2020-2026 RTC Course Offerings

HU 5100 Qualitative Humanistic Research | Canevez

15197 | TR | 2-3:15 p.m. | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This course will examine qualitative methodology and compatible methods, with attention to modes of data collection and analysis, and ethical research practices, such as confidentiality and informed consent. Approaches may include interview, ethnographic, qualitative textual analysis, and digital humanities methods, among others. Through the course students will learn how to analyze, construct, and conduct rigorous qualitative empirical research studies and consider these methods within broader agendas of scientific inquiry.

HU 5116 Approaches to Alterity/Difference | Nish

15187 | MW | 11-12:15 p.m. | Walker 329B

Course Overview

A critical examination of discourses, theories, and representations of otherness or difference according to race, gender, sexuality, class, age, nationality, ethnic background, and other socio-cultural categories. May include discussion of issues of self-representation within and among groups, the rhetorics of exile or diaspora, colonial and postcolonial constructions of identity.

HU 5008 Critical Approaches to Literature and Culture | VanKooy

85261 | W | 3-5:30 p.m. | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This course will focus on book history as a critical approach to the study of literature and culture, with an emphasis on its interaction with other critical approaches (such as feminism, Marxism, queer studies, etc.) and other disciplines such as history, rare book librarianship, and information science. We will read a mixture of primary and secondary material. Students are encouraged to find areas of overlap between this course material and their individual research interests for discussion in their major and minor assignments.

HU 5112 Theoretical Perspectives on Technology | Archer

85444 | T | 7-9:30 p.m. | Walker 329B

Course Overview

HU 6020 Special Topics in Composition: "Research Methods in Writing Studies" | Hassel

85253 | TR | 4:50-6:00 p.m. | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Students will be introduced to empirical, theoretical, and other methods and methodologies for researching writing, writers, writing processes, and writing programs. Students will plan a research project in writing studies, and will become familiar with significant writing studies scholarship that represents the discipline's maturation over the last half century. 

Course Learning Goals

• After completing this course, students will: 
  Be familiar with the range of methodological approaches to research in writing studies
• Understand and adhere to ethical principles for conducting research in writing studies
• Demonstrate competence in one or more methods of undertaking writing studies research inquiry
• Identify, analyze, and synthesize scholarly conversations in a focused area of the discipline 

HU 6070 Special Topics in Rhetoric & Composition: "Judging Writing: Power and Politics of Writing Assessment" | Hammond

85252 | TR | 3:30-4:45 p.m. | Walker 329B

Course Overview

What makes writing good? How do we know? Who has the authority to determine what counts as “good writing”? Is the assessment of writing a helpful way to appraise student development, a means of holding teachers and schools accountable for student performance, a vehicle for racist or colonialist standard language ideologies to creep into our lives—or something else entirely? In this graduate seminar, we will investigate writing assessment histories, theories, practices, and technologies—attempting, at every turn, to unpack the power and politics of writing assessment. This course will challenge you to question whose interests writing assessment serves and—what’s more difficult—to think through what it means to both meaningfully and fairly assess writing. As we progress through the course, we will consider dilemmas and debates in assessment, read new and canonical works, and analyze a range of different assessment methods and technologies—including rubrics, portfolios, directed self-placement, and automated essay evaluation.

HU 5000 Introduction to Graduate Studies | VanKooy

13883 | MW | 12–1:15 p.m. | Walker 329B

This year-long course prepares students for graduate level work in the RTC program and introduces them to the fields of scholarly inquiry covered by graduate faculty. The course is designed  both as an introductory course for students entering the graduate program in the Humanities and a continuing professional development course for RTC students. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions, develop research proposals, and communicate their research. This course is designed to familiarize them with the requirements for graduate work and research, and help them develop the skills necessary to succeed in our M.S. and PhD programs.

