Spring 2022 Courses
Explore our course offerings for the Spring 2021 semester.
ENG
100-Level Courses
ENG 101 - ACADEMIC WRITING AND RESEARCH (4 CREDITS)
Intensive instruction in academic writing and research. Basic principles of rhetoric and strategies for academic inquiry and argument. Instruction and practice in critical reading, including the generative and responsible use of print and electronic sources for academic research. Exploration of literate practices across a range of academic domains, laying the foundation for further writing development in college. Continued attention to grammar and conventions of standard written English. Most sections meet in computer classrooms. Successful completion of ENG 101 requires a grade of C- or better. This course satisfies the Introduction to Writing component of the General Education Program.
Prerequisite: A grade of C- or better in ENG 100 or placement via English department guidelines.
200-level Courses
ENG 207 - STUDIES IN POETRY (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 208 - STUDIES IN FICTION (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 209 - INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE (3 CREDITS)
Dr. William Shaw
Ten of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays will be read during this sixteen-week semester. We will study Shakespeare as both Poet and Dramatist. The task will be to develop a solid critical appreciation of each text (or “script”) by employing a variety of critical approaches to the form and content with an eye towards understanding how these approaches might engage the problems and choices involved in making the text (“script”) viable, comprehensible, relevant to the reader and entertaining to an audience in performance.
ENG 210 - INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 214 - INTRODUCTION TO EDITING (3 CREDITS)
Paul Isom
The purpose of the course is to teach editing skills that will help the student understand the concepts and the culture of editing for print and digital publications. The course will also help the student be a more effective editor in a number of contexts, including editing his or her own work, the work of others, professionally and non-professionally.
Christa Williams Gala
A nuts-and-bolts class for editing different kinds of writing in the workplace--and your own. Master the mechanics of grammar, punctuation and AP Style and implement those skills to make copy more concise and interesting. We'll also cover headline writing and the telltale signs of biased writing, libel and fake news. Learn how to fact-check, edit and rework copy with a discerning eye.
ENG 219 - STUDIES IN GREAT WORKS OF NON-WESTERN LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Meredith G. Fosque
Traditional Non-Western Literature
Readings in traditional literature, in translation, from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, Japan, and the Americas. Students will be introduced to the origins and flourishing of these oldest cultures through the oral and written stories, poems, essays and plays that have become the defining works of these societies. At the same time we will look at the geographical, historical, and philosophical contexts from which these texts arise. (Assignments will include brief Responses, a Presentation, two Papers, Quizzes, Midterm, and Final.)
ENG 222 - LITERATURE OF THE WESTERN WORLD II (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 223 - CONTEMPORARY WORLD LITERATURE I (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 224 - CONTEMPORARY WORLD LITERATURE II (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 232 - LITERATURE AND MEDICINE (3 CREDITS)
Lindsey Catherine Andrews PhD
This is an interdisciplinary course that fits broadly into the category of "Medical Humanities," which considers how humanistic, social science, and arts disciplines interact with the field of medicine. In this class, we will analyze the social aspects of medical knowledge by using literature—memoirs, fiction, and poetry—as a lens through which to understand diagnosis and treatment practices. Throughout the semester, we will examine aesthetic representation and linguistic play as means for unpacking the often hidden assumption that undergird medical knowledge and inform treatment practices. The texts we investigate will help us to understand how medical knowledge is produced, how treatment regimens are determined, and why social biases persist in medical practice. Perhaps most importantly, it will help us think about how and why the language we use around illness, pathology, disability, death and dying matters. The works we will read suggest that literature and art are not useful merely for historical insight, but they also offer crucial alternatives to dominant medical narratives. Although we will look at the long history of medical practice and the emergence of professional medicine, our texts will be drawn primarily from twentieth-century US authors. Authors may include: Carson McCullers, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, Virginia Woolf, Christina Crosby, Gayl Jones, Susanna Kaysen, Frank Bidart, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and William Burroughs.
ENG 248 - SURVEY OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 251 - MAJOR BRITISH WRITERS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 252 - MAJOR AMERICAN WRITERS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 260 - READING LITERATURE AND EXPLORING TEXTUALITY (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 261 - ENGLISH LITERATURE I (3 CREDITS)
Paul Broyles
This course traverses the first thousand years of English literature (from the mid-7th century to 1667), taking in a wide variety of genres and charting major authors and key literary developments. From Beowulf’s reanimation of a fading heroic past to Margaret Cavendish’s dazzling sci-fi vision of another world, we will see how literature makes and remakes the world with its changing needs and dreams as it responds to upheavals like invasion, pandemic, and social transformation. We will examine the formal, aesthetic aspects that allow literary texts to resonate across time and move us even today; we will also place the works in their historical contexts, exploring how literary texts respond to their environments, and how they might help reshape society. As the semester progresses, we will develop vocabulary and technical skills that allow us to describe very precisely how literature does the things it does.
William P Shaw PhD
A survey of the most significant literary works from "Beowulf" through "Paradise Lost," highlighting such prominent authors as Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton and others. The course will chart the complex interactions between literature and the cultural changes that occurred during the more than eight hundred year period covered in this sixteen-week course.
