Texas Tech University

Graduate Course Offerings, Spring 2024

If you have any questions about the Literature, Creative Writing, or Linguistics courses, please contact the graduate advisor. For all Technical Communication courses, please contact the Director of Graduate Studies.

The English/Philosophy building can be found on the Campus Map.

We also have a listing of past graduate course offerings.

Click an Option to Show Courses by Focus

 

ENGL 5000, Portfolio

Dr. Beau Pihlaja
Asynchronous (CRN: 66363)

ENGL 5000 is an MATC portfolio seminar that fulfills MATC student's capstone requirement. MATC students pursuing the Portfolio option for their degree will develop their portfolio in this course under the direction of TTU TCR faculty.

IMPORTANT: This is a “variable credit” course and will require you to assign the number of credit hours you need when you register. This course should count for 3cr. hours. Instructions for changing variable credit hours: Changing Variable Credit Course Hours.

Note: Your portfolio will be reviewed a second time by TTU TCR faculty in your final semester before graduation. While there is no examination, your portfolio fulfills the "comprehensive exam" requirement.

ENGL 5067, Methods of Teaching College Composition

5067 sections are required for onsite GPTIs. Enroll in the section based on your program/year.

Note: Online students/non-GPTIs are not permitted to enroll in these courses. These sections are integrally linked to the work GPTIs do in our First-Year Writing

ENGL 5067 (MA 1st Year)

Dr. Callie Kostelich
Mondays, 12:00 - 1:20 PM
Onsite (CRN: 57603)

This course is designed as a practicum for GPTI teaching first-year writing at Texas Tech University. This course will introduce teachers to methods and practices of teaching writing and provide scaffolding for their first three semesters teaching first-year writing. We will use class time to discuss teaching activities, to introduce you to theories of learning, writing, and rhetoric, to solve problems related to teaching and learning, and to help you build your teaching philosophy.

ENGL 5067 (PhD 1st Year)

Dr. Callie Kostelich
Wednesdays, 12:00 - 1:20 PM
Onsite (CRN: 63583)

This course is designed as a practicum for GPTI teaching first-year writing at Texas Tech University. This course will introduce teachers to methods and practices of teaching writing and provide scaffolding for their first three semesters teaching first-year writing. We will use class time to discuss teaching activities, to introduce you to theories of learning, writing, and rhetoric, to solve problems related to teaching and learning, and to help you build your teaching philosophy.

ENGL 5303, Studies in Medieval British Literature

Dr. Julie Nelson Couch
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 49653 / 63652D)

This course will cover a Middle English textual corpus selected in consultation with the current Engl 5302 students. Topic options (among others) include “Holy Romance,” “Manuscript Miscellany,” “Vernacular Arthur,” “Canterbury and Other Pilgrimages,” and “Race-Making in Medieval England.”

Assignments: research project, oral presentation, conference-length paper, annotated bibliography

Prerequisite: English 5302, Translating Middle English, Fall 2023 (or accepted evidence, evaluated by the professor, of Middle English fluency)

Requirements Fulfilled: Foreign Language/Methods (Option 3), British Literature; Period: early; Genre: poetry; Book History/Digital Humanities Certificate; Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5307, Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Dr. Marta Kvande
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 66347 / 66348D)

Many critics talk about “the novel” as if the term were both self-evident and immutably fixed. But eighteenth-century writers had no such misconceptions; the fictions they wrote varied wildly in their form, style, and content, and the term “novel” did not have a stable meaning until quite late in the century. This course will study British novels of the long eighteenth century, both canonical and not, with a particular interest in their delightful strangeness and in the ways novels defined and presented themselves both textually and materially. We'll consider questions like how and why the weird variety of early fiction gradually coalesced into something we now understand as a coherent genre; how the material forms of printed fiction helped shape the marketing of the genre and readers' responses to the texts; and what kinds of definitions of the novel genre work best.