HU 5070 History  and Theory of Rhetoric |  Abeles

15062 | TR | 2–3:15 p.m. | Walker 329B

This course provides an introduction to the history of rhetorical theory and the contemporary scholarship that makes use of it. It covers a broad swath of rhetorical theorists, often using the concept of performativity to clarify their understanding of language and communication. It begins with a consideration of ancient Greek rhetoricians and their approach to oral communication, demonstrating how they were engaged in both the study of persuasion and a deeply philosophical consideration of creativity. This focus continues in the course's coverage of early-modern and 19th-century rhetorical theory, with particular consideration given to the ways Friedrich Nietzsche and prominent rhetoricians like Frederick Douglass understood the performative function of rhetorical style. Coverage of 20th-century rhetoricians and theorists includes figures like Kenneth Burke, Virginia Woolf, and Gloria Anzaldua, with the focus again on the concept of performativity and, additionally, how that concept connects with more current theoretical approaches to contingency, articulation, agency, and rhetorical ecologies. Throughout the course, students are given the chance to clarify their own theoretical conception of rhetoric and use it in the analysis of their own topics of interest.

HU 5114 Visual Theory and Analysis | Hristova

15076 | TR | 12:30–1:45 p.m. | Walker 329B

A critical survey of selected theoretical, analytic and methodological issues that inform various disciplinary perspectives on visuality, visual culture, images, and image-based media, and visual representation.

HU 6112 Special Topics in New Media | Bell

15079 | MW | 3:30–4:45 p.m. | Walker 329B

We are surrounded by vibration that we feel and perceive as sound. Sound plays a crucial but often understudied role in experiences of media and cultural life. From the mundane sounds of our daily routines, to expertly constructed soundworks, sound, or lack thereof, is fundamental to artistic and communications media and, more broadly, to our perceptions of the world around us. This course will immerse you in the experience of listening as we learn to think about sound as historical, cultural, architectural, and ecological, as well as aesthetic.

The course is designed to provide an introduction to the interdisciplinary area of Sound Studies which has influenced work in almost all Arts and Humanities disciplines (cf. Sound Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal). Some of the written texts we may explore (exact readings are still TBD) include:

• Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives, Tanya E. Clement (MIT Press, 2024)
• Hungry listening : resonant theory for indigenous sound studies, Dylan Robinson (University of Minnesota Press; 2020)
• Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Wesleyan UP, 2017)
• The Sound of Culture : Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, Louis Onuorah  Chude-Sokei (Wesleyan University Press, 2016)
• Keywords in Sound, eds. Novak and Feld (Duke, 2015)
• Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq, J. Martin Daughtry (Oxford, 2015)
• The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, Emily Thompson (MIT Press, 2002)
• The Soundscape: Our Sonic Landscape and the Tuning of the World, R. Murray Schafer (Knopf, 1994)

Students will also have weekly listening assignments. Some sound editing will be taught in the course so that students can begin to use sound in their own work and/or incorporate it into the courses they teach. 

HU 6114 Special Topics in Visual Representation | Thomas

15085 | T | 7–9:30 p.m. | Walker 134

A critical examination of selected topics in visual representation, with an emphasis on the theoretical, industrial, cultural, international and national, and aesthetic contexts that inform an understanding of particular visual media. May include such topics as genre studies, reception theory and theories of spectatorship, gender and visual representation, etc.

 

HU 5003 Technical and Scientific Communication | A. Fiss

84942 | MW 2:00–3:15 p.m. | Walker 329B

Course Overview

We'll have two monograph-length touchstones: Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? (2019); and Marika Seigel, The Rhetoric of Pregnancy (2013). The first section of the course will be about the "turns" of technical communication throughout the history of humanities approaches to the field (1970s-2013); the second section will be about theoretical approaches to science and technology (staring with Naomi Oreskes but then reviewing 1960s-2010s approaches); and the third section will be about technical communication since the social justice turn (with Marika's book as well as post-2013 articles).

