Graduate Courses

From the chains of slavery, to the horrors of segregation, to ongoing systemic racism, violence has been an ever-present force that has shaped the black experience. Taking its intellectual cue from the work of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Toni Morrison, Kara Walker, and others, this course seeks to fathom contemporary black women’s aesthetic, narrative, and cultural production in relation to the imaginative archive of slavery and recurring instants of violence, rupture, and resistance marking the lives of black female subjects. A heuristic reading of a diasporic history in relation to atemporality and the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism will guide our scholarly work along with a consideration of the lingering consequences of slavery on the existential condition of blackness (and a gendered presence) in a New World setting.  

The following primary works constitute the basis of our investigation:  Toni Morrison, A Mercy; Nnedi Okorafor, Binti; Nalo Hopkinson, Browngirl in the Ring; Gayl Jones, Corregidora; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills; Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose; Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light; and Octavia Butler, Fledgling.

 Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for the following Areas of Concentration: African-American Literary and Cultural Studies; Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies; and a Literary Genre (Fiction). This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

At the core of this rigorous, traditional workshop is the premise that any student work under discussion could be better. In a great majority of fiction handed in to a graduate workshop, the thing that most needs to get better is the storytelling and structure. To attack that, this class will take a nuts-and-bolts approach to mastering the fundamentals of what a story is and how it's put together.

The default mode here is that students will be expected to workshop, revise, and resubmit two short stories (though you could workshop three). If you wish to workshop any portion of a novel, we will meet one-on-one to custom-tailor a workshop strategy for that book (rather than treating it the way we would a short story).

“A writer,” said Saul Bellow, “is a reader moved to emulation.” “I know of no good, ignorant writers,” wrote Richard Wilbur. “Great stories and novels,” said Charles Baxter, “are permission-givers.” In this course, you’ll develop your writing in tandem with your reading: eradicating ignorance, receiving permission, being moved to artful emulation. The strangeness of individual talent won’t be blunted by such things. Quite the contrary.

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

Linus Pauling said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas,” and the same is true for poems. Our classroom will be your garden. It’ll be your laboratory. Our classroom will be the little convenience store on the truck route that never closes as well as the high-volume, deep-discount retail poetry outlet that ships more units than anyone else in the tri-state area. This will be a bits-and-kits based course in which you’ll keep a daily journal of verbal “bits” you’ll move around until they become “kits” you’ll make into poems. You’ll map your poetic genealogy in our classroom, work with partners, lead discussions. We’ll teach, care for, and learn from one another unceasingly. Hit the gym! This may be the busiest class you’ve ever taken as well as one of the most fun (it always is).

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

This course is intended to develop the nascent literary artist’s deep sense of the sources and nature of the creative process. This will be done by an examination of the aesthetic philosophy voiced in From Where You Dream and by the subsequent creation of literary work for the workshop. A few serious cautions: there will be no peer criticism in class, and craft and technique, as such, will be discussed only incidentally and ad hoc, being instead relegated to the place where it belongs: the compost of the imagination. Neither will work be examined beyond the first 700 words or so until those are fully flighted.

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

According to nonfiction guru Lee Gutkind: “The word 'creative' refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To put it another way, creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.”

In this workshop, students will read various nonfiction writers and produce stories—true stories—with the goal of publishing them. We will discuss how you pitch to newspapers, journals, magazines, online sites, etc., as well as how to write a nonfiction book proposal.

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

Theories of Composition focuses on the history of the field and the theories that inform composition studies in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The course will present an overview of these concerns by moving students through representative selections in the field’s scholarship (namely, many of the selections that the FSU Rhetoric & Composition Program requires for the doctoral qualifying exam in this area). The course will consider three central questions: What has the scholarship revealed about college-level writing as a practice and the composing of written artifacts more generally? What do the various theories seeking to explain the process and impact of the teaching of writing mean for the various stake-holders acknowledged in the scholarship? What direction is the field taking as a result of its history and current issues facing it?

Course requirements include reading scholarly texts; engaging in synchronous and asynchronous group discussions; leading discussions on class reading selections; completing a take-home midterm exam; and composing a final project that demonstrates awareness of the reaches of composition theory.

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

Eerie Media: Automata, Amphibia, and Aliens explores collisions and convergences between exciting media-theoretical and eco-critical frameworks for understanding the form factors of modern and contemporary literature, culture, film, and thought. The problem of media that doesn’t mediate–or, does eldritch things for being and becoming, for producing and consuming texts and other artifacts and archives, for oikos and for bios–lies at the submedial heart of our seminar. There will be one presentation and one seminar paper.