Requirements Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Late; Genre: Fiction; BHDH Certificate

ENGL 5317, Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Secularism and its Discontents

Dr. Roger McNamara
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 67426 / 67427D)

We are all familiar with the phrase “the separation of church and state” as a short-hand phrase to describe secularism. To elaborate, secularism guarantees that religion can be freely practiced in the private sphere, and that the state cannot encroach on the rights of religious individuals, communities, and organizations. And vice-versa, individuals and communities cannot impose their religious beliefs on people in the public sphere. However, if we scrutinize the concept, the commonsensical notion of secularism collapses because it is embedded in a range of alternate notions like rationality and bureaucracy, the rise of capitalism, and the growing diversity within Christianity (the relationship between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism). All of these have had a huge impact on the way we imagine secularism in the present moment.

This course will be divided into two sections. We will first explore the theoretical underpinnings of secularism as it arose in Europe. Second, we'll examine a range of criticism against secularism broadly described as “postsecular”: from within the European-North American framework, through contemporary postcolonial criticism of secularism in the Middle-East, to South Asian critics who seem disenchanted with secularism.

Here is a tentative list of books we'll be reading:

Critical:

    • A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (selections only)
    • The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
    • Formations of the Secular by Talal Asad (selections only)
    • Religious Difference in a Secular Age by Saba Mahmood (selections only)
    • Others TBD.

Fiction:

    • Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
    • Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry
    • In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh
    • Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
    • Short stories by Flannery O'Connor
    • Others TBD.

Requirements Fulfilled: CLGT; Late Period; Genre: Fiction.

ENGL 5323, Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Making and Un-Making the Poetic Canon

Dr. Elissa Zellinger
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 66751 / 66349D)

When students think about nineteenth-century poetry (if they think about it at all), they might remember Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, maybe Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In this class, we will examine canonical figures, the literary history that has made them canonical figures, and, just as important, the figures who were left out of the so-called “American Renaissance.” Nineteenth-century American poetry has experienced a resurgence of critical interest over the last twenty years, and we will attend to the varied, recent approaches to this body of work. In our exploration, we will find that canon formation's inclusionary and exclusionary practices reveal longstanding social, political, and even economic forces that got their start in the nineteenth-century and continue to exert their influence today. But we will also study the ways that poetry functioned as a dynamic force that responded to institutional powers, historical crises, and social injustice. This course will provide a solid overview of nineteenth-century poems and authors, combined with current critical discussions/debates. Each week will focus on a single poet. Requirements for the class include in-class presentations, weekly Blackboard posts, a research proposal, and a final written assignment. The syllabus is designed to introduce students to a broad range of authors, texts, and critical methodologies.

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry

ENGL 5324, Studies in American Literature: Transpacific American Literature

Dr. Yuan Shu
Mondays, 2:00 - 4:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 49658 / 57991D)

Following the paradigm shift in American studies from the transatlantic to the transpacific, this course investigates how transpacific movements have informed and reshaped American literary imagination from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Beginning with Herman Melville's Typee and Jack London's Tales of the Pacific, we examine how the American whaling experience and the changing constructions of the South Pacific serve as an extension of the American westward movement and expansion of Anglo-American capitalism into the Pacific, which encompasses Pacific Islands, Oceania, and the Asia Pacific. We then scrutinize Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters as an alternative way of approaching American experiences, from the Asia Pacific to North America and from the west coast to the east coast, which foregrounds the process of American nation-building and empire-building. Meanwhile, we also focus on how the Cold War unfolds in the transpacific spaces, with special attention to David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato, and Viet Nguyen's The Sympathizer. We conclude by exploring two speculative fictions on our planetary and technological futures with transpacific twists—Karen Yamashita's Through the Arch of the Rain Forest and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Required Texts:

Primary Literary Texts:

    • Jessica Hagedorn, The Dogeaters
    • David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
    • Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men
    • Chang-Rae Lee, A Gesture Life
    • Jack London, Tales of the Pacific
    • Herman Melville, Typee
    • Viet Nguyen, The Sympathizer
    • Tim O'Brien, Going after Cacciato
    • Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
    • Karen Yamashita, Through the Arch of the Rain Forest

