Graduate Courses

This course will examine the long shadow cast by the Great Irish Famine (1847-1852) over nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish literature. Taking a materialist approach to the complex network of land ownership that preceded and presaged the catastrophe, this course will trace the many ways in which the Famine was not only predicted in Irish literary output from Maria Edgeworth and through to Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker (Dracula being among the first and most striking absentee landlords in English literature), but also organized and carefully administered by colonial and planter land-holding policies at the time. This course reads the Gothic in Ireland as an early but sustained rumination on an unsustainable system of land use and proprietorship, guided by a critical outlook that I am currently elaborating in my own study of this material and which I gather under the rubric of “Fictions of Depopulation.” Essentially, I examine the ways in which many of these stories feature a dwindling cast of characters and the ossification of the social and economic relations that conjoin them as evidence of what their authors see as the impending crisis of economic and political ruin for both the country and its catholic underclass. The gothic was, genuinely, a living, breathing, social reality in mid-century Ireland. Lastly, this course will feature a brief examination of the post-Famine gothic in early twentieth-century Irish literature as a way to think through the lingering historical effects of this cataclysmic period in Irish public, political, and economic life.

With the transhistorical, trans-geographical, multiple iterations of the phenomenon of the dandy figure in black cultures, can fashion be read as decolonial practice? And what is the significance of styling and dress to black masculinities, especially in the context of oppression and the debilitating effects of global capital? Is black dandyism just the legacy of colonialism and imperial hegemony or can it be linked to the ongoing and unfinished project of reconceptualizing the humanity of the black male subject? How might black men refashion their threadbare masculinities under racial capitalism, by reframing the black body as a site of pleasure rather than one of labour? Moreover, how might black dandyism signify the role of black aesthetics as elaborating a politics of black joy? These questions and others will provide the critical energy to animate our thinking about art and aesthetics, race, fashion, racial capitalism and gender construction. Using black dandy archives from short stories, novels, films, photography, the visual arts, music videos, magazines, fashion books from Barbados, Canada, the Congo, Nigeria, Jamaica, South Africa,Trinidad, the UK and the USA, this course will focus on the relationship between styling, black male subjectivity and black joy. In light of Zakiyyah Jackson’s advocacy for “alternative conceptions of being…produced by blackened people” (3), the course will consider the extent to which black aesthetics, especially fashion, can provide an epistemology for rethinking black male humanity and can trace a politics of black joy. We will give priority to ideas from decolonial practice, intersectionality, fashion studies, critical race studies, affect studies, studies on black (post)humanism and black masculinities.

Readings from essays and texts may include, but are not limited to:

Benjamin, Jody. The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850.
Buckridge, Steeve O. The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760-1890.
Cosgrove, Stuart. “The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare.” 
Ellis, Nadia. “Out and Bad: Toward a Queer Performance Hermeneutic in Jamaican Dancehall.” hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-black World 
Lewis, Shantrelle P. Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style. 
Majors, Richard, and Janet Mancini Billson. Cool Pose: The Dilemma of Black Manhood in America.
Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanism” 
McMillan, Michael. "Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys: Migration, Grooming, and Dandyism" 
Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. (Central Text)
Neptune, Harvey R. “From Barefooted Men to Saga Boys: Gender, Class, and Clothes in Occupied Trinidad”  
Nwafor, Okechuckwu. Aso Ebi: Dress, Fashion, Visual Culture, and Urban Cosmopolitanism in West Africa
Wynter, Sylvia. “Rethinking 'Aesthetics': Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice”

Cinematic representations of the prison coincide with the birth of the medium and have been pivotal to shaping public perceptions of prisons and punishment. This seminar explores how prisons have been represented and contested within cinema, how cultures of punishment have shaped cinematic spectatorship, and what it might mean to create abolitionist films about carceral power. We will survey films across forms, genres, and periods, from early cinema and film noir to avant-garde film, social documentary, and sexploitation. While the course will emphasize North American films, we will also study examples from global contexts, including Palestine, Angola, France, and the United Kingdom. Throughout, film screenings will be paired with readings in film theory and critical theories of prison abolition.