James Robert Knowles
This course is an introduction to English literature of the medieval and early modern periods, covering a 500-year period from the late twelfth century to the late seventeenth century. We will read a selection of major writers and texts from the Anglo-Norman period (Marie de France), the Middle English period (the Gawain poet, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe), the English Renaissance (Shakespeare), and the seventeenth century (Donne, Herbert, Milton). Our approach to reading and discussing these texts will be twofold. First, the aesthetic approach to reading asks us to recognize these poems and plays as works of art with transhistorical value and enduring appeal. Secondly, the historical approach to reading literature asks us to understand the same texts as cultural objects which are deeply embedded in the times, places, and circumstances of their creation. Part of our task will be to recognize how and when our own twenty-first-century moral and aesthetic impulses (what we find beautiful or moving or offensive) diverge from (or converge with) those of the writers we are studying. Over the course of the semester, students will acquire the necessary vocabulary and technical skills needed to analyze literary texts on their own terms and to situate texts within their original cultural contexts. For CHASS majors, it fulfills the Literature I requirement. Fulfills GEP Humanities credit (3 hours).
ENG 262 - ENGLISH LITERATURE II (3 CREDITS)
Anna Gibson
This survey of English literature begins in the late 1700s and brings us to the mid-20th century, taking us on a journey through the poetry, fiction, drama, and prose of major British writers. Along the way we will focus our attention on three literary movements/periods: the Romantic, the Victorian, and the Modern. Studying works of literature in the context of these movements will allow us to listen to the writers’ conversations and disagreements across and within these literary categories and to situate these conversations within the changing landscape of British cultural history. How did literary texts respond to massive social changes such as industrialization, empire and colonialism, a growing population, the rise of cities, shifting gender roles and social classes, and two world wars? And how did these texts shape people’s experiences of such changes? How did writers across this time period offer new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and world? We will ask these questions as we read works by such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, Mary Prince, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Jean Rhys. Assignments will include unit tests, reading responses, free-write quizzes, annotations, a short paper, and a small creative/reflective project.
ENG 265 - AMERICAN LITERATURE I (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 266 - AMERICAN LITERATURE II (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 267 - LGBTQI LITERATURE IN THE U.S. (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 275 - LITERATURE AND WAR (3 CREDITS)
Meredith G. Fosque
We will explore how people speak of, reflect on, and tell stories about war in the context of history and the evolving technology of conflict. This course looks at writings about the experience of war both historically and thematically and does so from multiple perspectives: literary, historical and technological. Issues will include the nature and purpose of war, the role of weaponry in dictating battle, the question of a just war, the theory of deterrence, and an examination of the soldier. Texts include Sun Tzu, The Iliad, Tales of the Heike, Patrick O'Brien’s The Ionian Mission, American, British, Russian, and Japanese views of World Wars I and II, Spycraft, Holmstedt's Band of Sisters, and Shepherd’s R&R. (Assignments will include brief Responses, a Presentation, two Papers, Quizzes, Midterm, and Final.)
ENG 282 - INTRODUCTION TO FILM (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 287 - EXPLORATIONS IN CREATIVE WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 288 - FICTION WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 289 - POETRY WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Experience in writing poetry. Class critiquing of student work and instruction in techniques of poetry.
300-Level Courses
ENG 305 - WOMEN AND LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 316 - INTRODUCTION TO NEWS AND ARTICLE WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Christa Williams Gala
Learn how to write concise stories about events and people with a special focus on the tenets of media writing, including writing leads, establishing story angles, interviewing and research, quote gathering, editing and fact-checking. Students will learn the difference between writing for print and digital platforms and practice through writing their own stories, including articles and profiles. Regular quizzes on AP Style and current events will be given.
Paul Isom
This course is designed to develop and hone skills in fact gathering and writing. The student must demonstrate competence in collecting information and interpreting and communicating that information in news style. Special emphasis is given to news judgment and collecting information from primary and secondary sources; story structure, writing quality, proper grammar and spelling, editing and revising, speed with accuracy and clarity; and responsibility in reporting.
ENG 317 - DESIGNING NETWORKED COMMUNICATIONS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 321 - SURVEY OF RHETORICAL THEORY (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 323 - WRITING IN THE RHETORICAL TRADITIONS
Ronisha Browdy
This course uses ancient African and Greco-Roman rhetorical concepts, theories, principles and practices to offer students opportunities to analyze and compose rhetorical texts. It provides an overview of western cultural rhetorical concepts like rhetorical situation, rhetorical appeals, rhetorical devices, and rhetorical canons. It also provides an introduction to rhetorical traditions from African cultural traditions, like the canons of ancient Egyptian rhetoric and African philosophies, principles, and practices (e.g., nommo and Maat). Through this multi-cultural rhetorical lens, students are tasked to: 1) conduct analyses of written, oral, and visual texts from a variety of contexts, genres, and mediums, 2) compose their own persuasive texts for a variety of audiences and purposes, and 3) interrogate culture and identity as significant parts of rhetoric and communication.
ENG 326 - HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (3 CREDITS)
Erik Thomas
ENG 326 will cover the known history that lies behind the English language, from Indo-
European to the present day. After an introduction to linguistic terminology and writing systems, the course explores Indo-European, some of the controversies surrounding it, and structures of it that are important to understanding later developments. It then discusses Proto-Germanic and Ingvaeonic Germanic, how they relate to Indo-European and Old English, and the cultural setting associated with them. Next, the coverage of Old English includes its linguistic structure, the Anglo-Saxon and Viking invasions, and an introduction to Old English literature. With Middle English, the course examines the impact of the Norman invasion and other factors on the language and how English ultimately prevailed over French, accompanied by a glimpse at Middle English literature. The Modern English period begins with the Great Vowel Shift and covers various innovations in linguistic structure, as well as the standardization of English and the development of American English. Students also analyze a period play from late Middle or early Modern English, affording them a view of both linguistic and literary developments.