Secondary Critical Texts:

    • David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism
    • Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature; Period: Late; Genre: Fiction or Drama

ENGL 5327, Studies in Multicultural Literature: Border Wars: From Corridos to Narcos

Dr. Cordelia Barrera
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Online (CRN: 61846)

In this course, we take the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a point of departure for examining its historical, political, and cultural construction. In discussing borderlands literary productions, we will examine the landscape, historical and contemporary conflicts, and nationalizing efforts at the border, as well as more abstract ideas that include the border as strategy for cultural representation and the forging of hybrid identities. Questions we will consider include: What are borders and borderlands? How do borders change over time and what impact do these changes have on border dwellers in a postnationalist America? How are border immigrants and exiles imagined, constructed, and exploited by individuals, governments, and corporations? How do citizens of the Borderlands resist injustice and violence? In exploring these questions, we will consider various cultural and literary approaches—including ecocritical and postcolonial theories, transnationalism, mestizaje, feminist critiques, social justice, and globalization. Our analysis of the borderlands will draw from various interdisciplinary sources including history, ethnography, literary productions, and film. Texts include With a Pistol in His Hand by Américo Paredes, Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa, Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera and Dreamland by Charles Bowden and Alice Leora Briggs.

Assignments include: Leading formal discussions; Conference-length paper; Article-length paper; Book or film review; Oral presentation of conference-length paper.

Requirements Fulfilled: American Literature, Period: Late; Genre: Fiction; LSJE

ENGL 5334, History of the English Language: Who Owns English? Authority in a Worldwide Language

Dr. Brian McFadden
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 56192 / 60695D)

This course examines the history and development of English from its origins in Early Medieval England through the high Middle Ages and the Early Modern period to Modern English, including the internal history, external history, and the development of its morphology, phonology, semantics, and syntax, in addition to examining orality and literacy and the effects of developing methods of textual production. We will also be reading short pieces written at different times through English history (e.g. Ælfric of Eynsham, Alfred the Great, Chaucer, Milton, Sidney, Johnson, Swift, Jefferson, Orwell) for a historical perspective on how authors perceived the language in which they were writing and how they claim authority to define and use the English language for their social and political ends. The earlier parts of the course will be highly technical; as the course progresses, there will be more opportunity for discussion and development of topics of interest to the student. The requirements will be a dialect project, a seminar paper on a topic of interest to the study of English as a language, a prospectus at midterm in order to give me an idea of what you wish to discuss in the essay, and an oral presentation on one of the texts to be discussed in class. Primary texts: Gramley, The History of English: An Introduction; Knowles, A Cultural History of the English Language; Orwell, 1984; McCrum, Globish; George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion; Wilton, Word Myths; plus additional reading assignments via OneDrive.

Requirements Fulfilled: Foreign Language/Methods (Option 2 or 3); Linguistics Certificate; Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate

ENGL 5335, Principles of Language

Dr. Aaron Braver
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 12:30 - 1:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 66351 / 66352D)

Language touches every aspect of our lives. From reading the morning paper to decrypting secret codes, the subconscious knowledge of language is uniquely human. In this course we'll ask what it means to have a command of language—do animals have it? Infants? How can analysis of its structure help us understand literary or poetic works?

By examining the structures of the world's languages, we will discover why linguists believe in a “universal grammar” in spite of the world's rich linguistic diversity. We'll also learn how to make the sounds of the world's languages—from French nasal vowels to the clicks of Africa's Bantu languages. This course is suited to anyone interested in language, literature, how the mind works, or the characteristics that make us uniquely human.

No prior linguistics knowledge is assumed or required. More information: https://bit.ly/engl5335.

