmental justice. Part 2 deepens our understanding of these concepts through extended study of writings by Elizabeth Rush and Zora Neale Hurston, alongside Rob Nixon’s environmental concept of “slow violence.” Part III turns to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) to explore models of collective survival and thriving on a rapidly changing planet, including “making kin” (Donna Haraway) and “contamination as collaboration” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing).
Spring 2022
ENG 710 Interdisciplinary Seminar on oceans: “The Sea Around Us”
Course Description: This interdisciplinary graduate seminar takes its title from Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (1951), which explores the complex and interdependent relations between humans and the more-than-human world of the sea. We, in turn, will explore these relations by engaging with several major concepts that the sea has generated in the work of scholars, artists, and writers of diverse identities since 1800, including the longue durée (Fernand Braudel), archipelagic thought (Édouard Glissant), the Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy), the repeating island (Antonio Benítez-Rojo), the wake (Christina Sharpe), the Black Shoals (Tiffany Lethabo King), and the Blue Humanities (Steve Mentz). In addition to selections from Carson's sea writings, primary sources will come from many genres and likely include works by Olaudah Equiano, Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, Zora Neale Hurston, M. NourbeSe Philip, Chris Jordan, A.S. Byatt, Ellen Gallagher, and Drexciya (an electronic music duo from Detroit).
When successfully completed, the course will provide students with more than a deeper understanding of human / sea relations across time. It will also expand our repertoires of analytical approaches to literature and culture, with particular focus upon the intersections of race, gender, class, and environment; illuminate the many genealogies and possible futures of the still-emerging field of Environmental Humanities (EH); and provide a scholarly grounding in EH approaches and methodologies that can be employed in almost any area of specialization.
To that end, students will be given the choice among two major final projects (in addition to several shorter required assignments throughout the semester): an extensively annotated reading list (of about 15 items) that will support future work on a related issue or text in the student's area of specialization; or a more traditional seminar paper of 20-25 pages on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor.
Eng 225 Advanced composition: Writing on humans, nature, and environmental crisis
Course Description: English 225: Advanced Composition focuses on texts in diverse genres for specific audiences. Students will engage in an in-depth research project across the term, integrating sources and methods from multiple academic disciplines, and learning to analyze how writing strategies and genre conventions differ across academic disciplines and broader communities. Students will also revise and edit their work in response to their own reflection in combination with peer and instructor review and feedback.
In this particular section of 225, we will develop and practice these and other skills through a semester-long engagement with the course theme, Writing on Humans, Nature, and Environmental Crisis. As such, we will examine texts in multiple genres that explore environmental issues in relation to their various effects on particular human communities. Guiding questions include: How are environmental concerns expressed differently in different genres? What different kinds of information do we learn about environmental problems through texts from differing sources? What rhetorical features and genres are best suited to communicate various environmental concerns and solutions to different audiences?
Our semester will be divided into three parts, and each part of the semester involves one major writing assignment that requires drafting and revision. In Part One of the course we will practice and improve the foundational skills of rhetorical and genre analysis by focusing upon a single genre of writing, creative nonfiction. In Part Two we will practice and refine the skills developed in Part One, while also developing the skills of locating, summarizing, evaluating, analyzing, and reflecting on textual sources in different genres that address a central research question from different disciplinary perspectives. In particular, we will examine texts in four genres—creative nonfiction, peer-reviewed article (academic scholarship), documentary film, and op-ed (opinion essay)—and one in an additional genre chosen by students. In Part Three we will put into practice the skills developed in Parts One and Two: students will select and research an environmental issue that adversely impacts human communities, choose the genre best suited to communicate that issue to a specific audience, and then compose a text in that genre as the final assignment. (Students may choose one of the genres that we have studied together, or another that suits the issue; genres encountered in one’s discipline or major are welcome.)