ENG 329 - LANGUAGE AND GLOBALIZATION (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 330 - SCREENWRITING (3 CREDITS)
Susan Jenny Emshwiller
Through lectures, film clips, screenplay examples, collaborative brainstorming, in-class written explorations of specific concepts, and sharing of students’ work we will explore the craft and art of screenwriting. Students will learn about structure, characterization, creating dynamic dialogue, subtext, subplots, theme, exposition, etc. utilizing established screenplay formats. The course will involve studying great films and scripts, participating in critiques, and the writing and revising of original material. Over the course, students will write scenes focusing on specific screenwriting elements, and share and critique these pieces. At the end of the semester the students should have a clear understanding of cinematic storytelling techniques and will have a work-in-progress screenplay.
ENG 331 - COMMUNICATION FOR ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (3 CREDITS)
Prerequisite: Junior standing
This course is aimed primarily at students in engineering and other technological fields. Students may take only ONE of the following courses: ENG 331, ENG 332 or ENG 333. In this course, students become familiar with written communication in industrial and technical organizations. Students are encouraged to adapt writing assignments to their own work experience, professional goals, and major fields of study. Instruction covers all phases of the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, and critiquing other people's work). Emphasis is placed on organizing for the needs of technical and management readers; concise, clear expression; and the use of visual aids. Typical assignments include job application letters and resumes, progress reports, proposals, technical instructions, and at least one oral presentation.
ENG 332 - COMMUNICATION FOR BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT (3 CREDITS)
Prerequisite: Junior standing
This course (formerly ENG 221) is aimed primarily at students in business-, administration-, and management-related fields. Students may take only ONE of the following courses: ENG 331, ENG 332 or ENG 333. This course introduces students to the more important forms of writing used in business and public organizations. Students are encouraged to adapt writing assignments to their own work experience, professional goals, and major fields of study. Instruction covers all phases of the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, and critiquing other people's work). Emphasis is placed on organizing for the needs of a variety of readers; concise, clear expression; and the use of visual aids. Students practice writing tasks dealing with the routine problems and details common in a work environment and more specialized writing such as problem analyses and sales and administrative proposals. Each student also gives one or two oral presentations related to the written work.
ENG 333 - COMMUNICATION FOR SCIENCE AND RESEARCH (3 CREDITS)
Prerequisite: Junior standing
This course is aimed primarily at students who plan careers in scientific research. Students may take only ONE of the following courses: ENG 331, ENG 332, or 333. This course introduces students to the more important forms of writing used in scientific and research environments. The course explores the relationship between research and writing in problem formulation, interpretation of results, and support and acceptance of research. Students are encouraged to adapt writing assignments to their own work experience, professional goals, and major fields of study. Instruction covers all phases of the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, and critiquing other people's work). Emphasis is placed on organizing for the needs of a variety of readers; concise, clear expression; and the use of visual aids. Typical assignments include proposals, journal articles, and at least one oral presentation.
ENG 335 - LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT (3 CREDITS)
Erik Thomas
Language Development examines the stages of language acquisition by young children and the mechanisms and hardware that children use to learn language. It begins with models of child language acquisition and an examination of the brain structures involved in language. It then proceeds through different age levels, from birth to early grade school, examining how children learn vocabulary, morphological and syntactic structures, and the phonology of their language at each step. The course concludes with discussion of the early steps to literacy.
ENG 342 - LITERATURE OF SPACE AND PLACE (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 350 - PROFESSIONAL INTERNSHIPS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 361 - STUDIES IN BRITISH LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Dr. John Morillo
Romantic Poetry and the Natural World
A comprehensive introduction to the groundbreaking poetry in Britain from 1785-1825. Emphasis on the representation of the natural world--animals, plants, landscape, environments-- in the works of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, with selected readings from other poets including Charlotte Smith and Felicia Hemans.
ENG 374 - HISTORY OF FILM FROM 1940 (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 376 - SCIENCE FICTION (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 377 - FANTASY (3 CREDITS)
Dr. Brian Blackley
A survey of representative works in the genre of fantasy examining characters from Beowulf to Bilbo Baggins. Primary focus on the heroic quest, including the search for revelation/transformation, the demands and types of leadership, the value of supporting figures (the wise old man, the good mother/goddess, the helper), and the supernatural/magical as key to success in the supreme ordeal. Prior reading of works by J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling recommended (due to reading load) but not required. There will be two tests, multiple quizzes, and an essay.
ENG 378 - WOMEN & FILM (3 CREDITS)
Dr. Marsha Gordon
This course will cover the rich history of women’s participation in the motion picture industry. Focusing on female directors, we will study the ways women have gone about the art and business of filmmaking both within the context of well-established national studio systems as well as independently. We will analyze films directed by women in a number of countries (likely including the U.S., France, Czechoslovakia, Italy, India, and Iran), from cinema’s earliest decades through the present day. In addition to considering the aesthetic and formal elements of women’s films, we will discuss the range of social issues at play within them. Students will read film criticism written by women throughout film history and engage critically with contemporary essays about film history and feminism. Course requirements include weekly screenings and readings, regular class participation, a class project, two papers, and a cumulative final examination.
ENG 381 - CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITING WORKSHOP (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 382 - FILM AND LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 388 - IMMEDIATE FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 389 - INTERMEDIATE POETRY WRITING WORKSHOP (3 CREDITS)
Dorianne Laux
This critique workshop will give special attention to creating new work through exercises gleaned from model poems. Submitted work will be discussed with an eye toward various modes of revision. The course expects students to be familiar with the themes, techniques and elements of poetry writing. We will read single collections of contemporary poems by a number of recommended authors. Students will choose a poem from among the course offerings for memorization and recitation and create a handmade broadside of a chosen poem or create a chapbook. Interviews, essays, audio and video recordings and biographical works may be reviewed as well. The class may also enjoy a visit from a guest poet and attend a campus reading and write a response paper. The course stresses reading as a writer, providing a foundation from which students can pursue further studies in poetry writing.