Requirements Fulfilled: Methods Sequence (option 2) for Foreign Language Requirement; Linguistics Certificate

ENGL 5357, Teaching Film and Media Studies: Within and Beyond the Image

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Online (CRN: 67402)

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In this course, students will learn practical strategies for teaching film and other audio/visual media (like video games, comics, and TikToks). They will become versed in the history of film instruction and in the ethical, legal, and technical concerns facing educators. While the course will be appropriate for students focusing on film and media studies, it will also provide valuable expertise to students in other fields who wish to nimbly integrate the study of media texts and/or the use of media-based assignments into their classes.

Topics covered include: defining film and media studies, teaching active viewing and listening skills, global cinema, interdisciplinarity, the logistics of teaching media that demands additional purchases/hardware, critical theory as a lens on to media, the accessibility of media classes for students with disabilities, ethics of representation in the classroom (including violence and obscenity), multicultural/queer/decolonized course design, incorporating the community into the classroom, and publicly engaged scholarship and programming as pedagogy.

Students will design syllabi, lesson plans, assignments, and assessment strategies that are relevant to their interests. They will also have the opportunity to visit classrooms. Classes will often be supplemented with perspectives of film and media studies professors from in and outside of TTU. Such guest speakers will underline the breadth of approaches as well as the challenges for teaching such materials. Invited artists will discuss their work and how it has been effectively positioned within pedagogical settings. Ultimately, the course will explore how best to teach students to see within and beyond the image.

Requirements Fulfilled: Foundation Course (With the DGS approval); Genre: Film

ENGL 5362, Rhetorical Analysis of Text

Dr. Lisa Phillips
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 57584 / 57585D)

Remember when you were a kid and you and your best friend argued about what she said to you earlier that day? You'd say, “I know what I heard,” placing complete trust in both your sense of hearing and your ability to remember. Your friend would say, “Well, I know what I said," placing complete trust in her own ability to remember what she said and in her ability to use language to say what she meant. Remember the faith you had in the truth your own senses reflected to you? When did that change? Or hasn't it?

The work of the senses is rhetorical. What you see is what you've been persuaded to believe as correct. What you hear, what you are able to hear, is what you've been persuaded to believe as correct. The work of the senses is also culturally and ideologically informed. What smells, tastes, or feels good to you might be repugnant to someone else.

This course will interrogate the trust we hold in our senses as a way of responding to the course's driving questions: how do we work to persuade the senses? How do our senses persuade us? What is the relationship between “truth” and the senses? Fact and the senses? Culture and the senses? (Dis)Ability and the senses?

My take on ENGL 5362: Rhetorical Analysis a.k.a. “Rhetorics of the Senses” will provide you an introduction to the practice of rhetorical criticism via sensory rhetorics—the scope of rhetoric is broad, including both discursive and nondiscursive symbols. Rhetorical analysis, more generally, is an everyday activity that you can use to evaluate how you and others respond, reject, accept, and make sense of the world.

We conceptualize sense as meaning when we say things like, “He has no common sense,” or “She's not making sense.” We call the most recent mass shootings “senseless,” and we wonder about those we perceive to, quite bluntly, have “no sense.” How, then, do we make meaning with our senses and analyze using our senses?

Together, we'll explore how and why sensory rhetorics—how we talk about them, how we conceptualize them, and how we represent them—persuade us to maintain an assortment of beliefs that are steeped in cultural ideology while examining how such rhetorics provide embodied metaphors for everything from knowing (knowing-as-seeing) to characterizing something negative. (That food stinks.)

Course Purpose
The course will provide you a general introduction to the practice of analyzing texts, broadly conceived. Think of this as a “how-to” class that addresses questions like: how do rhetorical scholars select artifacts to study? And, how do they conduct rhetorical analysis once they've selected them? While the contextual/theoretical focus pivots on sensory rhetorics, we will also consider enduring issues or tensions in rhetorical criticism: the purpose of criticism, the relationship between method and object, the role of theory, the influence of the critic, formal vs. eclectic or generative criticism, adapting methods to serve new contexts, combining methods, the relationship between discourse analysis and rhetorical analysis, and others.

