Graduate Courses

Jean Baudrillard famously wrote of the United States: “What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.” This course takes up Baudrillard’s provocation while adding the crucial modifier of speculative: it enters the speculative fiction of America and seeks to enter America as speculative fiction. We will focus primarily on twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. speculative fiction, staying centered on science fiction while taking up other speculative genealogies and trajectories, including the gothic, fantasy, horror, and the “genre turn.” Our work, though, will not be so much to survey “the” history of American SF as to investigate the intersections where science fiction studies and American studies meet. We will leverage the generative overlaps between these two fields to ask critical questions about how stories and social possibilities shape each other, about the contested and intertwined grounds of how the past is narrated and to whom the future “belongs,” and about the methodological and disciplinary stakes of considering the literary in a multimedia environment and connecting narrative to a variety of extraliterary fields—the political, the historical, the legal, the technological, the ecological, etc. Course assignments will be designed to give you familiarity with some of the fundamental “genres” of academic writing—the conference abstract and CFP; the conference talk; the article—with the hope that each of you leaves the seminar with an original project you can develop for publication.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies (American); a Literary Genre (Fiction). It also meets the Alterity requirement.

CRW 5130 is a graduate workshop in fiction writing. This class will follow the workshop model, and therefore student work, and the intensive discussion of that work, will be our main focus. To that end, over the course of the semester students will be required to share at least three story-length manuscripts (one revision and two new pieces; novel excerpts are fine). This course assumes you have a very serious interest in fiction writing, as well as in discussing the writing of same with others likewise engaged. Our concerns are mainly practical and craft-based: where you as author wish to go with a particular draft, and how we, as readers and writers engaged in a common cause, might help you get there.

Requirements: For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

I believe strongly in discussing freshly minted student material in workshops. In my experience, the energy and exchange of ideas in such a group can motivate everyone who participates. Ideally, for this class, I’d like you to submit new work. However, if you do submit a pre-workshopped piece, make sure that you are really open to hearing our suggestions. I would prefer that you submit something rough and malleable rather than polished and fossilized. Each student will have two-three pieces workshopped by the entire class, twenty pages max per submission. If you want to submit a longer piece you can do it in separate sessions. In addition, each student will choose a published short story from either Best American Short Stories 2025 or The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners and do a presentation on it in class.

Together we will explore some of the subtleties of the craft of fiction writing. What risks do successful fiction writers take and how can we learn from them? What new risks might you take in your own fiction? How can you make your fiction as dramatic, intense, engaging (and publishable) as possible? Our goal is the creation of a community of writers who can learn from and help each other. Courage, honesty, and dedication are expected.

Requirements: For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

Poetic sequences in all their different forms have been explored by poets from the beginning of writing until the present day. In this class we will spend the first hour discussing the different approaches to the sequence. Starting with Ovid and Horace we will move through time and look at Keats’s odes, Emily Dickinson’s fascicles, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and end up with Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets, Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, and Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things, a new collection of prose poems.

The final two hours of the class will be devoted to workshop. In no way will you be expected to write a sequence. Every poet will write one poem a week and write a 500-word response to the readings. The final project is a portfolio of your strongest work. Please contact me if you have any questions.

Requirements: For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

This course will focus (intensely so) on the writing and critique/reading of YOUR poetry. We will have readings, presentations, and discussions of poetic forms and issues relating to the writing of contemporary poetry as it relates to your developing work and the techniques that will matter most to your poems.

You will write and bring to workshop one poem per week. We are aiming for everyone to have a small chapbook by the end of the semester.

Requirements: For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

At a symposium on his work in 2000, John Edgar Wideman was asked about his nonfiction approach, and he said—to paraphrase—certain things have happened to me, and this is my version of it. I want the workshop to focus on the connection between “certain things” and the “version” you build through structure. We will discuss your line work, structure, and your imagery. To aid our imagery discussion, we will consider notes on photography, such as Susan Sontag’s “anthology of images” and “grammar of seeing” concepts. We’ll also study Toni Morrison’s process of moving from “picture to meaning to text.” Other lessons in visual storytelling will come from Teju Cole, Eudora Welty, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, and others. Since we will have a mix of prose writers and poets in the class, we’ll consider works by poets and writers such as Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive and Marilynne Nelson’s What Are We Doing Here? In addition to the traditional workshop structure, with two rounds of submissions, you are encouraged to write an autobiographical craft essay. We will look at examples from Matthew Salesses, Edwidge Danticat, Maud Casey, Jessica Handler, Felicia Rose Chavez, and others who connect their personal experiences with a craft text.

