As scholars, teachers, and students read, write, research, and experiment in digital environments at ever increasing rates, the field of English studies—including both literary and rhetorical studies—has transformed and expanded considerably. What has resulted (within and outside of English) is the “Digital Humanities,” a transdisciplinary, diverse field with roots from the post-World War II era to the present. The Digital Humanities (DH) has posed significant challenges to English studies, raising new intellectual problems, disciplinary paradigms, and well-financed institutional projects. This course serves as an introduction to DH: what it is, how it shapes research methods, expression, and epistemology in English Studies, and how you might begin to connect your particular research interests to the aims and practices of DH. At the same time, this course is a brief introduction to rhetorical studies—another field that is thriving in the English academic job market. We will consider: in what ways are DH questions, methods, representations, and tools rhetorical? Digital technologies and tools, such as data visualizations, mark-up languages, and interface design, shape our interaction with scholarship and research; these technologies and tools rely on assumptions about, and even transform, our objects of study. The rhetorical impact of digital tools and DH advancements has also shaped approaches to pedagogy in the contemporary university through emphasis on collaborative, student-centered, and digital learning environments.

The goal of this course is to introduce Graduate Teaching assistants to some of the major pedagogical conversations in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies that should guide, inflect, and invigorate their work as a teacher of writing in English 1. Over the course of the semester, we will explore a variety of topics that have concerned scholars of composition pedagogy—ranging from inquiry to citizenship to digital composing to multilingualism. The project of the seminar is not only for us to listen to what scholars have had to say about these topics but also to engage these conversations ourselves, reflecting on how and why certain scholarship might resonate with our own pedagogical investments as well as with the programmatic goals of the writing program at the University of Vermont.

Feminism has long been invested in the politics of personal experience. As Catherine MacKinnon wrote, "To say that the personal is political means that gender as a division of power is discoverable and verifiable through women's intimate experience…[T]o feminism, the personal is epistemologically the political, and its epistemology is its politics." This course takes up MacKinnon’s claim, thinking capaciously about how the maxim “the personal is political” has propelled feminist theory, politics, and practice. We will read a wide variety of critical and creative texts to consider how women have leveraged personal experience to forward theoretical principles and political projects, but we will also quickly move on to explore how broader understandings of experience, such as history, archives, and public memory, have invigorated feminist thinking and real-world activist work. The goal throughout the course will be for us to think expansively about how feminists have used the past (theirs and others) to reshape the world in which they live. The course culminates in a major research paper, annotated bibliography, and presentation.

Contemporary writers in digital spaces combine text, image, sound, video, and code to communicate more publicly and more quickly than ever before. This course is an in-depth survey of these reading and writing practices, focusing on theoretical innovations in rhetorical, new media, and technology studies, as well as on digital composing practice. You will compose in a small variety of media, from alphabetic essays to websites to video remixes. However, you need no prior experience with digital composing to succeed in this class. Think of our class as a “collaboratory,” wherein you experiment with new digital tools, learning from and teaching your peers. This is a rhetoric, rather than literature, course, so the readings and forms of analysis may differ from other English classes you might have taken. Instead of book-length fiction, our readings will primarily be article-length theory that explores how language, audio-video, code, and the Internet create meaning, connection, and change. But we will also spend a good deal of time with creative digital objects, such as remixes, interactive e-literature, and visualizations, which you will both analyze and make. This course, then, combines theory and practice, the abstract and particular, thinking and doing.

In "Feminist and queer theories of pasts and futures," this interdisciplinary seminar examines how feminist and queer writers, scholars, and activists have theorized, leveraged, and complicated experience and history in various, often divergent ways in the name of politics and action.

This course focuses on contemporary women writers in ways that interrogate both terms, “women” and “writers.” We will read and interact with women’s work in a variety of genres and media, including short stories, poetry, comics and collage, documentary film, electronic literature, creative nonfiction, and theory. Our task will be to examine how and why these composers chose and adapted these forms to investigate issues of gender, race, relationships, embodied experience, and cultural life in the 21st century. We will become, in a sense, historicists of our own moment: asking what we can come to know about now through the language, experiences, and design of these "women" "writers."

In the dynamic medium of the web, writers “weave and orchestrate” language, sound, image, video, and code to produce the immersive and binge-worthy artifacts we all consume daily. In this project-based course, you will learn to compose creatively and effectively in multiple modes, making website portfolios, online magazine features, inquiry-based serial podcasts, and video remixes. No prior experience with digital technologies is necessary!

This mid-level course for English majors focuses on feminist theories that critique and experiment with language, modes of persuasion, and meaning making. We consider how feminist scholars, writers, and activists have challenged traditional language practices and proposed innovative alternatives for thinking about communication and composing. Our readings include Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Adrienne Rich, Dorothy Allison, Joan Wallach Scott, and Sojourner Truth, among others. Writing assignments encourage critical and creative invention with opportunities for substantial revision.

The “essay” is difficult to define, generally understood as a short piece of nonfiction prose. Varying in purpose and style, essays may be crafted to inform, to analyze, to explore, or to argue. But regardless of the form and aim of an essay, many experiences, phenomena, and feelings challenge our ability to communicate them clearly or easily. This is one reason why essay writing requires artfulness: because expressing difficult subjects that are hard to articulate in language takes imagination and profound care. In this course, you will study such writing in published essays that examine subjects such as identity, physical pain, and even what reading and writing are “good for” in trying times such as ours. We will read and imitate celebrated writers who invented creative forms of the essay as they tried to make their subjects legible and real to us. Focusing on the “aims, methods, and materials” (Harris) of a variety of writers, we will inhabit their “projects” and “approaches” in order to write creative and experimental essays that attempt to make our subjects equally compelling. Joseph Harris’s framework in Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts will be our guide throughout the semester. Along the way, we will study and practice both academic and creative nonfiction writing that should serve you in a variety of future pursuits and studies.

This first-year writing course for students outside the CAS focuses on teaching the tools and habits of mind to craft written expression for a variety of audiences. With an enduring focus on process, students are introduced to strategies for inventing and organizing their ideas, and given opportunities for frequent and substantial revision. Students write, revise, and revise again with increasing attention to the effects of their rhetorical choices and participate in regular peer review workshops to practice reading, speaking about, and revising their writing. Assignments range from creative non-fiction to specialist research essays to magazine-style informative feature stories.

This mid-level course, part of the Public and Professional Writing certificate program, examines the theory and practice of writing to various publics. I ask students to select, research, and compose a single activist issue of their choice throughout the semester, and assign writing in a variety of public genres such as feature stories, newsletters, blogs, and fact sheets. The course explores the impact of rhetorical contexts on writing, persuasive strategies for addressing different audiences, and the ethics of writing for the public(s).

This mid-level course is part of the Public and Professional writing certificate program and explores the methods of inquiry, analysis, and composition of written communication in professional settings. I design sequences of reading and writing assignments to encourage students to examine such writing’s specialized use of language, conventions, formats, premises, motives, purposes, and ethical considerations. By preparing letters, resumes, proposals, reports, and other genres, students examine how and why “professional” communication functions.

In this first-year composition course, cross-listed with Women’s Studies, I designed sequences of alphabetic and multimodal assignments that help students develop an understanding of how they and others use writing to interpret and share experience, affect behavior, and position themselves in a world organized by gender. Toward these goals, students read gender theory, feminist blogs, gay liberation radio show archives, and graphic novels; they also compose alphabetic, audio, and video essays.