HU 5004 Cultural Theory | Morrison and Van Kooy

84943 | W 3:30-5:45 | Walker 329B

Course Overview

The complex development and meaning of the word culture, as Raymond Williams notes in Culture and Society (1958), is distinctively modern. Etymologically  grounded in the rural and agrarian acts of cultivating land and tending crops, the meaning of culture transformed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with industrialization, global wars (including the slave trade), and the emergence of democracies. Culture became equated with refinement,  with  intellectual and creative arts, with the establishment of customs, institutions, and to the achievements (or perceived failures) of a particular nation, people, or social group, and with the critique of particular socio-economic  and political conditions that inhibited or nurtured the further cultivation and growth of  society. 

This semester we'll tighten the scope of cultural theory to focus on visual and performative constructions (and critiques) of space and place as well as gendered and racialized  identities so we can explore the changing relationships between society and nature and between culture and society. To this end, we will be reading a selection of texts that may include but are not limited to this tentative list of writers and readings:

• Theodor Adorno; Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006);
• Hannah Arendt; Karen Barad; Laruen Berlant's "Cruel Optimism" in The Affect Theory Reader (2010);
• Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993);
• Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism; Jonathan Crary; Michel de Certeau's The Practices of Everyday Life (1980);
• Michel Foucault; Fredric Jameson, Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006);
• Tiya Miles's All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House, 2022);
• Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics"; and Joseph Roach.

HU 5012 Communication Theory | Collins

84944 | M 7:00PM-9:30PM | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Because the notion of communication spans an enormously wide range of approaches and concepts within its scope, the study of communication theory confronts us with a vast body of literature drawing from a number of disciplines making up what has become the field of communication inquiry. In this course, we will narrow our focus to include some intellectual legacies intersecting with humanistic perspectives on communication, culture, and technology. These include:

1. the constitutive relation between communication and culture,
2. socio-historical approaches to communication technology and social change,
3. medium theory,
4. political economy and media industries,
5. geopolitics and communication power.

Please Note: Selections from the following readings are tentative and may change:

• John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies (2011)
• James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (2009)
• Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (1988)
• Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (1951)
• Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (1982)
• Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (2003)
• Sarah Sharma, Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (2022)
• Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015)
• Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (2015)
• Andreas Hepp, Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age (2014)
• Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (2011)
• Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, Communication and Empire (2007)

HU 6002 Culture and Social Justice | Viera-Ramos

84945 | W 7:00PM-9:30PM | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Bodies in Transition: Conceptually Exploring Some "New" Feminist Writers in Latin America

Jacques Lacan used to claim that "poets, who do not know what they say, nevertheless always say, as is well known, things before others" (my translation). Building upon Lacan's observation, this seminar will approach contemporary fiction by Latin-American writers (in translation) with the aim of interrogating present-day understandings of feminist theory.

Writers such as Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Trías, Camila Sosa Villada, and Gabriela Cabezón Camara express a "new" political sensibility: as the feminist movement becomes of paramount importance for social justice, these authors explore the unknown—yet familiar at the same time—of a social relationship yet to come. For instance, Enriquez's writing delves into politics, not solely by amplifying the voices and visibility of feminist movements, but also by urging a reshaping of social dynamics. Her work possesses a unique quality that blends elements of familiarity and novelty, paving the way for a future distinct from the political landscape as we have known it. Although her writing does touch on other facets directly connected to politics, such as using Argentina's dictatorial era as a backdrop that accentuates the terror in her stories, the emphasis is placed on the individualized body that fosters an alternative, spiritually-driven social connection. Maintaining the Freudian premise of sexualized and eroticized bodies, this seminar will approach the traditional body-mind division as a possibility for intimately intertwining affections as a way of disrupting each other. Of course, on a "spiritual" level, these disruptions involve an ideological reinterpretation of the current social relationship —as it is the patriarchal model.

In a more concrete manner: if a notion of "woman" is to be deconstructed from its historical, political, economic, and cultural development, then the notion of "man" should also be a part of this deconstruction. Hence, the lingering question is: What kind of politics looms on the horizon of our daily lives?