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

This is a course about the history of ideas. It asks us to think about the frameworks we use to talk about and analyze literary and cultural texts. It is therefore deeply engaged in the politics of interpretive frameworks. We will carefully read critical texts that were ground-breaking in their day and try to consider what they can offer to our understanding of our own contemporary world and scholarly practices. Most of these texts are known for their stylistic and conceptual difficulty. In parsing the ideas that currently circulate in the scholarly debates of our discipline, we will concentrate on some of the most compelling threads of inquiry in our field.

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

This course will introduce you to the issue of literary and cultural studies—its institutional history and contemporary situation, its changing protocols and problematics in a professional discipline called English, and, perhaps most of all, its auto-critique, its attempt to ground and unground its practices and purpose, to interrogate its own conditions of possibility and social function. As such, this will be less an “introduction to theory” and more an “introduction to the theory of theory.” We’ll read and discuss a selection of texts attempting to answer the question: what is literary and cultural studies anyway? Why and how do we do it? On the other hand, to make this course as useful as possible for your own work and to encourage collaborative learning, I’m also hoping to break the class up into small theory cells based on a field or topic of critical inquiry that matters to you and have you work on mini-assignments and projects that will help you gain an understanding of that field or topic’s scholarship in practice. 

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

This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with concepts and theories at the intersections of race and/or ethnicity, class, gender, ability, and sexual orientation. Students will survey texts that recognize and interrogate difference as a critical point for understanding and engaging rhetoric and composition studies. Potential sites of inquiry for this course include feminist rhetorics and theories, global African and African Diasporic traditions and theories, critical race theory, and decolonial theories and methodologies. A major objective of this course is to interrogate “difference” as it functions rhetorically within various historical, social, and political contexts. Prompting questions include: What do we mean by difference (versus similarities/commonalities)? How does difference function within a given situation? How is it utilized/employed? What values, beliefs, assumptions, etc. are associated with difference? How is difference impacted by positionality and power? What implications does difference have on how we understand, teach, learn, and study rhetoric and composition? Students will be encouraged to engage historical and contemporary texts on theories of difference as well as invited to locate and contribute relevant material to the course inspired by their own personal, research, and teaching interests.

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

This course examines the theories and methodologies of public rhetorics and community writing. The class focuses on how writing functions as a tool for engagement, advocacy, and social change. Community writing refers to rhetorical practices that emerge from collaborations between university scholars and community partners, addressing locally identified issues through reciprocal and justice-oriented relationships. Public rhetorics considers how writing circulates in public spaces, influences civic discourse, and mobilizes action in response to contemporary social and political challenges.

We will explore current trends in community-engaged research and pedagogy, drawing from the CCCC Statement on Community-Engaged Scholarship and Pedagogy in Rhetoric and Composition, alongside key texts that helped establish the field. Readings will include scholarship on community-engaged research methods, community literacy, and writing in public spheres. In addition to studying contemporary research, students will examine foundational works that shaped the field, tracing the intellectual and activist traditions that inform community writing and public rhetorics.

This course is designed to support students in developing research and teaching approaches that position writing as a means of coalition-building, institutional transformation, and public engagement. Whether your focus is community literacy, digital media, activist writing, or writing-program administration, you will gain insight into how public rhetorics and community writing shape the field of rhetoric and composition and inform the practice of engaged scholarship.

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

This course focuses on animals and animality in early modern English literature. Reading an array of texts, including drama and poetry as well as selections from contemporary popular works such as animal husbandry manuals, cookbooks, natural histories, emblems, almanacs, broadside ballads, and more, we’ll consider how early modern humans were “thinking with animals” and how they lived among and experienced the creaturely world. We will also think about animality and otherness. What does literature reveal about how early modern people differentiated between human and other-than-human lives - about what it means to be human or animal? How is animality mapped onto human bodies and to what effect? Conversely, are animals humanized or anthropomorphized? How does animality converge with other categories of difference or disqualification? How do animal tropes shape early modern literature? To what extent is “the animal” a literary and dramatic invention? (To what extent is “the human”?)

Our practice will be grounded in careful close reading of primary texts, but accompanying readings in early modern cultural contexts as well as secondary and theoretical work in early modern animal studies, posthumanism, disability studies, and more will provide foundations and frameworks for approaching our texts.

Course assignments may include regular discussion posts, presentations, and leading discussion. For the culminating project, participants will identify a call for papers or site of publication and produce a piece of original scholarship which may be presented as a conference paper or developed into a publishable article.