By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and apply the key complementary components of poetry. They will also be able to outline and explain various styles, structures and modes of contemporary poetry, evaluate their usefulness, and apply this knowledge in both classroom critique and revision. They will be able to identify and explain the uses and effects of metaphor, imagery, rhyme, rhythm and scansion in contemporary poetry as well as their own work and in the work of their classmates. They will design and formulate their own poems using modern and contemporary poems as models.
ENG 393 - STUDIES IN LITERARY GENRE (3 CREDITS)
Sujata S. Mody
Modern Hindi-Urdu Short Story
This course provides a focused treatment of the modern short story in Hindi/Urdu. We will consider the aesthetics and politics of the genre from the early twentieth century onwards. Emphasis will be placed on the development of the modern genre in the colonial and nationalist periods in South Asian literary history; students will also be introduced to some writing from India and Pakistan in the post-Independence era. All readings are available in English translation.
ENG 394 - STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Rebecca Walsh
Studies in World Literature: Modern Literature of and about South Asia
This course examines a range of Indian literary texts (originally written in or translated into English) that are becoming increasingly central in the modernist literary canon, such as the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and the fiction of Mulk Raj Anand, among others. Non-literary course readings and activities will help students read the work of these Indian authors in historical, cultural, religious, and political context. Part of the course will place Indian literary production in a broader global conversation about identity and freedom from oppression by focusing on some writing produced elsewhere (the Caribbean, Ireland, England and in the U.S.) that directly influenced Indian literature and/or was influenced by it. One specific set of global connections we will explore are the forms of exchange, long-distance support, and sometimes misalignment between African American anti-racist writing and Indian anti-colonial and anti-caste writing, a surprisingly rich transnational network that emerged in the 1900s-early 1950s, before the better-known connections between the Civil Rights Movement and Gandhi's strategies of non-violent resistance of the mid-1950s to 1960s. Readings will focus mainly on the first half of the twentieth century, though the last part of the course may include some contemporary literature as well.
ENG 395 - STUDIES IN RHETORIC AND DIGITAL MEDIA (3 CREDITS)
Aaron Dial
Seeing Sound
Jerry Wexler of Billboard is credited for coining the term “rhythm and blues” in 1948. This term replaced “race music” in light of changing racial sensitivities during the postwar era. However, the naming of this expansive and often contradictory musical genre presents a point of rupture in which this class hopes to intervene. That is, in the wake of Jazz’s dwindling popularity, rhythm & blues became thought of as the de-facto “sounds of Blackness.” Furthermore, these innovations of sound stem as much from technical innovation and labor as any assumptions of innate talent. With this in mind, a question emerges: how can we make sense of a musical genre that is defined through nativist assertions of Black talent when digital technologies, a cosmopolitan sense of culture and musicianship, and the Othering and consumptive regimes of popular music are constantly redefining its contours? To this end, this class hopes to situate students with the critical tools where genre interrogation becomes more important than a reading of any particular aural text. In other words, within this class, we will perform an archaeology where unearthing micro-histories and untold or overlooked narratives glimpse not only the defining elements of R&B but the ways in which classification and identification from within and without the genre mediate our understanding of the past, our performance of the present, and our imaginations of the future.
To be clear, this class is not a survey of the genre’s sounds through time, though some of that work will happen. Moreover, this class does not make any authoritative claims as to what R&B is or is not. Instead, it is my sincere hope that students are empowered to ask better and different questions of this specific genre, popular music writ large, and their own tastes through a triangulation of reading relevant theoretical literature, listening to varied and diverse sounds, and scholarly practice that emphasizes student making and critical engagement much more than resuscitation.
400-Level Courses
ENG 410 - STUDIES IN GENDER AND GENRE (3 CREDITS)
Barbara Bennett
Gender and Genre--Contemporary Southern Women Novelists. We will explore a variety of authors including Lee Smith, Dorothy Allison, and Jesmyn Ward. Race, Class, and Gender will be at the heart of our discussions.
ENG 411 - RHETORICAL CRITICISM (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 416 - ADVANCED NEWS AND ARTICLE WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Paul Isom
The purpose of the course is to prepare the student for advanced reporting in print/broadcast media. Topics can include in-depth coverage of local, state, and national government; criminal justice and the courts; business and economics; science and health matters; coverage of education, science, religion and sports. This course will seek to enhance both the student’s knowledge of these topics and the student’s ability to successfully report on them.
ENG 417 - EDITORIAL AND OPINION WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Christa Gala
Learn the art of supporting your opinion while anticipating the points on the opposing side. We'll delve into discovering different opinion columnists from both right- and left-leaning publications (and how those labels are established) before tackling our own opinion pieces, including political columns, personal essays and blogs on topics of your choosing. We'll also learn to fact-check, research for sound evidence and argue both sides of an issue. A decent knowledge of grammar and AP Style is assumed.
ENG 422 - WRITING THEORY AND THE WRITING PROCESS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 425 - ANALYSIS OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Daun Daemon
Course focuses on analyzing scientific and technical texts and presentations, including their creation, the ethical dimensions of communication within scientific and technological communities, the impacts and interactions of scientific and technological texts within broader contexts. Includes field research in scientific or technological arenas.
ENG 426 - ANALYZING STYLE (3 CREDITS)
David M Rieder
Introduction to the analysis of style in print-based texts, hypertexts, and visual culture. The semester will be divided among three analytical approaches. First, we begin with Richard Lanham's textbook, Analyzing Prose, which introduces you to the important roles that style plays in prose writing. This first section will offer you a grounding in the rhetorical canon of style. Next, we'll study the changing role of style in the electronic form of hypertext writing. We'll focus our attention on Shelley Jackson's hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl. Finally, we'll look up and off the page/screen to analyze (postmodern) American culture, which is heavily influenced by communicational issues related to style.