Because good criticism cannot be reduced to a cookie-cutter formula, we will downplay the idea of criticism as a step-by-step procedure and emphasize instead issues and questions that rhetorical analysis unearths. By the end of the course, you should be able to work through these issues effectively as you develop sound and insightful rhetorical analyses.

ENGL 5366, Teaching Technical Communication

Dr. Kellie Gray
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 50774 / 54729D)

English 5366 is a course that will prepare you to teach technical and professional writing as an introductory (survey) course for students across the disciplines. It will introduce you to the theoretical and pedagogical knowledge you will need to teach technical and professional writing successfully. While we will occasionally use the ENGL 2311 course objectives and curriculum requirements to frame our discussions about assignments and activities, the skills you will develop in this course can be applied to an introductory technical writing course at any institution. Over the course of the semester, you will be asked to facilitate discussions, deliver teaching demonstrations, develop instructional materials, and make curricular recommendations for introductory content. The major deliverable for this course will be a fully developed 15-week introductory technical writing course, which you'll work on throughout the semester.

As a class, we will discuss critical issues related to teaching technical communication while also considering practical matters, such as designing effective assignments, determining reasonable evaluation criteria, and developing engaging course activities. While this course focuses on teaching technical content, many of our discussions about teaching and learning are widely applicable. For example, we will regularly question how we can best align our pedagogical values with our teaching practices and how we can create hospitable learning environments for both onsite and online students. Students without a technical communication background are always welcome.

ENGL 5369, Discourse & Technology

Dr. Steve Holmes
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 67492 / 63731D)

This course explores how writing is a technology that has changed from the invention of paper as a form of artificial memory storage to contemporary multimodal and networked forms of digital rhetoric. We will read some of the classic historical texts like Walter J. Ong and notable criticisms such as Nicolas Carr's “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” but we will focus primarily on contemporary theorists and practices such as posthumanism and new materialism. This course will ask you to examine how these latter areas intersect with current trends in writing studies, digital rhetoric, and technical and professional communication scholarship. Students will be welcome to apply these theoretical conversations to a wide range of project types and applications as they relate to individual research and practitioner interests.

ENGL 5370, Studies in Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop

Dr. Jacqueline Kolosov
Mondays, 9:00 - 11:50 AM
Hybrid (CRN: 57933 / 63653D)

ENGL 5370 is a writing workshop which implicitly involves close reading of your own and your colleagues' work, alongside a range of published poems and likely 2-3 contemporary collections of poetry. Expect to submit new work every other week, both new poems and revisions. The course will include looking at a few particular forms such as the sonnet and the ghazal with an eye towards exploring the boundaries or more precisely the possibilities contained here. Expect to experiment and especially to risk crossing or at least living on an edge or threshold that forces you to really risk something and excavates you from habit.

The reading, writing and revision of poems will be complemented by a selection of craft essays by practicing poets such as Ellen Bryant Voigt, Tony Hoagland, Carl Phillips, and others. Fundamentally poetry is a practice, one that requires habitual performance or application, so that it becomes a habit that allows for continual discovery and growth.

Requirements include final portfolio of six to eight finished poems; a prose statement of some 1000-1200 words that engages aesthetics, questions, concerns, obsessions, etc.; and attendance that is nothing less than rigorous and faithful.

Requirements Fulfilled: CW Workshop, Genre: Poetry

ENGL 5370, Studies in Creative Writing: Nonfiction Workshop: The Digressive Engine

Professor Lucy Schiller
Wednesdays, 9:00 - 11:50 AM
Hybrid (CRN: 32540 / 57931D)