When Renee “Cash” Blackbear comes through the door into a darkened barroom at the opening of Marcie R. Rendon’s 2017 novel Murder on the Red River, it is clear that this story, set in the Red River Valley between North Dakota and Minnesota in the 1970s, begins with a refusal of stereotypes and a reversal of conventional popular representations in twentieth-century settler colonial genre fiction. An accomplished pool player and sugar truck driver in 1970s North Dakota, Cash is an independent young Ojibwe woman who appears as kind of cowboy, a social justice crime fighter, an anti-Nancy Drew in her beat-up Ranchero, and a hardboiled detective who works in this first novel in the Cash Blackbear series to solve the murder of a man from the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. Margaret Stoecklein has drawn attention to the ways in which Indigenous detective fiction “convey[s] the legacies of settler colonial criminality. From theft of natural resources, to sexual violence against women, to theft of lands,” Indigenous detective fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is focused on crimes that “arise from the colonialist power structure,” its writers emphasizing those criminal legacies and “conscious in their choices to transform the detective fiction formula.” In this course, we will read a handful of novels by Indigenous women writers and featuring Indigenous women detectives alongside critical works and works that consider past and present contexts for these narratives. 

Book bans are back in the Canadian news in the wake of the Alberta Provincial government’s attempt in July 2025 to order school boards to “remove” books with what it refers to as explicit images of sexual acts. Although the Alberta government stepped back its ban to centre on only “visual” depictions after the Edmonton public school board listed more than 200 books slated for banning, the Premier of Alberta insisted that four comics, three of them graphic memoirs, are examples of what are not appropriate material in Alberta schools. Three of these four comics centre on 2SLGBTQ+ themes and and all are books published in the United States, which right-wing groups in the United States have also targeted in censorship campaigns. 

In this course, we investigate the long history of censorship and book banning in Canada as a way to make sense of this latest controversy, and to understand how ideas about censorship have developed and are deployed in Canada and the United States. Given the lack of scholarship in Canadian literature on censorship and the book market, this course also aims to provide an opportunity to discuss theory and case studies about what censorship is and what it does, so that more research can be published about censorship in the Canadian context. 

Topics include censorship theory, ideology and history in Canada and the United States; censorship and biopower; comics in Canada and the War Measures Act; the Little Sisters court case and the Canadian border; the history of Quebec public libraries and religious censorship;  the Butler decision and pornography; queer theory and censorship; censorship and the idea of protecting children; writers, teachers and librarians who fight censorship; censorship and neo-colonialism.

Long before William Wordsworth “wandered lonely as a cloud,” writers in seventeenth-century England renewed religious, philosophical, and political debates about the dangers and opportunities of solitude. In literature these blossomed into the poetry of retirement during the Civil Wars, the vogue of the Country House poem, a flourishing beatus ille tradition, and self-styled solitary geniuses like Margaret Cavendish and John Milton. In this graduate seminar we will trace the origins of such conversations and their contributions to literary history. The constellation of associated motifs—otio (leisure), retirement, loneliness, melancholy—furnish both major and minor works of literature in the seventeenth century and set the stage for their inheritors in the Romantic era. By considering the development of solitude as a concept and loneliness as a feeling during the 1600s, we can thus interrogate recent critical claims suggesting that isolation as subjective experience takes shape only in the nineteenth century.

Selected works may include: prose readings from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and treatises by writers like John Evelyn, George Mackenzie, and John Milton; lyric poetry by Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell, and others; Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies and World’s Olio; and Paradise Lost and the 1645 Poems of Mr John Milton.

Why, in a digital age, does the reading of books and the existence of a ‘bookish culture’ still matter? 

This course explores the material and ideological aspects of contemporary book and reading cultures, focussing on the social location and cultural function of book reading in the 21st century. Drawing upon contemporary case studies from Canada, the United States, Australia and the UK, we will also consider how and why ‘ordinary’ people read books, how the contemporary mass media and social media frame reading as a form of popular culture and why these practices matter – politically, socially and culturally.  

Students will be encouraged to develop their own research projects within and beyond the four themed units: Reading As A Social Practice; Reading as Popular Culture; Producing Readers; Readers and Digital Media. Within each unit we will examine a selection of theories, artefacts and practices that will allow us to investigate the meanings and formations that contemporary book cultures assume. Our texts and case studies will range across media, genres and nation-states.  We will also read a selection of historical analyses by book historians and theoretical texts derived from cultural studies’ work on readers and about popular culture.  Through hands-on activities (e.g. an in-class reading group) and mini-research tasks (e.g. observing readers in libraries and bookshops) we will ‘test’ both theories of and popular ideas about reading and book readers as well as interrogating our own reading practices.