Tentative reading list:

• Borges, J.L. Emma Zunz
• Enriquez, M. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed; Things We Lost in the Fire
  
• Sosa Villada, C. Bad Girls; I'm a Fool to Want You
  
• Trías, F. The Rooftop
  
• Schweblin, S. Fever Dream
• Cabezón Camara, G. Slum Virgin
  
• Lacan, J. Feminine Sexuality (Chapters TBC)
• Butler, J. Gender Trouble (Chapters TBC)
• Ettinger, B. The Matrixial Borderspace (Chapters TBC)
• Haraway, D. A Cyborg Manifesto

 

 

HU 5000 Intro to Graduate Studies | Van Kooy

13951 | MW 11:00-12:15 | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This year-long course prepares students for graduate level work in the RTC program and introduces them to the fields of scholarly inquiry covered by graduate faculty. The course is designed  both as an introductory course for students entering the graduate program in the Humanities and a continuing professional development course for RTC students. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions, develop research proposals, and communicate their research. This course is designed to familiarize them with the requirements for graduate work and research, and help them develop the skills necessary to succeed in our M.S. and PhD programs. 

 

HU 5002 Rhetoric and Composition | Hammond

14979 | TR 3:30-4:45 | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Rhetoric's recorded history dates back to the time of Socrates, but Rhetoric and Composition is a much more recent invention, with origins in the peculiar political, social, and philosophical exigencies that characterize modern society and, most specifically, the modern university classroom. This course explores how this relatively young discipline has encountered and responded to these challenges, with a variety of pedagogical and research methods that, amidst their diversity, continue to speak to the broader philosophical and political challenges that face students, teachers, and the academy. At issue will be the changing economic and institutional role of higher education, the challenges that a variety of civil rights movements put and continue to put to the academy, the increasing integration of technology and literacy, and debates with other allied disciplines about what academic traditions are best positioned to teach the means of effective communication. Throughout the course, we will keep in mind that these contemporary issues are not so much a departure from the rhetorical tradition as they are a continuation of rhetoric's propensity to contest both with and against philosophy, as well as composition's long history of exploring how communication is vital to the health of political agents and their agency.

 

HU5100 Qualitative Humanistic Research | Canevez

14980 | TR 2:00-3:15 | Walker 109

Course Overview

This course will examine qualitative methodology and compatible methods, with attention to modes of data collection and analysis, and ethical research practices, such as confidentiality and informed consent. Approaches may include interview, ethnographic, qualitative textual analysis, and digital humanities methods, among others. Through the course students will learn how to analyze, construct, and conduct rigorous qualitative empirical research studies and consider these methods within broader agendas of scientific inquiry.

 

HU5116 Approaches to Alterity/Difference | Nish

15111 | TR 7:00-8:15 | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This course will use disability justice to frame our exploration of scholarship and practice related to disability. We will take Sins Invalid's claim that "we can only truly understand ableism by tracing its connections to heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism," as a starting point for examining these connections between ableism and other systems of oppression. We will also discuss the application of these ideas to various texts and practices.

HU 5000 Intro to Graduate Studies | Van Kooy

CRN | Time TBD

Course Overview

This year-long course prepares students for graduate level work in the RTC program and introduces them to the fields of scholarly inquiry covered by graduate faculty. The course is designed  both as an introductory course for students entering the graduate program in the Humanities and a continuing professional development course for RTC students. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions, develop research proposals, and communicate their research. This course is designed to familiarize them with the requirements for graduate work and research, and help them develop the skills necessary to succeed in our M.S. and PhD programs. 

HU 5931 Composition Pedagogy | Hassel

CRN 82951 | Time TBD

Course Overview

A study of pedagogical techniques, technologies, evaluation, and assessment. Topics may include practical strategies and theories of rhetorical analysis, reflective speaking practices, critical visual design, and composition. GTAs in the RTC program in their first year of teaching are required to enroll in two consecutive semesters of this course.

HU 5006 Continental Philosophy | Marratto

CRN 84850 | 2:00 – 4:30 p.m. | Thursday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Study of major figures and themes in continental philosophy. Topics might include: human being, temporality, historicity, tradition, language, perception, embodiment, intersubjectivity, politics, and technology. Approaches to these issues may include phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, feminist theory, and critical theory.