Requirements: For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

Please contact instructor for course description.

Requirements: This course contributes to the 12 hours of graduate coursework required of the MA degree with a focus on Rhetoric and Composition.

The Internship in Editing allows graduate students to receive academic credit for completion of an internship or practicum focused on writing or editing. The course is graded S/U and may be taken for 1 to 6 credit hours. The course requirements may be fulfilled through many types of work including professional service, such as serving as poetry editor for a literary magazine or managing editor for an academic journal, or writing/editing projects associated with a communications-focused job. Email course instructor with questions and to discuss available opportunities or whether a current job or position would be eligible for credit.

This course introduces students to contemporary developments in rhetorical studies with an emphasis on rhetorical situations and rhetorical ecologies. We will begin by reviewing earlier theorizations of the rhetorical situation to establish a foundation for our discussion. We will then study different theoretical and practical perspectives on rhetorical ecologies, examining how an ecological model can challenge and/or extend existing approaches to rhetorical inquiry in the twenty-first century. In addition to exploring what rhetorical ecologies make possible, we will read, analyze, and write about case studies that highlight limitations of this model. This course equips students with theoretical and analytical tools to engage critically with rhetorics of humanitarian, environmental, and technological crises.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: Rhetoric and Composition.

This course will introduce you to the issue of literary and cultural studies—its institutional politics and contemporary situation, its changing historical protocols and problems in a professional discipline called English, its effort to ground (and unground) its methodologies and purpose. As such, this will be less an “introduction to theory” and more an “introduction to the theory of theory”—a critique of critical practice. We’ll read and discuss a selection of texts attempting to answer the question: what is the social function of literary and cultural studies? Why and how do we do our work? However, to make this course as useful as possible for your own work and to encourage collaborative learning, we’ll also break the class up into theory cells based on a field or topic of critical inquiry that matters to you, and you’ll be tasked with completing short assignments that will help you gain an understanding of that field or topic’s scholarship in practice.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for Gateway Theory course.

This course prepares students to read medieval texts written in what we still popularly term “Old English,” a collection of English dialects dating from approximately 600-1100 CE. Familiarity with Old English is not required! The aim of the class is to develop translation skills (learning vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, etc.) in tandem with studying early English literary culture. We will translate and analyze samples of poetry (including short selections of Beowulf), riddles, sermons, philosophical texts, historical chronicles, law codes, and educational materials, considering them as literature as well as historical evidence of life and politics in early medieval Britain.

As we learn how to access these texts in their original dialects, we will also interrogate and critique the colonial history of Old English philological studies—how the “scientific” linguistic approaches of the nineteenth century aided in British colonial projects, and how the imagined direct continuity between an “Old” and “Modern” English fueled (and continues to fuel) white-nationalist rhetoric and ideologies. We will explore newer directions in the field that offer alternative frameworks for studying the language that challenge prescriptivist and paradigm-based models and the linguistic homogeneity that they imply. This class therefore questions the concept of language “mastery” and instead aims to familiarize students with the current questions and issues of Early English studies, engaging not only scholarly conversations about these specific medieval texts, but also about methodology and pedagogy.

Requirements: This course fulfills the general literature requirements for one pre-1660 and one pre-1800 course. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: History of Medieval and Early Modern British Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660).