Texts will include:
A Giller or GG short-listed or Canada Reads book available in paperback from 2025/6 prize lists

Theory and Criticism (indicative – to be revised):
Pierre Bourdieu ‘The Forms of Capital.’ (1986)
Extracts from: John Frow Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. (1995)
Extracts from: Janice Radway A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. (1997)
Extracts from: The cluster “Reading with Algorithms” in Post45 (December 2023)
Extracts from: Maria K. Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, Lesley Willards, editors (2024) special issue on Fandom and Platforms. Transformative Works and Culture vol. 42 (March 2024)

Online media will include: 
Podcasts (e.g. Ariel Bissett)
Fanfiction (e.g. on Archive of Our Own and Wattpad)
Booktoks, Bookstagram and BookTube

This course investigates the curious rise of neo-Victorian culture in the twenty-first century. From the BBC’s Sherlock television series to novels like Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet and our relentless fascination with vampires, an increasing range of media—from fiction to television to video games—returns to Victorian culture in order to negotiate contemporary issues surrounding gender, technology, imperialism, sexuality, capitalism, and race. Where once postmodernism was considered the dominant aesthetic response to the disaggregation of society under the pressures of late-twentieth century capitalism, this course explores the potential of the neovictorian form for ideology critique in the present. This course will introduce students to the field of Neo-Victorian studies, and its major cultural and political coordinates. As we consider a range of neovictorian cultural objects, we will also work with theories of adaptation, of remediation, of cultural appropriation, of postcolonialism, and of narrative form. 

Primary Material (Text)
Gyles Brandeth, Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol 
Charlotte Brönte, Jane Eyre 
Joy DeLyria and Sean Michael Robinson, Down in the Hole: The unWired World of H.B. Ogden. 
Arthur Conan Doyle “A Scandal in Bohemia” 
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
China Mieville “London’s Overthrow”
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell 
Tom Phillips, A Humument 
Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet

Primary Material (Audio/Visual)
Fukunaga, Cary (Dir.) Jane Eyre
Sam Liu (Dir.) Batman: Gotham by Gaslight
Paul McGuigan (Dir.) BBC Sherlock “A Scandal in Belgravia”
Brian Percival (Dir.) North and South Episodes 1 & 2
Guy Ritchie (Dir.), Sherlock Holmes

This course introduces students to research in Writing Studies with a focus on writing in the disciplines and in writing centres. WRS 603 will help students identify different stages in the writing processes, become familiar with different tutoring models, become aware of diversity and equity, recognize underlying ethical issues regarding tutoring, and articulate their own tutoring philosophy. Students who successfully complete WRS 603 will become eligible to apply to become tutors at the Writing Services and/or tutors in WRS 102 courses.

For some time now, one has no longer been sure what the term refusal means.  

–Lacan, Seminar XI

What, if anything, is useful about saying “no”? In this seminar, we will address this question by undertaking an intensive study of the politics, ethics, aesthetics, and limits of refusal. Inquiring into the practice of refusal in its multiple forms and avatars, we will read across theoretical, psychoanalytic, and political writings, also engaging a bit of experimental media along the way. In so doing, we’ll ask: What possibilities open up—and shut down—when we refuse to compromise, cooperate, or show up to the negotiating table? Is refusal an inherently conservative project in its resistance to transformation (think: the refusal to change or be educated, to “improve” or “develop,” to move or move on), or do such refusals in fact obstruct efforts to conserve symbolic and political-economic order? When someone refuses the law, does this suggest that they follow another order of law—let’s call it the law of refusal—and, if this is the case, how should we account for such a law's jurisdiction and one’s responsibility, right, or duty to it? Is saying “no” necessarily a volitional and sovereign act, and where do (or don’t) the Other and sovereignty’s others figure in the scene of the refusal, that is, in what we might dub refusal's other scene? What’s the relation between “refuse” as verb or activity and “refuse” as noun (waste, skubalon, lumpen, shit, that which is worthless or useless)? Indeed, should refusal even be considered an activity or, alternatively, does it mark the suspension of activity?

