Lower Division Courses

Chantel Carlson

TR 9:30-10:50, 11:00-12:20 

Core: FAR

In this introductory creative writing course, students will read and analyze plays, experimental collaborative performances, and poetry, specifically focusing on identity expression through the written word and performance. Students will also get experience writing their own plays and poetry, as well as receive constructive critiques on their own written work. Because this is a writing workshop that values inclusivity, students will participate in a collaborative environment through workshops and group assignments.

Beginners welcome!

Janelle Gray

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: FAR

What makes a scene impossible to look away from? In this class, we'll explore how to write stories that are meant to be performed--on stage and on screen. Together, we'll break down powerful scenes driven by conflict, character, and dialogue using student-picked plays, TV shows, and movies. Then, you'll bring your own stories to life through workshop and collaboration.

Sarah Margaret Pittman

MWF 11:00-11:50, 12:00-12:50

Core: LT, HUM

This course will introduce students to literature spanning from the late eighteenth century to today that focuses on social issues to explore how literature is shaped by its historical and cultural contexts. We will begin by discussing poetry that depicts the hardships and inequalities present during the Industrial Revolution before we shift to study an early social novel and novella from the mid-nineteenth century. We will also look at contemporary songs and works of literature to better understand how storytelling spurs social reform and change. Students will read a variety of works, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. We will also analyze adaptations and reimaginings of social novels to examine why stories of disparity and adversity are still relevant today. This course will include a combination of traditional assessments and creative projects. For example, students will write their own lyrics for a protest song. As an introduction to literature course, students will also learn to identify plot, theme, setting, point of view, and poetic techniques. 

Lorenzo Casanova

TR 12:30-1:50, 2:00-3:20

Core: LT, HUM

The course will explore genres such as short stories, novels, and films centered on queer experiences. It will emphasize queer literature and highlight the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality within heteronormative society. The physical movement across rural and urban regions offers alternative ways of survival for the LGBTQIA+ community. The course will explore how regional spaces in queer literature embody social and political connections, emphasizing storytelling as world-making for queer communities. Also, students will become familiar with interpretive strategies and will examine the course texts about literary antecedents, literary analysis as a research method, and the cultural circumstances of composition. Subtopics will often vary by section. This course cannot be repeated for additional credit.

Sarah Parijs

TR 9:30-10:50

Core: LT, HUM

Simultaneously a product of Japanese culture and globalization, anime is an audiovisual form of film and television which is often framed as form of entertainment catered to and for children. While this childlike and simplistic categorization is frequently challenged by its multi-genre approach to varying subjects and themes, this course outlines the aesthetics and ideological contexts of theories of the child, childhood, and maturation across anime and its adaptations from other genres such as manga, history, literature, and folklore. As an introduction to film analysis, this course will examine a broad survey of genres in anime to learn about fundamental aspects of film, television, and literary adaptation techniques, like mise-en-scene, characterization, framing, sound, and more. We will also watch and read stories by a variety of directors and authors; learn about how anime and its adaptations define the child and social, biological, behavioral, environmental, and political processes of growing up. 

Lisa Nikolidakis

MW 4:00-5:20

Core: LT, HUM

Whether it’s nuclear panic, forests that won’t let you go, or rogue AI systems, ecohorror taps into our deepest fears about the world we’re creating, altering, and destroying. In this course,

we’ll explore how ecohorror films reflect and amplify environmental anxieties, while also learning how films work on screen through core elements like mise-en-scène, sound, editing, and narrative. From the eerie wilderness of The Blair Witch Project to the economic terror of Parasite to dystopian chaos of Snowpiercer, we’ll analyze how films construct nature as a monster (or are we the monsters?), and examine the social, political, and environmental forces shaping those fears. You’ll leave the course with a strong film vocabulary, the ability to critically analyze how movies create meaning, and a framework for making your own short ecohorror film, culminating in a final screening and Oscar Party.