HU 5090 Writing Creative Nonfiction | Carpenter

CRN 84851 | 7:00 – 9:30 p.m. | Tuesday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Writing and revising creative nonfiction in a workshop format. Course may include introduction to contemporary and historical works in the field, as well as study of its theories, techniques, and sub-genres.

HU 5870 New Media Theory | Archer

CRN 84852 | 7:00 – 9:30 p.m. | Wednesday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Examines development of theories explaining the cultural significance of new media technology in communication. Emphasizes strengths and weaknesses of these theories, the concept of "new", and emergent theories challenging the centrality of media in the digital and biotechnological age.

HU 6114 Special Topics in Visual Representation – Documentary | Smith

CRN 84853 | 12:30 – 1:50 p.m | Tuesday/Thursday | Walker 120C

Course Overview

In this course, we will examine documentary films and filmmaking, exploring the shifting boundaries, conventions, imperatives, and aesthetics that define this genre as it is experienced by filmmakers, participants, audiences, and industry professionals. What must be present in a film and its articulation for it to be called a "documentary"? What imperatives and conventions help determine or overdetermine the documentary experience? How have documentary practices changed over time and what are the implications of this for the work they do in the world? To help us think about these questions, we will explore documentary films, history, theory, and practice. While there will be hands-on project work in this course, it is not a filmmaking course. Students who take this course, however, will be prepared to pursue a film project in a subsequent term.

 

HU 5000 Introduction to Graduate Studies | A. Fiss

CRN 14080 | 12:00 – 1:15 p.m. | Monday/Wednesday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This year-long course prepares students for graduate level work in the RTC program and introduces them to the fields of scholarly inquiry covered by graduate faculty. The course is designed  both as an introductory course for students entering the graduate program in the Humanities and a continuing professional development course for RTC students. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions, develop research proposals, and communicate their research. This course is designed to familiarize them with the requirements for graduate work and research, and help them develop the skills necessary to succeed in our M.S. and PhD programs.

HU 5008 Critical Approaches to Literature & Culture | L. Fiss

CRN 15015 | 2:00 – 3:15 p.m. | Monday/Wednesday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This course will focus on book history as a critical approach to the study of literature and culture, with an emphasis on its interaction with other critical approaches (such as feminism, Marxism, queer studies, etc.) and other disciplines such as history, rare book librarianship, and information science. We will read a mixture of primary and secondary material. Students are encouraged to find areas of overlap between this course material and their individual research interests for discussion in their major and minor assignments.

HU 5112 Theoretical Perspectives on Technology | Bell

CRN 15085 | 3:00 – 5:30 p.m. | Tuesday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This course will explore theoretical perspectives on technology by taking a chronological journey through the development of writing as a technology and technologies for writing. From papyrus to artificial intelligence we'll consider how language and its transmission undergird societies. Along the way we'll see how various disciplines, including media studies, science and technology studies, and writing studies, have developed theories and methodologies for researching the impact of information and communication technologies.

HU 6050 Special Topics in Language & Literature: Atlantic Anthroposcenes | Van Kooy

CRN 15056 | 3:00 – 5:45 p.m. | Thursday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Traditional British and American literary studies have all but given way to new modes of inquiry that emphasize the production of interdisciplinary perspectives. This course will introduce students to a variety of canonical and non-canonical literary texts as well as a selection of literary and cultural criticism. We will be attentive to newer methodologies and to the intersections between literature, the visual arts, geography, and our growing critical concerns about climate change. One of the driving questions in this course will be to consider how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers and artists boldly and sometimes radically reimagined the web of human relations that subverted Enlightenment and so-called Modern conceptions of humanity and the world. Secondly, without attempting to subpoena literature or the visual arts to testify for one perspective or another, we will explore how the study of literature and the discourses of literary criticism can help us address the attendant issues of gendered and racialized inequality, precarity, and violence that accompany environmental crises. The course will be divided into a series of case studies, which can serve as a foundation for individual seminar papers. In these essays, students will hone their close reading skills and explore possibilities for future research and scholarship. Critical readings will include essays by Donna Haraway, Achille Mbembe, Jill H. Casid, Jason Moore, Anahid Nersessian, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, and Kathryn Yusoff. These essays will be paired with a selection of novels, poems, dramas, and paintings that attempted to portray the Atlantic World in this period.