These queries will lead us to explore some canonical forms of refusal, as well as refusal’s less canonical and perhaps less recognizable forms. But thinking with these various forms—from strikes to Shabbat, from intifada and intractability to inoperativity and indifference, from decadence and divestment to destitution—will simultaneously require us to tarry with a host of contradictory problematics that the question of refusal also brings forth. These include negativity and affirmation, destruction and creation, law and lawlessness, means and ends, reproduction/ resurgence/tradition/trace and event, fidelity and betrayal, sacrifice and enjoyment, self-defence and self-abolition. Taking up these and related issues, participants will collectively examine and evaluate how refusal has been articulated, often in quite distinct ways, across several prominent critical traditions, including incongruous strains of marxism and black study, psychoanalysis, political theology, queer theory, anticolonial thought, and poetics.

In preparation for the first seminar, participants are asked to screen Lays lahum wujud [They Do Not Exist] (dir. Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974, Lebanon, 25 min.) and read both Maurice Blanchot’s short manifesto “Refusal” (1958) and excerpts from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (2024).

Readings may include: Agamben, Creation and Anarchy; Badiou, Saint Paul; Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”; Bradley, Anteaesthetics; Derrida, “Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know)”; Du Bois, John Brown, “The General Strike”; Edelman, Bad Education; Gana, Melancholy Acts; Han, Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition; Hartman, “Redressing the Pained Body,” “The Belly of the World”; Invisible Committee, To Our Friends; Lacan, Seminar VII; Marriott, “On Decadence,” “On Revolutionary Suicide”; McNulty, “The Event of the Letter”; Moten, “Erotics of Fugitivity,” (with Harney) All Incomplete; Omar, “Bleeding Forms”; Sacks, Poeticality; Said, “In Defense of Lost Causes”; Shariʿati, “Shahadat”; Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus; Taubes, Political Theology of Paul; Terada, Metaracial; Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal”; Weinbaum, “Gendering the General Strike”

More films have been produced outside of the Hollywood studio system than within it, but these films have not garnered the same level of critical attention because they fall within the domain of the non-theatrical. The term ‘nontheatrical’ describes films screened in spaces outside of the traditional movie house--in classrooms, civic centres, museums, churches, prisons, clubs, factories, union halls, amongst others. The term non-theatrical refers to seemingly innumerable genres and modes of production distinct from Hollywood including, amongst others, industrial and sponsored films, home movies, amateur films, educational, medical and science films, social guidance films, religious films, domestic science films, as well as travelogues and government films. From the 1910s to the 1980s tens of thousands of non-theatrical films were produced. In this seminar we will dip into the vast world of primarily North American non-theatrical film production to explore prominent technologies, infrastructures, organizations, and filmmakers that were key to non-theatrical film.

This graduate seminar will explore the issue of energy futurity—as a problem, as an opening, and on both counts as a matter of and for culture. Using the distinction between firmative and affirmative speculation offered by the theory collective uncertain commons as a point of entry for our inquiries, we will undertake a three-part study: a preliminary consideration of key concepts and debates in the Energy Humanities with which to frame our work; then an analysis of key modes of firmative speculation from the recent past and present that foreclose energy futurity by sedimenting transition-without-transformation; and, lastly and most extensively, an analysis of exemplary instances of affirmative speculation in contemporary society and culture that work to unnerve the givenness of energy futures-to-come. Key terms for (and so theoretical perspectives on) our endeavor will include: aesthetics; affect; materiality; temporality; mediation; capital. A prime aim in this course is to consider what happens—to imagine what could become possible—when taking up energy as focus yet also frame: as at once object and analytic.

The syllabus will combine readings in critical and cultural theory with selected aesthetic materials drawn from fiction, film, photography, and art. While these aesthetic materials will speak most directly and self-evidently to specific topics on the syllabus, they will also serve to articulate points of connection across many topics—whether by putting concepts, issues, and debates from earlier readings in new light, or by anticipating concerns in readings to come, or both. Engaging with this range of theoretical and aesthetic materials will allow us to consider the ways in which and the ends to which speculative energy futurity might inflect or even reorient the practice of critical and cultural inquiry today. 