This course introduces the complex interactions between literary culture and the changing, overlapping media ecologies that have shaped the way we produce, transmit, transform, receive, and interpret creative representations of human experience. It provides an accelerated history and theory of “platformalism”: the affordances of forms through which specific technological platforms enable or disable, encourage or discourage aural, textual, and visual articulation and communications across spatial, temporal, and social boundaries (class, race, nation, gender). Because it is impossible to cover the more than 80,000+ years of text technologies in one course, we will focus on the complex interaction of text technologies in English Renaissance drama (but not duplicating the plays studied in other early modern grad courses this academic year): skin (the earliest matrix for symbolic inscription, including make-up, whiteface, and blackface), semiotic fashions (clothes, accessories, wigs), many forms of manuscript (scenarios, playbooks, actors’ parts, backstage “plats,” musical notation), hand-press printing (advertising flyers, books), built acoustic amplifiers and multimedia systems (musical instruments, churches, commercial performance spaces, palaces). We will also spend a few weeks examining the re-transmission and re-reception of Renaissance drama via later text technologies (machine printing, modern technologized theaters, sound recording, radio, film, digital streaming). Topics are explored through case studies and hands-on encounters, accompanied by historical and theoretical readings. Major assessment is of your individual projects, which may concern any period or technology—though, if you want credit for a pre-1660 or pre-1800 course, your major project must focus on the technologies of that period.

Requirements: This course satisfies the gateway requirement for the History of Text Technologies concentration. This course satisfies the general literature requirement for one course pre-1660 or for one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Medieval and Early Modern British Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660); History of Text Technologies; or a Literary Genre (Drama).

This graduate seminar examines writing assessment, emphasizing how digital technologies and contemporary language debates are reshaping writing assessment theory and practice. The course explores assessment theory (post-psychometric validity, algorithmic bias, culturally sustaining assessment), large-scale assessments (standardized testing, program evaluation, automated scoring), and classroom assessment (formative feedback, summative evaluation, multimodal grading, ePortfolios, AI-assisted feedback). The seminar combines theory with practice, requiring the reading contemporary scholarship as well as designing and critiquing writing assessment instruments. Key issues include:

• AI and Assessment: AI disruption of traditional models, detection technologies, and AI response/feedback
• Algorithmic Ethics: Machine learning in writing evaluation, biases in automated scoring, assessment data
•  Multimodal Assessment: Evaluation of compositions beyond traditional texts
• Language Standardization: Assessment’s role in perpetuating/challenging linguistic standards and biases

Requirements: This course fulfills the Composition and Rhetoric PhD requirement for Digital Revolution and Convergence Culture.

This course will examine Shakespeare’s relationship to the transformative media of early modern England. Shakespeare was the most popular English author in the English printed book trade from 1592 to 1640, and his works have never been out of print since. He was also the most successful English playwright of the period, and in terms of revivals he is still the most popular playwright in English. What made Shakespeare’s writing so appealing to these two very different media? And how has it continued to appeal to evolving media structures? We will look at his relationships with individual printers, publishers, playing companies, theatrical infrastructure, and the bodies of performers. We will use contemporary media to compensate for the fact that Tallahassee does not possess any first editions of Shakespeare or any professional theatre company specializing in his plays: online digital facsimiles of early editions and recordings of theatrical performances (including photography, silent film, sound film, and evolving conventions for filming live performances). Works studied will include a selection of genres and a selection of those plays most adaptable to contemporary media and theory.

Requirements: This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course pre-1660 or for one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Medieval and Early Modern British Literary and Cultural Studies American Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660); History of Text Technologies; or a Literary Genre (Drama).

Writing well is the best revenge. In this class we’ll read the work of six women poets—Phyllis Wheatley, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Jane Taylor, and Felicia Hemans—who managed to write innovative poetry under hostile social and political circumstances. We’ll also read poems by William Blake, John Keats, and William Wordsworth. This course introduces students to Romantic-era poetry, as well as to critical responses to that poetry.

Students will be encouraged to think about their artistic, critical, practical, and professional methodologies. This is a class about how writers do what they do under difficult circumstances. As a finale to the class (and a preamble to their careers), students will be encouraged to make significant progress on thoughtfully designed and deeply researched writing projects. This is a class about immersing oneself in creative work under less than ideal conditions.

Course objectives:
1) Students will have a rich intellectual and creative experience.
2) Students will become familiar with Romantic-era poetry, with debates in the field of Romantic studies, and with innovative critical approaches to the field.
3) Students will refine their writing and research skills.
4) Students will identify their personal aspirations and tailor their approach to class coursework accordingly.