The essayist understands the importance of circling, dodging, re-approaching. Digression, though, is something slightly different, and powerful: it is deviance from expected narrative, and it can have, as poet and scholar Sandra Schor has written, something of a “sneer” to it—an “arrogance, assertion of fact, forthrightness, nostalgia, and compulsiveness.” In this course, we'll study nonfiction fueled by digression in an effort to better understand how digression might work, and how it can very often come to stand in for the writer's voice—or, maybe more aptly, psyche. Necessarily, we will also ponder the question of coherence within semi-narrative nonfiction: what this word really means to us as nonfiction writers, and what coherence we owe (or don't) to our readers. Lastly, we'll consider digression's relationships to place and journeying, as well as to obsession and internal spiraling. We will read from expansive, occasionally genre-blurring digressions, among them (this list is subject to shift slightly) W.G. Sebald, Robert Vivian, Thomas Bernhard, Horacio Castellano Moya, J.C. Hallman, Nicholson Baker, Ryszard Kapuściński, Sven Lindqvist, Margo Jefferson, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Keene, and Thomas De Quincey.

And we'll write. Over the course of the semester, students will each compose several short essays of compressed digression, as well as one long, digressive essay to be seriously and diligently workshopped. Other requirements include complete attendance, careful reading, and thoughtful participation in discussion, which will occasionally ask students to present information on our cast of digressives and their work.

Requirements Fulfilled: CW Workshop, Genre: Nonfiction

ENGL 5374, Technical Editing

Dr. Geoffrey Sauer
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 64926 / 62330D)

There are two kinds of technical writers: those who have been handed a .docx and been told to turn it into a professional, published work— with professional images, interactive ToC, an index and digital edition.

And those who haven't yet.

This course will teach editing concepts and processes for particular rhetorical situations. It will cover using editorial tools (software and techniques), collaborating, using, creating and customizing style sheets and style guides, multilingual text management, usable typography, and managing document production for digital, responsive, and single-sourced deliverables. This course emphasizes developing an editorial eye for verbal and visual details in order to achieve style, accuracy, consistency, correctness, and complete-ness, for popular genres of both print and online outputs.

ENGL 5377, Special Topics: The Place of Aesthetics in Technical Communication and Design

Dr. Scott Weedon
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 57592 / 32555D)

Aesthetics, or the experience one has of artistic or beautiful objects, is a steadily rising interest in technical communication. In 2011, TC scholar Suguru Ishizaki noted that “From a beautiful photograph of nature to the sleek design of wind turbines to the creative visualization of environmental data, communicating information often appeals to the audience's aesthetic experience. But, how do communicators take into account aesthetic experience as they develop communication strategies?” Ishizaki traces this concern in technical communication to the early work of TC scholar Charles Kostelnick, and we can see it continue in more recent explorations of, for instance, the “aesthetic aspects of color and typography in document design work” (Wellhausen, 2018) and Antonio Byrd's introduction of “ Black technical joy” which designates “the rhetorical practice of finding comfort in and celebration of the strategic ways Black people approach technical and professional communication (TPC)” (Byrd, 2022). In these and other scholars' work, aesthetics and the pleasure of technical communication are taking center stage.

The power of aesthetics in technical communication is pervasive. Think of makeup tutorials and their various strategies of appeal, or other types of how-to or explainer videos that do not simply transmit information but exude style and induce pleasure. What is it about these presentations and the processes they unfold that attract us? Consider further the ways technical communication is taken up by artists to create aesthetic experiences or effects, such as Sol LeWitt's Conceptualist instructions and designs or Piet Mondrian's appropriation of the grid for his paintings, or more recently, Saâdane Afif's Technical Specifications installation that remixes his older works. These and other artists find in technical communication ways to mediate and communicate aesthetic experiences for audiences. These examples are just a few of the ways technical communication is impactful outside of the workplace or classroom. In the contemporary world. technical communication is infused throughout our cultural consumption of entertainment and art.

ENGL 5377 will explore the aesthetic aspects of technical communication. The course will be a seminar-style class, and it is offered as an invitation to explore new directions and possibilities in technical communication research. It is therefore experimental. You are not required to know anything about the arts or aesthetics; you simply need to be curious about exploring the ways aesthetics matters to technical communication.