Selected potential materials may include:

• After Oil Collective Solarities (Minnesota 2022)
• After Oil Collective The Renewable Normal (Nebraska 2026)
• China Miéville “Covehithe” in Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories (Pan Macmillan 2015)
• Climaginaries Network Carbon Ruins exhibits
• Deepak Unnikrishnan Temporary People (Restless 2017)
• Dominic Boyer Blob
• Edward Burtynsky Oil
• E.E.R.K. Collective Energy Emergency Repair Kit (Fordham 2024)
• Elizabeth LaPensée Thunderbird Strike (2016)
• Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, Patricia Yaeger, eds Fueling Culture (Fordham 2017)
• Mishka Henner Fields
• Shell energy scenarios
• Tsēmā Igharas Black Gold
• uncertain commons Speculate This! (Duke 2013)
• Warren Cariou Petrographs

This course gives students the opportunity to engage an urgent question for literary studies, with five Shakespeare plays as our starting point: in the face of an ever-increasing global ecological crisis, how does literature help us to understand the causes of and imagine responses to the rapidly growing threat to humanity’s existence that scientists have predicted and warned about for decades? And how do they help us think about issues of ecological crisis beyond climate emergency? Written on the brink of modernity, Shakespeare’s work reflects developments in Shakespeare’s lifetime that have played a role in shaping the concatenating crises imperilling humanity and myriad other species now. At the same time, Shakespeare’s work powerfully exemplifies the immense imaginative capacity that literary writers bring to the problems that humanity has created for itself and the planet’s non-human beings. How does the Shakespearean drama help us think beyond crisis to the kind of socialities that sustain just relations between human persons and across human and non-human nature?

We will study A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Lear, The Tempest, and Hamlet in relation to select secondary readings that help us situate the Shakespearean drama and ecological crisis in relation to historical and contemporary thinking.

Our secondary readings will begin with Jason Moore’s “Capitalocene, Part 1: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis” and will include selections (in alphabetical order by surname) from:

• Jorge Bergolio (Pope Francis), Laudato Si’ (2015)
• Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, The Long Heat (2025)
• Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso Books, 2006)
• Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021)
• Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Duke UP, 2019)
• Genevieve Guenther, The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024)
• Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020)
  Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Press, 2013)
• George Monbiot, Regenesis: How to Feed the World Without Devouring the Planet (Penguin, 2022)
• Friederike Otto, Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality (2025)
• David Wallace Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)
• Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions (Punctum Press, 2023), eds. Howe, Diamanti, Moore
• Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperColllins, 2020)

This course takes up a few central “statements” about the “self” (individual subject) as a construct—of narrative fiction (i.e. the first-person voice/perspective typical of the bildungsroman), of scientific debate (evolutionary, legal, and psychological investigation), of the emergent self-help industry—in order to investigate how the self was conceptualized (written, positioned, dissected) and subjected (to juridical, state, satirical, etc. apparatuses and practices, but also made into a semi-autonomous being, an agential subject) in Victorian Britain. The idea of the self serves only as a potential touchstone for our approach to these disparate texts; students are encouraged to develop and refine their own interpretive interests, and to have Villette read for the start of class.  

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)—Broadview 
Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (1859)—Oxford World’s Classics
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)—Broadview 
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)—Broadview
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869)—provided (edition TBA)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)—provided (edition TBA)