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

Through works by authors including Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats, this course aims to foster an appreciation both for Romantic poetry and for the theoretical complexities of lyric. Romanticism is often seen as synonymous with the lyric tradition, yet what constitutes a “lyric” is a thorny question. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have struggled with how best to understand the complex relationships between poet, poetic speaker, and audience(s) that lyric invites. Balancing our focus between foundational work on lyric theory with cutting-edge work in the field published within the past few years, this course strives to help students develop analytical skills for reading poetic form. Throughout the semester, students will also improve skills necessary for success in the profession, including crafting abstracts, refining one’s prose style, and locating appropriate venues for publication

Requirements: This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course 1660-1900. It also satisfies the coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: British and Irish Literary and Cultural Studies: 1660-1900; a Literary Genre (Poetry).

Nineteenth-century literature was transformed by an explosion of periodicals, amplifying new forms and ambitions in nineteenth-century novels. This course examines changes in nineteenth-century British print and publication technology and practice. We will trace the circulation of texts and literary cultures within a growing network of periodical outlets, mapping the legal and illegal recirculation of fragments and wholes. We’ll examine how novelists serialized three-volume (triple-decker) novels for the book-buying public and for subscribers of Mudie’s circulating library, shipped throughout Britain and its colonies, changing readers’ expectations of scale and place. While we’ll also look at the “chips,” “squibs,” letters, and other tidbits that filled up periodical pages, we’ll focus on a variety of Victorian serial fictions, including the changing role of illustration in different editions and publication formats. Each week, we’ll analyse a case study of a specific periodical; we’ll also be reading one novel serially: Trollope’s 1875 The Way We Live Now, a novel that began as a critique of literary culture and evolved into a powerful indictment of political and financial corruption. 

Other authors include Charles Dickens, whose best known editorial post was at Household Words and All the Year Round; William Makepeace Thackeray, who edited Punch and The Cornhill Magazine; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who wrote at all levels of the Victorian publication ecology and edited Belgravia and Temple Bar; and Frederick Douglass, whose autobiography was serialized in Victorian periodicals and who republished Dickens’ Bleak House in Frederick Douglass’s Paper. Additional serials include Simmonds’ Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany, The Penny Magazine and Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge book series, and penny dreadfuls.

Runs of these journals are available online and FSU owns print copies of many of them. We’ll examine economic, political, and technological changes as well as developments in authorial status, professionalization, copyright, and literary style, from the penny dreadfuls to the shilling monthlies, touching on Gothic romance, sensation fiction, satire, domestic realism, and “high” realism. 

Requirements: This course fulfills the general literature requirement for a course in 1660-1900. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: British and Irish Literary and Cultural Studies: 1660-1900; History of Text Technologies; a Literary Genre (Fiction).

This course will feature an intensive study of prosody and poetic form, focusing both on canonical and contemporary poetry. Participants will become fluent with the basic vocabulary of prosody, master scansion, and write their own original poems in any number of received forms. Apart from the nuts and bolts of form, we will also consider the evolution of prosody and form in more recent examples, exploring the ways contemporary poets employ traditional forms to both revise, re-shape, and extend their respective traditions. 

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: Literary Genre (Poetry).

An intensive study of Geoffrey Chaucer’s great story collection, The Canterbury Tales (in the original Middle English), in light of the literary-historical and intellectual interests of late-medieval England. Our primary goal is to explore Chaucer’s artistic goals and strategies while becoming familiar with the textual and cultural conditions that shaped the early circulation of Chaucer’s text.

Our concerns will include: the status of the Tales as a (mostly poetic) story collection that bears both a closural framework and a brazenly open textuality; the poet's use and abuse of his sources and influences in designing individual tales; medieval theories of authorship as they inform Chaucer's various authorial and narratorial guises; and the generic multivalence of the tales and of Chaucer's artistic design. We will reflect on how the Tales, which Chaucer himself largely denounced—tongue quite possibly in cheek—in his “Retractions,” contribute to Chaucer's status as the first canonical English vernacular author. We will read nearly all of the Tales as well as a healthy cross-section of 20th- and 21st-century criticism on them, paying attention to the work’s (highly problematic) overall structure as well as the dynamic of its internal components. Instead of advocating for any one critical or methodological position, this course promotes a balanced, integrated view of various influential scholarly perspectives, so that seminar participants will emerge as versatile and analytically sentient readers of Chaucer’s most important narrative poetry. No prior experience with Middle English is expected, although learning to read and pronounce Middle English is a formal expectation of the course and will involve a collective effort