Alexandra Edwards

TR 5:00-6:20

Core: LT, HUM

What do gangsters, screwball comedies, and film noir have in common? They're all products of one of the most powerful — and most controlled — creative systems in American history: the Hollywood Studio System. In this course, students will trace the history of Hollywood from the dawn of sound film through the system's gradual decline, watching and analyzing films like Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, and Double Indemnity along the way. We begin with two 1929 short films starring jazz legends Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington, and follow Hollywood's story through the Pre-Code era, the censorship battles of the Production Code, wartime filmmaking, and the shadowy world of film noir. Using a five-category analytical framework — narrative, aesthetic, ideological, historical, and industrial — students will learn to read films not just as stories but as cultural artifacts shaped by censorship, commerce, and politics, ending with Singin' in the Rain as a film that looks back at everything Hollywood built, and everything it cost.

Ismael Quinones

TR 11:00-12:20, 12:30-1:50

Core: WCO I

We will study, practice, and produce writing that “imprints” in time. From speeches that enacted political change, arguments that shaped the public, histories of ancient times, and visual rhetoric in contemporary life, students will participate in democratic deliberation, study histories of social movements, and imagine how we write a better world into existence.

Ashok Bhusal

MWF 9:00-9:50, 10:00-10:50, 3:00-3:50

Core: WCO

Welcome to the Fall 2026 ENGL 10803 class! This course is designed for you to engage in various forms of compositions with writing serving as your starting point. Through these compositions, you will learn about yourself and the world. To accomplish this, you’ll engage in processes of composition including invention, critical reading, drafting, revision, and editing as you complete written as well as non-written tasks that will enable you to make sense of the world around you. This is a skill-oriented, hands-on and task-based class and so I want you to see every assignment as a “final exams” since an aggregate of the points you earn from each task throughout the semester will determine your final grade. 

Yingwen Yu

MWF 11:00-11:50

Core: LT, HUM

In Sister Nations, Winona LaDuke writes, “The women are telling stories, the women are singing, listen, listen. Read, read.” This course takes up that invitation by exploring contemporary Native American women’s writing across fiction, poetry, and visual media. Together, we will examine how these works engage with identity, land, community, and survival, while connecting oral traditions to present-day cultural, political, and environmental issues. Students will read, discuss, and reflect on powerful voices that challenge dominant narratives and reimagine the future.

Madhukari Guha

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: LT, HUM

There is an assumption that women writers tackle domestic, cosy, and lowbrow genres such as the romance and the fairy tale. This course will help dismantle that myth by teaching writings of women in the genres of romance and fairy tale to show how these genres are not apolitical, and regularly addresses the inequality of power across gender, nationality, race, color, and class. We will be reading texts by celebrated women novelist from the nineteenth to the twenty first centuries from Jane Austen to Margaret Atwood.

Jill Havens

MWF 11:00-11:50, 2:00-2:50

Core: LT, HUM

Humans have always felt the need to tell stories about their lives, to share their experiences, to explain the things they cannot understand or to express their own truths. Many stories from ancient civilizations have survived and come down to us now as myths. Myths take many forms, carry many meanings, and serve many purposes; and these stories can tell us much about the needs, values, beliefs, and concerns of the people who found comfort in their gods and heroes. In this course we will explore a variety of myths from the Classical world of the Greeks and Romans to the Iron Age of the Celts and Dark Age of the Vikings. As we read these stories, we will try to understand their meaning for those who originally told and heard these stories, and the purpose these stories had for the people who believed in their truth. We will also examine how modern Western culture has been shaped by this legacy of ancient myth and even impact everyday aspects of our own lives.

Layne Craig

MWF 1:00-1:50, 2:00-2:50

Core: LT, HUM

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, facing his own cancer diagnosis, turned to the words of playwright Samuel Beckett to characterize the sense of limbo he felt in facing his prognosis, repeating to himself the quotation, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” For Kalanithi, and for many facing medical diagnoses and crises, narrative and literary language provide frameworks, inspiration, and a sense of identity that can have profound effects on their experience of illness and health. In fact, these effects are being acknowledged by more and more medical schools as they integrate health humanities courses into their curricula. In this class, we’ll examine the ways in which stories influence our views of illness and health. Most readings will be twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and memoirs depicting issues such as infectious disease, mental illness, cancer, and reproductive health.