Theories of blackness are about ideas and descriptions of the black body, and they are often anchored in the rhetoric of race. Scientifically suspect, and largely unverifiable, these theories point to a sense of presence, another human presence that is different, often an undesired presence. It is the presence of this body in time and space that is at the heart of the debates. Tied to the descriptions of this presence are inherited human qualities connected to an unchangeable biology. As part of the larger discourse of the make-up of human bodies, blackness is biologically determined, unchangeable. Since the late 16th century, these imagined characteristics were enabled and perpetuated by European history of bodies and given pseudo-scientific validations. These ideas soon found their way into literary expressions, becoming a significant part of Europe’s literary classics in the 8th and 19th centuries.  In the texts that emerged from this tradition, to be black is framed as a burden to the black body itself and to humanity. It is this presence and the burden it carried with it that influenced the poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” by Rudyard Kipling, which became the race anthem of Europe long after the European “voyage of discovery.”  As a political and cultural practice, the literary production (and consumption) of the cultures of black people and places became important to the history of nationalism and identity formation in Europe, especially when nations emerged as recognizable spaces and discursive categories in the 18 and 19th centuries. Providing the growing readership in Europe with stories about this human other became an essential part of this literary tradition. Narrative voyeurism around the incompleteness of this body became routine in Europe’s mode of articulating the meaning of this humanity that was different. Nowhere is this literary tradition better articulated than in Europe’s African romance novels with writers such as Sir Henry Ridder Haggard and Edgar Wallace making incredible careers built on this category of writing. As Edward Said puts it, the image of the other became consistent with itself in Europe’s popular imagining about Africa and Africans and remained unchallenged well in the 20th century. This course tracks the intellectual history of this image of anthropological Africa in Europe, analyzing its textual construction and discursive validation in a selection of the African Romance novel genre. Films based on these texts will also be studied in this class. Students who take this class will be introduced to the complex connection between the rise of European nationalism, especially British nationalism, race discourse and classism that defined the colonial project in British West Africa. Special attention will be given to the ways in which abstract racial categories are deployed in the so-called African romance novels. Making the pitch that the modern Anglophone African writer emerged in the background of this history, the course will study the content and literary strategies of resistance enabled in a second group of selected texts from postcolonial African writing. This course is designed to fulfil two primary goals: (1,) to introduce students to a different way of reading the African romance novel, and (2) to interrogate the politics and philosophical reasons behind African writers’ responses to the content and ideological goals of the African Romance novel. Theoretical help towards the reading of the two groups of texts will come from synthesizing ideas of literary and political theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Aime Cesare and Edward Said. 

Literary Texts
Edgar Wallace, Sanders of the River
Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman (Norton Edition)
Athol Fugard, “Master Harold” … and the Boys
JM Coetzee, Disgrace

Critical Texts (Print)
Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Elleke Boehme, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Harry Garuba. “Race in Africa: Four Epigraphs and a Commentary.” PMLA, 5, 2008: pp, 1640-1648.
Arif Dirlik, “Race Talk, Race and Contemporary Racism,” PMLA, 5, 2008, pp: 1363-1379.
Timothy Lockley, “Race and Slavery"-The University Warrick Project.

The language of human rights is instantly recognizable, providing a way to make powerful claims for recognition and for justice. According to scholars like historian Lynn Hunt and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, literature is key to the narration and dissemination of those human rights. While the novel has been singled out as a particularly effective genre that has enabled sympathy towards others, this course examines a broader range of narratives that raise awareness of human rights. This course asks, what kind of human rights feelings can these narratives – literary, fictional, autobiographical, visual, comic – cultivate? Who is the subject of human rights and how is that political subject constructed at the level of genre, form, structure, plot, and content? We will begin by examining the discourse of justice and rights through the aspirational 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We will investigate how subsequent literary and visual narratives take up the language of the UDHR and open readers up to the plights of others. We will explore how they navigate the representational challenges of communicating violence in postcolonial and settler states, as well as the risks of empathy in relation to asymmetric structures of power. Through a selection of literature, testimony, and life writing, as well as visual media, we will explore the representation and mediation of human rights as they pertain to the figure of the child, the posthuman, the refugee, the asylum-seeker, indigenous peoples, prisoners of the Global War on Terror, victims of the Holocaust, as well as those living in active war zones.

In WRS 601, we explore questions like:

• Why is writing hard for many people?
• What is good writing? Who gets to decide what is good writing?
• How should we best teach writing in school and workplace settings?
• How should we provide feedback to writers and assess writing?
• How do technologies like ChatGPT impact our writing?
• What does a healthy writing process look like?
• How can we use writing to improve learning?

WRS 601 provides a solid grounding in the current research and practices in Writing Studies and prepares students to coach and teach writing. We take an interdisciplinary approach and address writing issues in different disciplines and contexts, like education and the workplace. An important learning objective of the course is to help students develop healthier writing processes and to improve their writing skills. This course has an experiential learning option that allows students to practice the theory they learn in the classroom if they are interested.

Students who complete WRS 601 may be eligible to apply to become Graduate Teaching Assistants for WRS 102 (Writing in the Disciplines) and to become instructors of WRS 101 (Exploring Writing).