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

The subordination of Africa in health humanities discourse, in studies of literature and medicine more specifically, does not just raise important questions for that interdisciplinary field. It also tacitly devalues African people’s health and wellbeing and under-leverages the twentieth- through twenty-first-century African novel in which African characters’ physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual life and wellness are made more visible, complex, and significant. There are 34 essays in, for instance, the MLA-published volume Teaching Literature and Medicine (2000). None of them centers on anything Africa. Nor does the compilation’s index attenuate the diminution. In this seminar, we will confront and change that erasure. We will focus attention on modern African fiction’s decades-long engagements with matters of health, care, and medicine. Reflecting in formal, thematic, and aesthetic ways the realities of African people’s existence, particularly their persistent straddling of traditional and modern ways of knowing, being, diagnosing and healing in the world, African novels depict characters dealing with various and sometimes “undiagnosed” health challenges, including: alcoholism, anxiety, paranoia, depression, stuttering, poverty, rage, madness, suicide/suicidal ideation, infertility, miscarriage, eating disorder, viral infections, malnutrition, malaria, abiku/ogbanje (sickle cell) crisis, ibeji or cult-of-twins, spirit possession, intersex conflict, war, ecological disasters, PCSD (Post-Colonial Stress Disorder), among other traumas. Through close reading of these select works—Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, Chigozie Obioma’s The Fisherman, Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Are, Buki Papillon’s An Ordinary Wonder, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count—we will titrate African literature’s many contributions to medical/health humanities.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies; and a Literary Genre (Fiction). This course meets the LMC distribution requirements for Alterity and electives

“Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a revision of soldiers’ marching song for abolitionist John Brown, cemented Julia Ward Howe’s celebrity when it appeared in an 1862 Atlantic Monthly. Yet, two decades before its publication, Howe crafted a tale of an intersex person—“one presenting a beautiful physical development, and combining in the spiritual nature all that is most attractive in either sex” who would be “the poetic dream of the ancient sculptor, more beautiful, though less human, than either man or woman”—that remained lost in the archive until Gary Williams curated its fragments as The Hermaphrodite (U of Nebraska P, 2004). Similarly, the lesser-known 1860 narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery offers a rare glimpse of how those who liberated themselves exploited the dehumanizing system’s colorism and gender biases. Using Ward’s vision of a young nation’s quest for a utopian society and the Crafts’ tale as our palimpsests, this course mines works of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama, and film from the past two centuries and interventions in gender and sexuality studies in search of new insights on the mythologies of the gender binary that binds—and divide—our own contentious moment. In addition to Howe and the Crafts, we will select from works by Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Sui Sin Far, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, T.S. Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Christine Jorgensen, Toni Morrison, Leslie Feinberg, Octavia Butler, Daniel Black, and others and the films A Florida Enchantment, Blonde Venus, Some Like It Hot, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Paris Is Burning, Boys Don’t Cry, Moonlight, and Everything Everywhere All at Once to read and screen alongside major contemporary theorists, including Cameron Awkward-Rich, Marquis Bey, Judith Butler, Leah DeVun, Alice Domurat Dreger, E. Patrick Johnson, Susan Stryker, and C. Riley Snorton.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies; Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; African-American Literary and Cultural Studies; and Poetry and Film as Genres. The course also meets the Alterity requirement

This course takes as a starting position that queer theory has always been about more than/in opposition to queerness as sexual or gender identity. Instead, we will locate key debates and issues in queer theory over the last four decades as sites of interrogation into socially constructed norms and dominant structures of power that shape our gendered and sexual lives, bodies, and experiences. The course will serve as an introduction to the still lively (if not always ending or in fear of being “over”) field of queer theory in the US context, which emerged in its institutional and by now established form around 1990. Charting its historical emergence in response to feminist theory and gay and lesbian studies in the 1980s paralleled with activist movements for sexual, gender, and racial justice that paved its way, we will begin with texts before 1990 to best understand debates that formed the field, before moving into more contemporary queer theory. Topics in the course will include, then, first the field’s emergence in relation to feminism, activism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics, followed by weekly interventions that “queer” topics such as: literary and cultural studies, sex/sexuality, ecology, temporality, affect, the archive, compulsory heterosexuality, monogamy and the couple, childhood, disability, class, aesthetics, geography, race, blackness, gender and settler colonialism, reproduction and the family, science studies, education, and queerness beyond identity.

Readings will include works by many of the following: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Leo Bersani, Heather Love, Tavia Nyong’o, Annamarie Jagose, Matt Brim, Jack Halberstam, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kara Keeling, Donna Haraway, Catriona Sandilands, Jules Gill-Peterson, C. Riley Snorton, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, Hortense Spillers, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Susan Stryker, Mel Y. Chen, and Marquis Bey. 

Please note that in this course, we will read primarily theory, one novel, screen one film, and read several supplementary short stories. Reading expectations will be roughly one book per week, and each student will be assigned specific chapters each week to focus on for class discussion. Discussion and regular participation are expected and required in this course. Students need not have any background in reading theory or in queer theory specifically to enroll. 

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies (American); Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. This course also meets the Alterity requirement.