HU 6070 Special Topics in Rhetoric & Composition: Rhetorical Analysis | M. Seigel

CRN 14258 | 3:30 – 4:45 p.m. | Monday/Wednesday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This course will introduce you to different methods of and perspectives on rhetorical analysis in academic writing. By the end of the course, you should: (1) be able to choose a method of analysis most appropriate to your research questions, forum, and subject matter; (2) have a greater understanding which disciplines tend to employ rhetorical analysis as a method and how rhetorical criticism intersects with other disciplines and areas of inquiry; (3) be familiarized with the professional forums where rhetorical analysis is discussed and practiced (journals, organizations, conferences, etc.), and; (4) gain familiarity and experience with the conventions of academic writing in fields that employ rhetorical analysis as a method.

HU 5000 Intro to Graduate Studies | A. Fiss

CRN | Time TBD

Course Overview

This year-long course prepares students for graduate level work in the RTC program and introduces them to the fields of scholarly inquiry covered by graduate faculty. The course is designed  both as an introductory course for students entering the graduate program in the Humanities and a continuing professional development course for RTC students. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions, develop research proposals, and communicate their research. This course is designed to familiarize them with the requirements for graduate work and research, and help them develop the skills necessary to succeed in our M.S. and PhD programs. 

HU 5931 Composition Pedagogy | Marika Seigel

CRN 83056 | Time TBD

Course Overview

A study of pedagogical techniques, technologies, evaluation, and assessment. Topics may include practical strategies and theories of rhetorical analysis, reflective speaking practices, critical visual design, and composition. GTAs in the RTC program in their first year of teaching are required to enroll in two consecutive semesters of this course.

HU 5007 Critical Perspectives on Globalization | Jacob

CRN 85041 | 2:00 – 3:15 p.m. | Monday/Wednesday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Examines different facets, stages, and manifestations of globalization, with an emphasis on critical discourses that seek to understand this phenomenon from humanistic and cultural perspectives.

HU 5012 Communication Theory | Hristova

CRN 84952 | 12:30 – 1:45 p.m. | Tuesday/Thursday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

Traces the development of communication theories. Emphasizes interactions among theoretical, political, historical, and socio-cultural factors.

HU 5070 History and Theory of Rhetoric | Abeles

CRN 84953 | 7:00 – 9:35 p.m. | Tuesday/Thursday | Walker 329B

Course Overview

History and theory of rhetoric, focusing on ancient rhetoric, alternative rhetorics, and/or modern rhetorical theory.

HU 6110 Special Topics in Critical Inquiry – Ethics, Politics, and Power | Morrison

CRN 84074 | 3:00 – 5:50 p.m | Tuesdays | Walker 329B

Course Overview

This course explores two important interrelated philosophical themes "human nature" and ethical responsibility. The uncritical assumption that humans have a fixed "nature" and that they are, first and foremost, rational minds, shaped a view of ethics that was uncritical and untenable. 20th Century European philosophy fundamentally challenged this view of the primacy of "the human." Thus, we will begin by exploring the various phenomenological arguments that reveal human subjects as being-in-the-world, embodied, and essentially defined by relations to others and relations mediated by language (eg. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Russon). We will follow the development of this insight that human subjects are not simply given but emerge over time, historically, in relation to larger social and political contexts in the work of ethical thinkers profoundly influenced by these phenomenological arguments (eg. Beauvoir, Foucault and Butler) who also eschew the humanist model of the autonomous individual, replacing it with a model of a subject who is dispersed into networks of language, technology and power. How does this phenomenon of a "dispersed" or "hybrid" subjectivity transform how we think of ethical responsibility? This question will guide our inquiries into some of the most urgent contemporary ethical issues: racial and sexual inequality, state violence, the environmental crisis and finally the exacerbation of all of these issues through the applied logic of technological systems. Possible readings/selections include: Totality and Infinity (Emmanuel Levinas); The Primacy of Perception (Maurice Merleau-Ponty); The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir), Ethics and Politics (Jacques Derrida), Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault), Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? and The Force of Non-Violence (Judith Butler), The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon); The Ethics of Resistance (Drew Dalton); Taking Turns with the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction and Generational Justice (Matthias Fritsch); Technology and the Virtues (Shannon Vallor); Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America(George Yancy); Being and the Screen: How the Digital Changes Perception (Stéphane Vial); "A Phenomenology of Whiteness" (Sara Ahmed).