Requirements: This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course 1660-1900. It also satisfies the concentration requirement in British and Irish Literary and Cultural Studies: 1660-1900; Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; or a Literary Genre (Poetry). This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

“For twenty-five centuries, western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.” Jacques Attali’s demand for a new mode of engaging the world that de-centers sight and attends to the world as an auditory phenomenon is answered by the writers of the modern music novel, which describes everyday realities but also aestheticizes these realities by foregrounding musical processes. Our reading will focus on twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, paying close attention to how writers adapt the methods of musical composition for narrative purposes in their writing. We’ll also consider how the shift from analog to digital technology has transformed the “musicalization of fiction” (Werner Wolf) as well as our lives. Course reading includes: Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, Michael Thelwell’s The Harder They Come, and Odafe Atogun’s Taduno’s Song.

Requirements: This course fulfills the following concentration requirements: Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies (American, British, Irish); a Literary Genre (Fiction).

This course will examine the relationship between modern Anglophone poetry, arts such as painting and sculpture, and the modern museum as an institution, display gallery, source of cultural prestige, and repository of colonial loot. While the idea of ekphrasis, the poetic description of works of art, has its deepest roots in Western culture going back to Homer and Horace, we will explore how this tradition has been shaped by the museum as an institution. We will investigate how poetry from the Romantic era through the modernism to the postcolonial era has both shaped and been shaped by the values of Western museum culture and collecting practices. We will ask how Western museum culture has been challenged by non-Western ideas about artistic production and the social meaning of the arts. We will examine what role poetry may have played in developing ideas around cultural restitution, anticipating the current movement toward the return of objects and artworks to their peoples and places of origin. We will explore how the collection of art and objects by modern art galleries has shaped our understanding of modern poetry's relation to the visual arts when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Along the way, we will address theories of ekphrasis and intermediality between the so-called “sister arts.” We will cover a wide range of poetry from the nineteenth century to the present, including works by John Keats, Lord Byron, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michael Field, W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Grace Nichols, Robin Coste Lewis, Derek Mahon, and Daljit Nagra, among others.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literature and Culture; Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies, and a Literary Genre (Poetry). Depending on one’s final project, the course may, with the appropriate approvals, fulfill the concentration requirement for British Literature 1660-1900.

While British writers pulled back from the experimentalism of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, Irish writers redefined Modernist experimental writing throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries in a reshaped language all their own, Hiberno-English, in what Gilles Deleuze would call “Minor Literature.” This course explores such issues through some of the most exciting literature in English of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Critical Theory and Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies; a Literary Genre (Fiction).

This LIT 5309 course examines popular culture and media in the context of the emergence of mass culture and focuses on the evolution of media in the digital era. We will address popular music, television, film, and new media. We will also consider audience studies and fan culture. Our reading draws on media studies, screen studies, popular music studies, film and new media, popular culture studies, and digital humanities. The course will give you solid grounding in media studies and the chance to do more specialized research in the field. Within media studies, we will discuss topics including multi-platform storytelling, media convergence, serialized narratives on television, interactive digital videos and films, digital technology and popular music, documentary film, and new ideas of media in the digital era. Our focus will be on U.S. media, but we will consider questions of the global circulation of media.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literature and Culture; the History of Text Technologies (reception conceptual area, Film/Television media); Film and Media Studies; a Literary Genre (Film/Television).

This course is structured on a series of book/film pairings involving women travelers and tropes of (im)mobility. Given the historic injunction to domesticity and the prohibition of female mobility (or, in my shorthand, fem(m)obility) is travel for women on their own terms synonymous with empowerment? Under what circumstances is the freedom to travel compromised and/or complicit in class and/or cultural hierarchies that are otherwise oppressive? Under what circumstances, contrariwise, is it a mark of an individual's transnationalist and/or intersectionalist positioning? These are some of the questions that will drive our discussions this semester.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; a Literary Genre (Fiction). It also fulfills the Alterity requirement.