In addition to two 6-7 page essays (and other shorter writing assignments), you will learn how to write a hypertextual essay in StorySpace, the same software program that Jackson used to write her hypertext novel.
ENG 430 - ADVANCED SCREENWRITING (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 451 - CHAUCER (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 462 - 18TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 486 - SHAKESPEARE, THE EARLIER PLAYS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 488 - ADVANCED FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 489 - ADVANCED POETRY WRITING WORKSHOP (3 CREDITS)
Dorianne Laux
This critique workshop will give special attention to creating new work through exercises gleaned from model poems. Submitted work will be discussed with an eye toward various modes of revision. The course expects students to be familiar with the themes, techniques and elements of poetry writing. We will read single collections of contemporary poems by a number of recommended authors. Students will choose a poem from among the course offerings for memorization and recitation and create a handmade broadside of a chosen poem or create a chapbook. Interviews, essays, audio and video recordings and biographical works may be reviewed as well. The class may also enjoy a visit from a guest poet and attend a campus reading and write a response paper. The course stresses reading as a writer, providing a foundation from which students can pursue further studies in poetry writing.
By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and apply the key complementary components of poetry. They will also be able to outline and explain various styles, structures and modes of contemporary poetry, evaluate their usefulness, and apply this knowledge in both classroom critique and revision. They will be able to identify and explain the uses and effects of metaphor, imagery, rhyme, rhythm and scansion in contemporary poetry as well as their own work and in the work of their classmates. They will design and formulate their own poems using modern and contemporary poems as models.
ENG 490 - STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Professor Jim Knowles
Arthurian Literature
The full title of this course is “The Green Knight, the Fisher King, and the Fairy Queen: Arthurian Legend and its Afterlives.” Stories about the legendary King Arthur and his knights began to circulate in Britain soon after the departure of the Roman legions from the island in the fifth century. Since then, these stories and their offshoots have continued to captivate audiences across temporal, national, and linguistic boundaries for well over a thousand years. This course will explore a subset of the most interesting and influential medieval and early modern versions of the Arthurian legends and their derivations. Selections may include: Chretien de Troyes, Lancelot and Perceval; Marie de France, Lanval and Chevrefoil; Heldris of Cornwall, Le Roman de Silence; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; and parts of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Students in the course will fill out the syllabus through end-of-term presentations on modern and contemporary reimaginings of Arthurian material (in fiction, poetry, film, serial TV, comics, etc). All readings in English or in English translation. For English majors, this course can fulfill the British requirement in the core, the pre-1800 co-requisite, or a literature elective.
ENG 491 - HONORS IN ENGLISH (3 CREDITS)
Barbara Bennett
NC Contemporary Novelists
North Carolina Writers--North Carolina is a rich environment for writers, especially in development and support of authors. In this class we will look at a number of authors associated with North Carolina such as Jill McCorkle, Randall Kenan, and Monique Truong.
ENG 492 - SPECIAL TOPICS IN FILM STYLES AND GENRES (3 CREDITS)
Andrew Johnston
Rendering Worlds: Digital Media, Animation & F/X
This course will explore the history, theory, and aesthetics of contemporary digital media technology, with an emphasis on animation, games, and special effects. Recent cinema has become more reliant on special effects and though these have been utilized since the medium's origins, the development and use of CGI algorithms have changed film's contours along with media like video games and animation. We will examine the historical creation and rise of CGI, rendering engines, and other technologies that wind through a broader media landscape, paying attention to creative applications, expressive potentialities, and the interaction of spectacle and narrative that frame and create worlds. The class will engage with a variety of screen-based media, such as contemporary games and consoles, Star Wars in the 1970s to its contemporary incarnations, and home video play of Atari 2400 games in the 1970s to Google's DeepMind AI playing them today.
ENG 494 - SPECIAL TOPICS IN LINGUISTICS (3 CREDITS)
Robin Dodsworth
ENG 494:001
Sociolinguists recognize linguistic variables as elements in the structure of every language. Quantitative analysis of linguistic variables aims to uncover the relationship between linguistic variation and two kinds of influencing factors. The first kind has to do with elements of the grammar such as sound structures, the lexicon, and clause type. The second kind has to do with social structures, especially durable economic disparity (social class), sex and gender, age, and ethnicity. This course covers theory and methods in variationist sociolinguistics as they relate to both kinds. We begin with what has come to be known as "first-wave" research, which began during the 1960s and focused on linguistic differences between speakers in different demographic categories within what were called speech communities. We then proceed into more research about the relationship between language and social constructs, including work that explores the relationship between linguistic variation and the social identities and personae that speakers construct. Throughout the course, we emphasize and practice the analysis of natural language data, including data from my ongoing study of language change in Raleigh.
Coming into the course, you will need basic familiarity with phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics. You will not need any background in quantitative analysis or statistics.
Robin Dodsworth
ENG 494:003
This course is an introduction to the concepts and quantitative methods that are
currently central to the analysis of sociolinguistic variation. It is not a statistics course per se,
and in fact the challenge inherent to this course is to develop a good understanding of certain
quantitative methods without delving deeply into the math underlying most of those methods.
Coming into the course, you don’t need any mathematical knowledge beyond high school-level
algebra.