Sarah Margaret Pittman

MWF 8:00-8:50, 9:00-9:50

Core: WCO II

This course will focus on the analysis and creation of arguments in various forms of media, such as print and digital media, that are centered on current local and national topics and concerns. Students will learn how to compose rhetorical analysis essays, argumentative essays, and multimodal projects for the digital realm. In this class, students will complete a combination of traditional essays and creative projects.

Victoria Washington

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: WCO II

In 20803, your written inquiry led you along new routes and brought you to new places. Now, it’s time to find your voice. Writing as Argument offers the opportunity to practice formulating, expressing, and defending arguments of your own. As a class, we will analyze the rhetorical patterns of writers, musical and visual artists, comedians, and other rhetoricians to determine how they construct compelling arguments. From there, you will flex your rhetorical muscles by researching and developing a thesis on a specific topic. Lastly, the course will culminate in a final exam framed as a class debate where you will have a chance to collaborate with your peers to create and present your closing argument. Gird up your loins. It’s time to fight.

Mat Wenzel

TR 9:30-10:50, 12:30-1:50, 2:00-3:20

Core: WCO II

What does it actually mean to make an argument — not a fight, but a real conversation? In this course, we take the writing and inquiry skills from ENGL 10803 and put them to work across all kinds of media: written, visual, spoken, and digital. Working in small groups, you'll research and produce your own podcast series on topics that actually matter to you and your communities. Along the way you'll get better at finding and using sources, analyzing how arguments work, and composing for real audiences. The podcast is our main format, but the bigger question we're asking all semester is: how do you get into a conversation that's already happening — and say something worth hearing?

Hannah Jorgensen

MWF 11:00-11:50

Core: CA, HUM

Digital humanists both use digital methods to study literature and culture, as well as take digital culture as an object of study itself. How can computation help us see literature and culture in new ways? No coding experience necessary, though previous coding and statistical knowledge is welcome. We will be learning digital humanities by doing digital humanities. We will be reading various academic articles, popular articles, and reviewing project websites, but you will also learn some basic tools to build your own project. In the final part of the course, you will identify a dataset you are interested in studying with a small group and complete a final digital humanities project that draws on both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Sarah Ruffing Robbins

TR 3:30-4:50

Core: GA, LT

How have American individuals and groups addressed the challenge of finding home? What do you know about your own family’s history of moving around within and across parts of the US and the world? How does your own sense of “homeplace” relate to historical issues and social movements in a globally-situated US culture with a long history of complex migrations, by individuals and groups? Through reading and writing that incorporates personal responses and a series of inquiry projects, we’ll explore questions about migration, settlement, and (sometimes) resistance in literary and pop culture texts—including visuals and films as well as printed ones. We’ll also do research projects to explore Americans’ searches to claim “home” in a nation shaped by migrations of different kinds, both within and across borders.

Overall, we’ll ask how stories told in various forms can document and support, but also sometimes question, folks’ efforts, when they move around, to sustain familiar social networks, honor long-held values, and hold on to prior identities even as, by moving to a new place, they may well find themselves changing in varying ways.

Caylie Cox

TR 9:30-10:50

Core: N/A

Technical and professional writing forms a large part of many job duties across nearly every industry. In the business world, writing makes things happen, and documentation is the lifeblood of a company. But too often, technical writing courses are just…boring! This class is my attempt to make technical and professional writing instruction interesting and (dare I say it?) fun. Instead of writing documentation about real products, you and your group members will create a fictional product within the world of a book—sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian, or any other fiction genre you can think of. We’ll use real technical writing genres to guide your work on this “product” from design and testing to marketing and sales.