HU 5000 Introduction to Graduate Studies | Fonkoué

14282 | 9:30 – 10:45 a.m. | Tuesday/Thursday | TBD

Course Overview

This year-long course prepares students for graduate level work in the RTC program and introduces them to the fields of scholarly inquiry covered by graduate faculty. The course is designed  both as an introductory course for students entering the graduate program in the Humanities and a continuing professional development course for RTC students. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions, develop research proposals, and communicate their research. This course is designed to familiarize them with the requirements for graduate work and research, and help them develop the skills necessary to succeed in our M.S. and PhD programs.

HU 5004 Cultural Theory | Amador

CRN | TBD

Course Overview

This course introduces graduate students to contemporary methodologies for the analysis of cultural formations and products. Students will work with theoretical approaches in Marxism, Disability Studies, Afropessimism, Queer Theory, Cultural Materialism, Psychoanalysis, and Decolonial theory in order to identify how visual, material, and textual rhetorics influence cultural attitudes and practices. Graduate students will produce research projects for eventual publication that illustrate their command of how cultural theory across different schools is communitarian, connected practice informed by the constant movement of social life. (Groundwork, Methodology)

HU 5006 Continental Philosophy | Bowler

CRN |TBD

Course Overview

Study of major figures and themes in continental philosophy. Topics might include: human being, temporality, historicity, tradition, language, perception, embodiment, intersubjectivity, politics, and technology. Approaches to these issues may include phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, feminist theory, and critical theory.

HU5113 Cultural Studies | Slack

CRN | TBD

Course Overview

The theme of this class is "culture, creativity, and change." It covers the various ways that cultural studies conceives of the concept of culture with related understandings of the sources of creativity and assessments of how change occurs (or not). The class emphasizes the concept of culture as articulation, with its concomitant attention to identifying where, where, and how creative intervention makes change possible. The work of cultural studies scholars such as Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg are featured, but the orientation is meant to be practical application contributing to culturally responsive and responsible change.

HU 5000 Intro to Graduate Studies | 

CRN | Time TBD

Course Overview

This year-long course prepares students for graduate level work in the RTC program and introduces them to the fields of scholarly inquiry covered by graduate faculty. The course is designed  both as an introductory course for students entering the graduate program in the Humanities and a continuing professional development course for RTC students. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions, develop research proposals, and communicate their research. This course is designed to familiarize them with the requirements for graduate work and research, and help them develop the skills necessary to succeed in our M.S. and PhD programs. 

HU 5931 Composition Pedagogy | Romney

CRN 83664 | Time TBD

Course Overview

A study of pedagogical techniques, technologies, evaluation, and assessment. Topics may include practical strategies and theories of rhetorical analysis, reflective speaking practices, critical visual design, and composition. GTAs in the RTC program in their first year of teaching are required to enroll in two consecutive semesters of this course.