ENGL 5379, Empirical Research Methods in TCR

Dr. David Roach
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 62317 / 62318D)

The course explores empirical research methods in communication research, emphasizing research designs and quantitative analysis. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to empirical technical and social science research methods and concepts.

The course will emphasize: 1) the philosophy of empirical inquiry; 2) methodological concepts including design and data; and 3) the assumptions underlying and uses for various statistical analyses. At the end of the course, the learner should be able to:

    1. Understand and use basic principles of research, design, variables, and measurement.
    2. Discuss the nature of empirical communication research.
    3. Construct research questions and hypotheses.
    4. Use SPSS to analyze quantitative data.
    5. Comprehend, calculate, and use descriptive statistics, difference testing, and relationship testing effectively.
    6. Explain and use basic principles of inferential statistics.
    7. Comprehend, interpret, write, and explain quantitative results in research articles.

ENGL 5380, Advanced Problems in Literature: We Too Write Black Freedom: Gender, Consciousness, Power

Dr. Kanika Batra
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Online (CRN: 56195)

In two distinct but mutually influential black freedom struggles in the last half of the twentieth century – against social and political inequality in the United States and apartheid in South Africa – there is sometimes an inordinate emphasis on male black leaders and their ideas. Important as the revolutionary philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Barney Pityana, and others were, women and queer activists played an equal and sometimes more than equal part in conceptualizing and actualizing black freedom. Some of this forgotten history has been uncovered in recent years by black feminist scholars. Much of it remains unacknowledged and unknown.

The political writings, speeches, life narratives, and first-person accounts emerging out of these important freedom struggles is the focus of this course. Beginning with narratives of women's leadership in desegregation efforts in the American South including sit-ins, freedom rides, and black electoral mobilization, moving on to the emergence of black power rhetoric by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after the assassination of Martin Luther King, we will chart these influences on the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) rhetoric of community development popularized by the South African Student Organization (SASO). The final section of the course will focus on the writerly and activist legacies of SNCC and SASO in contemporary mobilization around #BlackLivesMatter and #RhodesMustFall. We will also address the formal elements of ‘autobiography,' and how these narratives imitate, subvert, or remediate that form to arrive at an expansive and inherently political definition of ‘life writing'.

Texts may include:

    • Select Web Resources: TORCH: The Oxford Center for Life Writing; SNCC Digital; The Steve Biko Foundation; Digital Innovation South Africa BCM Materials; #BLM Resources; #RMF Statement
    • Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Vintage, 1967.
    • Steve Biko. 1977. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. University of Chicago Press, 2002
    • Ruth First, 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation Under the South African 90-Day Detention Law. Penguin, 2009 
    • Joyce Sikakane. A Window on Soweto. International Defence Aid Fund, 1977.
    • Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck, eds. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell it Like it is. University Press of Mississippi, 2013. 978-1617038365
    • Anne Moody. Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South. Dell, 1992.
    • Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod, Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, eds. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts of Women in the SNCC. University of Illinois Press, 2012.

Requirements Fulfilled: CLGT; Genre: Non-Fiction; LSJE; Women's and Gender Studies Certificate

ENGL 5382, Theory and Research in the Written Discourses of Health and Medicine

Dr. Scott Weedon
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 62327 / 62325D)

Theory and Research in the Written Discourses of Health and Medicine will introduce students to the subfield of rhetorical studies and technical communication known as the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM). In this subfield, scholars research the cultural, social, and symbolic facets of medical practice, history, and science. RHM researchers examine the genres that convey medical information, the interactions between patient and providers, the rhetorical impact of medical technologies, the effects of race, class, gender, and environment on health outcomes, and many other topics.  The course will tackle topics that have impacted our world for the last three years. We will seek to understand the nature of medical uncertainty, the intersection of politics and medical science, the causes and effects of health disparities, and the management of the life and death of populations. The class will be useful to students interested in scientific, health, and technical communication, rhetoric of science, technology and medicine, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical research methods.

