Fall 2025 Graduate Courses

Further invigorated by the emergence of the digital humanities over the last two decades, print culture has played a crucial role in U.S. literary and cultural studies. This course will examine a wide range of literary periods by pairing important works of print studies scholarship with some of novels they examine. Beginning in the era of the U.S. Revolution, we will read excerpts from William Charvat's Literary Publishing in America: 1790-1850, Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic, and Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print to discuss the emergence of the US novel. Duncan Faherty’s and Marlene Daut’s work on Haiti will also be discussed as a possible explanation for the dearth of scholarship produced on literature between 1800 and 1820, because these texts often explicitly or repressively worked through fears surrounding Haitian independence. We then examine seriality and early forms of media virality during the last half of the nineteenth century by reading scholarship by Meredith McGill, Anna Kornbluh, Nancy Glazener, and Ryan Cordell. Philip Round’s work will invite us to consider how indigenous authors and editors both shaped culturally dominant print culture and blazed their own paths to publication.  Drawing on Kathy E. Fergeson’s Letterpress Revolution, Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, Frances Smith Foster’s Written by Herself, and Benjamin Fagan’s The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation, we will further examine various countercultural or counterpublic literary communities and political movements. Our course will conclude by turning to the twentieth-century upheavals and changes in the publishing industry and its persistent privileging of white authorship by considering arguments such as those advanced by Michael McGurl, Richard Jean So, John K. Young, and Dan Sinykin. In lieu of a traditional seminar paper, students will write serial installments about a specific literary periodical, newspaper, or press, which will cover what they published, what kind of literary criticism they advanced, and their larger contributions to U.S. print culture. To that end, we will learn about the many digital resources available at Richter Library and visit Special Collections.

Interdisciplinary scholarship has long been central to Caribbean Studies and recent publications in the field suggest that this is truer now, more than ever before.  Historically, the divide between the social sciences and humanities in Caribbean Studies centered on the differences in critical approaches as well as on going (sometimes contentious) debates about what was vitally important to the field. Since these discussions began in the late 1970s, new epistemic engagements with the social sciences (particularly anthropology), archival documents, (H)istory and postmodern engagements with form and disciplinary methodologies have created opportunities for innovative collaborations among scholars, visual artists, community organizations, archivists, and creative writers.  These collaborations necessitated all involved to rethink not only the direction of the field, but also the extent to which theoretical approaches in “areas studies” needed to be revised for the field to move beyond the geographic fantasies that designated the Caribbean as the “West Indies.” At the same time, scholars were also grappling with the colonial pasts out of which these imaginings emerged and building bridges with other fields engaged in similar critical enterprises (American Studies, Trans-Atlantic Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies). 

The contemporary moment in Caribbean Studies can be characterized by debates invested in interrogating the content, structure, and perspectives of the field. This course invites students to participate in these ongoing conversations in order to gain a deeper appreciation of some of the key critical moments that inform the shape of the field and continue to influence the trajectories of critical conversations today.  The course will invite students to think seriously about some of the following: what are the limitations of thinking about and through the Caribbean primarily as an English-speaking region? As heterosexual?  What do we lose when we marginalize these ways of being in the world, even when the linguistic and cultural traditions in the region continuously expose these presumptions as mythology?  Our discussions will begin with the special issue of Small Axe (Vol. 41, July 2013) dedicated to the question, what is Caribbean studies?  We will then expand our conversations to consider more focused engagements with, and responses to, this question from an array of interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches.  Readings for the course may include:

Attai, Nikoli.  Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean 

Brodber, Erna.  Louisiana

Brathwaite, Kamau.  “Caribbean Man in Space and Time” 

Francio Guadeloupe and Yvon Van Der Pijl. Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean:

Ways of Being Non-Sovereign

Francis, Donette.  Fictions of Feminine Citizenship (selections)

Gil, Lyndon.  Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean

Neptune, Harvey.  Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation

Rubin, Vera ed. Caribbean Studies: A Symposium (selections)

M.G. Smith.  A Framework for Caribbean Studies (selections)