We will spend the first part of the course learning to use the R programming language. As
our textbook says in the Preface, "These days, it’s safe to say that R is the de facto standard in
the language sciences." We will focus on basic data handling, simple computation, and
graphing. If you already have some experience with R, you’ll probably still learn some things
you didn’t know during this first part of the course, and I’ll be happy to point you to some more
advanced reading about R programming upon request.
The next part of the course is devoted to developing an intuitive understanding of some of
the building blocks of quantitative analysis, including distributions, descriptive statistics,
probability, sampling, and variance. We then briefly look at t-tests but quickly move on to the
most common statistical test in variationist sociolinguistics, multiple regression. We will work
toward developing a very solid practical understanding of regression, first linear and then
logistic regression. We will practice extensively using data available to all NC State linguists,
including the Raleigh data. You are also most welcome to bring in your own quantitative data
for us to work on together.
ENG 495 - STUDIES IN LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Dr. Jason Miller
Langston Hughes: From Popular Culture to the Civil Rights Movement
Langston Hughes (1901-1967) absorbed and shaped popular culture noting that his greatest source of inspiration was listening to (or reading) the news. In shaping both Harlem’s values and the social turmoil of the 1960s, this seminar reassess this writer whose career merely begins with his role as a leading figure of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s.
Accessing numerous primary sources, this course examines Hughes’s use of popular blues and jazz music to shape the rhythms and cadence of his innovative poetry. Despite (or perhaps because of?) their blues influence, many of Hughes’s poems read like rehearsals for social change. We will then continue on through his dramatic works, track his influence on Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), and move into his weekly newspaper columns written for the Chicago Defender from 1942-62. Final projects for this course might explore such questions as “What role did communism play in the life of this writer who was forced to testify on television before Joseph McCarthy in 1953 at the height of the Red Scare”? Of special note, this seminar begins and ends with extended exploration into the previously unidentified role Hughes’s poetry played in the Civil Rights Movement and its direct inspiration on the nation’s most visible dreamer— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
GRAD
500-Level Classes
ENG 511 - THEORY AND RESEARCH IN COMPOSITION (3 CREDITS)
Chris Anson
This course provides an introduction to foundational theories and research in the field of composition studies, and is a prerequisite for graduate students who are assigned to teach ENG 101 in the First-Year Writing Program. During the semester, we focus on the dynamic and sometimes competing nature of theories and research, keeping in mind the historical and political contexts in which they emerged. The goal of the course is to examine assumptions underlying current theory and research and to explore implications for the teaching and practice of writing. Conducted as a seminar, the course is designed to help new members of the field to:
- familiarize themselves with the range of voices and theoretical assumptions underlying the teaching of writing;
- understand various histories of the field of composition studies;
- become acquainted with major journals and resources in the field of composition, sufficient for conducting independent explorations of research and theory on topics of interest;
- develop a reading knowledge of research methods in composition, sufficient for interpreting and evaluating the results of published research in the field;
- apply knowledge of the field’s history, theory, and research in analyzing new contexts, developing new pedagogical insights, and raising new questions for research.
ENG 518 - PUBLICATION MANAGEMENT FOR TECHNICAL COMMUNICATORS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 522 - WRITING IN NONACADEMIC SETTINGS (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 523 - LANGUAGE VARIATION RESEARCH SEMINAR (3 CREDITS)
Robin Dodsworth
Sociolinguists recognize linguistic variables as elements in the structure of every language. Quantitative analysis of linguistic variables aims to uncover the relationship between linguistic variation and two kinds of influencing factors. The first kind has to do with elements of the grammar such as sound structures, the lexicon, and clause type. The second kind has to do with social structures, especially durable economic disparity (social class), sex and gender, age, and ethnicity. This course covers theory and methods in variationist sociolinguistics as they relate to both kinds. We begin with what has come to be known as "first-wave" research, which began during the 1960s and focused on linguistic differences between speakers in different demographic categories within what were called speech communities. We then proceed into more research about the relationship between language and social constructs, including work that explores the relationship between linguistic variation and the social identities and personae that speakers construct. Throughout the course, we emphasize and practice the analysis of natural language data, including data from my ongoing study of language change in Raleigh.
Coming into the course, you will need basic familiarity with phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics. You will not need any background in quantitative analysis or statistics.
ENG 530 - 17TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Margaret Simon
This course introduces you to the poets, politicians, historians, and cultural figures of seventeenth-century England. We'll read the work of well-known writers like Ben Jonson and John Donne, but we'll also spend a lot of time encountering authors you've likely never heard of, particularly women writers and non-elite individuals writing for a growing print market. We'll especially consider the production of English literature within a global context. How, for example, can we think of the many English advancements in the seventeenth (more women writers, scientific advancement, travel and exploration, and social legislation), with all of their positive connotations, during a period that saw the brutal establishment of England's settler plantations and the trade in enslaved peoples? How were English scientific advancements, and other intellectual developments, often informed by unacknowledged non-Western scholarship? We'll consider how we can best interpret the signal works of an era and culture that often suppressed the voices of anyone outside of a male English elite. With trips to the library's Special Collections and work with texts in their original print and manuscript forms, we will consider what we can learn about both well-known and marginalized voices through archival research and non-canonical literature. This class will include traditional research papers, as well as a multi-modal final project.
ENG 533 - BILINGUALISM AND LANGUAGE CONTACT (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 534 - QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS (3 CREDITS)
Robin Dodsworth
This course is an introduction to the concepts and quantitative methods that are
currently central to the analysis of sociolinguistic variation. It is not a statistics course per se,
and in fact the challenge inherent to this course is to develop a good understanding of certain
quantitative methods without delving deeply into the math underlying most of those methods.
Coming into the course, you don’t need any mathematical knowledge beyond high school-level
algebra.