ENGL 5389, Field Methods of Research

Dr. TJ Geiger
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 32579 / 32580D)

What do we do when we want to study something that can't be re-enacted in a laboratory, dissected analytically from detailed, constrained experimental conditions? This question is incredibly important for researchers who study everyday language and language-in-use. Historically scholars of technical communication and rhetoric have called upon the methods of anthropology, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and interviews. These methods remain crucial to the discipline's ability to study our technical writing, design, and rhetoric as it's practiced in uncontrolled conditions. The technical communication and rhetoric's long-standing relationship with usability testing and now user experience architecture have moved to fuse the traditional ethnographic methods with the experimental insights of user-centered and participatory design research.

Our class will survey and practice those methods most common to field research, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and participatory design research. We will also contextualize those methods relative to the debates and concerns the field has had about replicability, generalizability, and the relationship of qualitative research methods to quantitative methods as equally “empirical.” We will also pay close attention to the ethical implications of this mode of research, attending to the potential risks and rewards of conducting research of language-use outside a lab, in public spaces, even in digital, online, and new media contexts.

ENGL 5390, Writing for Publication: Creative Writing Emphasis

Dr. Curtis Bauer
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 57479 / 50212D)

This course is designed to teach students in graduate programs how to write clear and effective articles for professional journals in their field.

This particular course will support the needs, knowledge, and ability of students in our Creative Writing track, those who aspire to professional proficiency in writing, and potentially to work in the writing, publishing, or editing industries, and/or to teach at a postsecondary institution. The course is aimed at master's and doctoral students specializing in creative writing (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and/or translation); students will be expected to bring a body of previously drafted work into class to revise. Also required is the generation of “support materials” designed to further individual author's career goals, and may include interviews, book reviews, craft articles, project statements, query letters, websites, etc. Numerous professionals from the literary world—publishers, editors, journalists, translators, residency directors, program administrators and literary and booking agents will virtually visit the class for Q&As. In service of the triple focus on revising creative work for potential publication, drafting supplemental materials to aid in the creation of a writerly platform, and reading a selection of assigned articles and chapters concerning both the craft and business of writing, students will be responsible for three brief, casual (5-10 minute) presentations over the course of the semester on, respectively: a model author website; a residency, grant, or fellowship opportunity; and a “tour” of their personal author website complemented by an elevator pitch and five minute reading of revised creative work. Discussions will aim to supplement and deepen students' knowledge of writing, publishing, editing, and literary citizenship.

Requirements Fulfilled: Writing for Publication

ENGL 5393, Grants and Proposals for the Academy & Industry

Dr. Rich Rice
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Online (CRN: 64922)

Technical communicators and educators see problems in their communities that require sophisticated plans to solve. Such problems often require additional funding and resources or a plan of action which involve formative and summative assessment measurements, including in our work in the academy and industry. In this course you will learn rhetorical processes of grant seeking from identifying a problem, to coming up with an idea to solve the problem, to making sure the idea furthers the mission of the organization, to finding potential sponsors, to planning and developing a proposal. The goal of the course, in other words, is to define objectives and then to turn those objectives into outcomes.

ENGL 5394, User Centered Design

Dr. Rob Grace
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 PM
Hybrid (CRN: 62320 / 62321D)

Our experiences with technology go beyond simple appraisals of utility. User experience (UX) refers to the range of meaningful experiences—physical, affective, and aesthetic—people have when interacting with technologies for work, play, or anything else. UX design, in turn, refers to an iterative process and set of techniques that designers use to create technologies that provide people with experiences they value.

In this class, students will undertake a UX design project to research, define, design, and evaluate a digital technology that affords interactions people find meaningful and, in some way, valuable. Each student will develop the project by researching a use context targeted for design, engage representative users in activities that help define design requirements, and create paper-based and digital, interactive prototypes for experience-centered evaluation. Throughout the UX design process, students will iteratively develop their design concept and reflect on its development by reading and discussing assigned texts, sketching design ideas, analyzing use case scenarios, and participating in class activities.