McKittrick, Katherine.  Dear Science and Other Stories

Thomas, Deborah. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica

Scott, David.  Conscripts of Modernity (selections)

Sheller, Mimi.  Consuming the Caribbean and Citizenship from Below (selections)

Smith, Faith. (ed.)  Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (selections)

________. Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early 20th Cent.

Thompson, Krista.  An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque

Description:

This class will focus on contemporary work in the environmental humanities. We will engage in a wide range of interdisciplinary ecological conversations: from creative nonfiction to cultural theory, from policy documents to popular TV shows. There will be outdoor components to the class: slow looking in the campus arboretum and/or a field trip to Everglades National Park. Reading and viewing materials for the last quarter of the semester will be decided collectively by the class.  

Requirements:

• Keep a field journal of your observations and reflections on South Florida environments (broadly construed; not necessarily focused on the “natural world”);
• Lead class discussion at least twice during the course of the semester;
• Either:
  • A traditional 4,000-word research paper; or
  • Two shorter research and writing projects. Possibilities include a combination of short research/position paper; public-facing article/StoryMap; annotated bibliography; conference presentation; sample syllabus with rationale; sample or actual grant/fellowship proposal

Course materials (provisional: subject to change!)

• Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places
• Rosalind Donald, Camila Young, and Katharine Mach, “The Role of Local Narratives in Emerging Climate Governance” 
• Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals 
• Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023
• Aldo Leopold, “Thinking Like a Mountain”
• Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights
• Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation”

As the title suggests, this course will provide students with an opportunity to consider the scholarly side of academic life in a more holistic (and hopefully realistic) fashion.  We all know that a critical part of academic life is research and publishing, particularly the peer reviewed essay and (eventually) the monograph.  While these two modes of publishing academic research are indeed the "gold standard," there are also numerous other avenues to shaping, intervening in, and challenging critical discourses in a given field.  During the semester, we will examine the world of publishing and editing -- first from the ground view of exploring what journals are, how they function, how/where/why they emerge and yes, how to arrive at the point where your work appears in them.  Taking a view from the ground up, we will examine how editorial decisions are made: how are peer reviewed essays judged; which journals are best for your work, and how you arrive at these decisions; and most importantly how do you write a review essay, an album/cd/film, a review of an exhibition, a traditional book review, a book discussion, a review essay (bet you didn't know there were so many different sub-genres of reviews?!).  We will also consider the “return” of the interview as a critical form of engagement not only in Caribbean studies, but also in creative writing.  Moving from the ground level, we will also examine the “metanarratives” that inform the ideological end epistemic focal points of the founding and continued support of many journals.   

We will also examine why these publications, often referred to as "Other Academic Publications," aren’t considered as valuable as the holy grail of the "peer reviewed essay."  Increasingly, authors of peer reviewed essays and monographs have begun to cite “other academic publications” while also publishing their scholarship in digital forums, blogs, and other “non-traditional” academic venues.  In fact, there is a controversial epistemic shift underway in several disciplines away from “tier 1” journal publications and sources towards “open access” publications.This course will introduce students to key critical moments in emerging areas in the humanities, particularly in relation to journal publishing, shifting models for academic publishing (from print to e-journals and open access journals), and the scholarly value of other forms of academic publishing.  Upon completion of the course, students will be expected to have a deeper understanding of critical aspects of academic publishing that include how to complete a peer review for an academic journal; developing interview questions for creative writers/critics/visual artists; and writing book reviews and review essays.  By the end of the course, each student will be expected to have at least two pieces of "other academic publishing" in the final stages of preparation before being sent out for review by journal editors and peer reviews. 

The Graduate Practicum in Teaching College Writing covers high impact approaches to teaching and learning in the context of first-year writing, including topics such as rhetorical theory, multimodality, generative artificial intelligence, and more. The course will invite you to engage with scholarly theory and evidence-based practice as published in the scholarship of the field. Additionally, the practicum will create opportunities for you to develop course materials, give and receive feedback on those materials, and practice facilitating learning activities.