We will spend the first part of the course learning to use the R programming language. As
our textbook says in the Preface, "These days, it’s safe to say that R is the de facto standard in
the language sciences." We will focus on basic data handling, simple computation, and
graphing. If you already have some experience with R, you’ll probably still learn some things
you didn’t know during this first part of the course, and I’ll be happy to point you to some more
advanced reading about R programming upon request.
The next part of the course is devoted to developing an intuitive understanding of some of
the building blocks of quantitative analysis, including distributions, descriptive statistics,
probability, sampling, and variance. We then briefly look at t-tests but quickly move on to the
most common statistical test in variationist sociolinguistics, multiple regression. We will work
toward developing a very solid practical understanding of regression, first linear and then
logistic regression. We will practice extensively using data available to all NC State linguists,
including the Raleigh data. You are also most welcome to bring in your own quantitative data
for us to work on together.
ENG 549 - MODERN AFRICAN LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Dr. Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi
This course will focus on twentieth and twenty first century African narratives by male and female authors. We will address “the empire writing back to the centre,” paying close attention to discourses of empire (colonialism, nationalism, and postcolonialism). We will explore issues of language, subjectivity, hybridity; gender and sexual politics, and Africanfuturism. We will further examine how (Third World) feminisms, postcolonial theory, transnationalism and globalization are imbricated in critical readings of modern African literature and contemporary postcolonial cultural studies. This course fulfils the needs of students in American/British Lit and in World Lit. It also fulfils the need for any concentration as an elective.
ENG 554 - CONTEMPORARY RHETORICAL THEORY (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 560 - BRITISH VICTORIAN PERIOD (3 CREDITS)
Paul Fyfe
Explore how writers represented the tumultuous Victorian era (1837-1901), spanning responses to industrialization, political reform, religion, colonialism, class, gender, and race at home and abroad. The course covers an array of literary forms and seeks to include perspectives from within the British Isles as well as from across the British empire. Authors include Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Seacole, Wilkie Collins, Toru Dutt, Olive Schreiner, and others.
ENG 582 - STUDIES IN LITERATURE (3 CREDITS)
Dr. Jason Miller
ENG 582:001
Langston Hughes: From Popular Culture to the Civil Rights Movement
Langston Hughes (1901-1967) consistently noted that his greatest source of inspiration was listening to (or reading) the news. In shaping both Harlem’s values and the social turmoil of the 1960s, this seminar reassess this writer whose career merely begins with his role as a leading poet of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s.
After engaging with extensive works from Hughes’s seventeen-volume oeuvre, this course directs students into the archival realm of primary sources which includes his mentoring of NC’s own jazz singer Nina Simone. Music shaped the rhythms and cadence of a new innovative genre created solely by Hughes that David Chintz has rightly labeled “Blues Poetry.” Through regular student presentations, we will examine Hughes’s dramatic works, track his influence on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and move into his weekly newspaper columns written for the Chicago Defender from 1942-62. Final papers for this course might explore such questions as How does literature serve as a rehearsal for social change? or What role did communism play in the life of this writer who was forced to testify on television before Joseph McCarthy in 1953 at the height of the Red Scare? Of special note, this seminar begins and ends with extended exploration into the newly identified role Hughes’s poetry played in the Civil Rights Movement and its direct inspiration on the nation’s most visible dreamer— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rebecca Walsh
ENG 582:002
Studies in Literature: Race, Gender, and Transnationalism in American Literature
This course responds in part to the urgency of current anti-racist protest movements by taking as its focus constructions of race and gender in post-1900 American literature in the context of nation/transnationalism. We will attend to some of the foundational concepts in critical race theory (with roots in legal scholarship), and current directions in discussions of race, gender, comparative ethnic studies, and nation/globality. By considering these readings in relation to the literature on tap, we will explore the potential for the literature of the course to extend our understanding of systems of race, gender, nation, and power, and the intersectional nature of identity. The main emphasis of the course will focus on the first half of the twentieth century but the last section of the course will push beyond this. Readings will include some familiar and some less well-known literary texts, and will also draw from critical race theory and conceptions of racial capitalism, theories of intersectionality, feminist locational theory, and theories of nation and transnationalism.
Dr. Leila May
ENG 582:003
The Female Gothic
In this course we will query the formal and thematic features that constitute Gothic literature, and, more specifically, the literary mode that has been referred to as the Female Gothic. How is this mode manifested differently at various historical moments? In what ways does the focus shift, and how different are the concerns, when a Gothic work is authored by a woman as opposed to a man? What happens, for example, when the woman who is "buried alive" speaks? How does the nature of the "horror" shift? We will explore the extent to which the Female Gothic underwrites or resists the dominant ideological positions of a given moment (in other words, the extent to which it is either a conservative or a subversive--or at least transgressive--literary form). Our readings will commence with two Edgar Allan Poe stories in order to help us set up a kind of classic male Gothic paradigm against which to read the Female Gothic, which will first be represented by Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. After a study of numerous examples of the Female Gothic in England and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will end the semester with Toni Morrison's extraordinary, densely-textured work Beloved, which will allow us to examine what happens to the Female Gothic when seen through the prism of race.
ENG 583 - STUDIES IN RHETORIC AND WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Stacey Pigg
Technical Communication and Learning Technologies
The global COVID-19 pandemic refocused our attention in new ways to the fragility of our learning technologies and infrastructures. It raised questions such as: How can we support students' learning, given unequal access to technologies, wealth, and social support? How should we plan for learning in the future, given what we know about the respective challenges of face-to-face, blended, and online learning? Interdisciplinary questions like these are being debated globally, as the Educational Technology industry attempts to adapt to what has largely been understood as a crisis in the efficacy of learning technologies. In this course, we will bring theories and methodologies from technical communication to bear on these questions and reflect on how expertise in technical communication might contribute to the design and evaluation of learning and educational technologies. This course will: 1) offer an introduction to the emerging field of learning experience design (LXD); 2) offer students both practice and critical reflection on research methods for understanding learning experiences (e.g., learning analytics research, contextual inquiry); and 3) hone critical skills for understanding the challenges and promise of technologically-mediated learning including issues such as data privacy and surveillance, learner access, and learner mobility.
ENG 585 - STUDIES IN FILM (3 CREDITS)
Dr. Marsha Gordon
American Film + Media 1920s/2020s
What can we learn about American film and media history by exploring echoes across a century? This course will actually begin in 1919/2019 to incorporate the twinned pandemic events that ushered in these respective centuries and will proceed through a study of emerging technologies and forms, as well as changes in distribution and exhibition. We will explore questions of race and gender, class, immigration, and national politics as these matters manifest in film and media of their respective eras. We will engage with comparative genre studies (including horror, comedy, social issue, and melodrama) and consider the way news reached/s audiences in moving image form.
Although we will use films as the spine of the course, we will also be looking at other media and reading primary materials (reviews, opinion pieces, trade periodicals) alongside secondary writing by film historians. Students will be expected to write a series of short reflection and archival research papers, participate regularly in class discussions, and produce a final project that is suited to their disciplinary and scholarly interests. This final project can range from a traditional academic research paper, to a video essay, to a multi-media installation, to a web-based project (the nature of the project will be decided between each student and the professor). At the final exam each student will present their final projects to the class in the form of an abbreviated reading/performance, conference-style paper, or screening, depending upon the nature of the final project.
ENG 588 - FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 589 - POETRY WRITING WORKSHOP (3 CREDITS)
Dorianne Laux
This critique workshop will focus on works in progress, giving special attention to creating new work through exercises gleaned from model poems. Submitted work will be discussed with an eye toward various modes of revision. We will read essays on poetry as a way to begin thinking about our own work. Interviews, essays, audio and video recordings and biographical works may be reviewed as well. The class may also enjoy a visit from a guest poet. The course stresses reading as a writer. For graduate students only.
ENG 590 - STUDIES IN CREATIVE WRITING (3 CREDITS)
Eduardo Corral
Twenty-First Century Literary Texts
In this seminar, graduate students will read texts published in the last twenty years. Class discussions will revolve around emerging twenty-first literary trends and compositional strategies. Students will explore how "new" literary trends and linguistic and structural approaches are rooted in modern and postmodern literature. Students will compose creative work that borrows the structure and/ or linguistic approach of a text read in class.
ENG 592 - SPECIAL TOPICS IN FILM STYLES AND GENRES (3 CREDITS)
Dr. Andrew Johnston
Rendering Worlds: Digital Media, Animation & F/X
This course will explore the history, theory, and aesthetics of contemporary digital media technology, with an emphasis on animation, games, and special effects. Recent cinema has become more reliant on special effects and though these have been utilized since the medium's origins, the development and use of CGI algorithms have changed film's contours along with media like video games and animation. We will examine the historical creation and rise of CGI, rendering engines, and other technologies that wind through a broader media landscape, paying attention to creative applications, expressive potentialities, and the interaction of spectacle and narrative that frame and create worlds. The class will engage with a variety of screen-based media, such as contemporary games and consoles, Star Wars in the 1970s to its contemporary incarnations, and home video play of Atari 2400 games in the 1970s to Google's DeepMind AI playing them today.
600-Level Courses
ENG 636 - DIRECTED READINGS
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 675 - PROJECTS IN TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION (3 CREDITS)
Huiling Ding
Students working on a capstone project will be guided through a review of research and design methodologies, data gathering and analysis, and processes of drafting and reviewing research- and design-based projects. It runs as student-centered seminars, with discussion focusing on the progress and problems of researching, designing, developing, and defending a larger project, and on helping each other work within established deadlines and different fields. A typical capstone project is expected to provide students with an opportunity to gain deeper insight into the field and to acquire greater ability to work in the profession of technical communication.
ENG 676 - MASTER'S PROJECT IN ENGLISH (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 685 - MASTER'S SUPERVISED TEACHING (3 CREDITS)
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
ENG 695 - MASTER'S THESIS RESEARCH
Visit the NC State University online course catalog for the general course description for this course.
700-Level Courses
ENG 798 - SPECIAL TOPICS IN ENGLISH STUDIES (3 CREDITS)
Dr. Marsha Gordon
American Film + Media 1920s/2020s
What can we learn about American film and media history by exploring echoes across a century? This course will actually begin in 1919/2019 to incorporate the twinned pandemic events that ushered in these respective centuries and will proceed through a study of emerging technologies and forms, as well as changes in distribution and exhibition. We will explore questions of race and gender, class, immigration, and national politics as these matters manifest in film and media of their respective eras. We will engage with comparative genre studies (including horror, comedy, social issue, and melodrama) and consider the way news reached/s audiences in moving image form.
Although we will use films as the spine of the course, we will also be looking at other media and reading primary materials (reviews, opinion pieces, trade periodicals) alongside secondary writing by film historians. Students will be expected to write a series of short reflection and archival research papers, participate regularly in class discussions, and produce a final project that is suited to their disciplinary and scholarly interests. This final project can range from a traditional academic research paper, to a video essay, to a multi-media installation, to a web-based project (the nature of the project will be decided between each student and the professor). At the final exam each student will present their final projects to the class in the form of an abbreviated reading/performance, conference-style paper, or screening, depending upon the nature of the final project.