HU 5003 Technical & Scientific Communication | A. Fiss

CRN 84841 |9:30 – 10:45 a.m. | Tuesdays/Thursdays | Walker 329B

Science Communication and Public Engagement

Technical and Scientific Communication combines history, theory, professional practice, and pedagogy to encourage the examination of science and technology as evolving, complex forms of knowledge, social constructs, and realms of human life. We begin by reading about current research in the field and looking at a few frameworks for considering Technical and Scientific Communication from the perspectives of rhetoric, philosophy, history, communication, education, and other fields. We then work through a series of case studies to try out the different approaches. Throughout, we'll be thinking about how well the frameworks match the case studies, as we consider the varied places of Technical and Scientific Communication in the workplace, the laboratory, the classroom, and our broader lives.

HU 5114 Visual Theory & Analysis | Smith

CRN 84842 | 12:30 – 1:45 p.m. | Tuesdays/Thursdays | Walker 329B

Course Overview

A critical survey of selected theoretical, analytic and methodological issues that inform various disciplinary perspectives on visuality, visual culture, images, and image-based media, and visual representation.

HU 6010 Special Topics in Communication – Media Effects | Collins

CRN 83664| 7:00 – 9:45 p.m | Tuesdays | Walker 329B

Course Overview

A critical examination of selected topics in visual representation, with an emphasis on the theoretical, industrial, cultural, international and national, and aesthetic contexts that inform an understanding of particular visual media. May include such topics as genre studies, reception theory and theories of spectatorship, gender and visual representation, etc.

HU 5000 Intro to Graduate Studies | Fonkoué

CRN 14616  | 9:30 – 10:45 a.m. | Tuesdays/Thursdays

Course Overview

This course prepares students for graduate level work in the RTC program and introduces them to the fields of scholarly inquiry covered by graduate faculty. The course is designed both as an introductory course for students entering the graduate program in the Humanities and a continuing professional development course for RTC students. Participants will learn how to formulate research questions, develop research proposals, and communicate their research.

HU 5070 History of Theory & Rhetoric | Abeles

CRN 14863 | 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. | Tuesdays/Thursdays

Course Overview

Moves from a focus on classical rhetoric to a selective overview of rhetoric in the medieval, Enlightenment, modern, and contemporary periods. There will be a consistent theme of inquiry concerning the applications of rhetorical theory to the practices of producing texts in various forms and the teaching of writing through rhetorical theories. Further, we will read primary and secondary texts pertaining to the various periods

HU 5112 Theoretical Perspective on Technology | Bell

CRN 14864 | 7:00 – 9:30 p.m. | Tuesdays

Course Overview

This seminar will help prepare students to investigate aspects of digital and other technologies relevant to their individual research projects. We will engage key readings from three scholarly traditions: the philosophy of technology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and the history and culture of technology. We will also explore recent transdisciplinary developments such as the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in contemporary studies of technology.  At the conclusion of the course, students should be able to develop a comprehensive bibliography of sources relevant to the study of a digital technology of their choice; identify the theoretical perspective of each source and the tradition of which it is a part; and begin to place their own theoretical and methodological commitments within an ongoing scholarly conversation about the chosen technology. Examples of possible readings include "The Question Concerning Technology" (Heidegger), The Machine Question (Gunkel), The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Eds. Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch), More Work for Mother (Schwartz), A History of Modern Computing (Ceruzzi), Always Already New (Gitelman), and essays by Idhe, Feenberg, Winner, Ellul, Sterne, Law, Star, and others.

 

HU6110 Special Topics Critical Inquiry – Ethics: Politics and Power | Morrison

CRN 14866  | 7:00 – 9:30 p.m. | Wednesdays

Course Overview

This course explores two important interrelated philosophical themes "human nature" and ethical responsibility. The uncritical assumption that humans have a fixed "nature" and that they are, first and foremost, rational minds, shaped a view of ethics that was uncritical and untenable. 20th Century European philosophy fundamentally challenged this view of the primacy of "the human." Thus, we will begin by exploring the various phenomenological arguments that reveal human subjects as being-in-the-world, embodied, and essentially defined by relations to others and relations mediated by language (eg. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Russon). We will follow the development of this insight that human subjects are not simply given but emerge over time, historically, in relation to larger social and political contexts in the work of ethical thinkers profoundly influenced by these phenomenological arguments (eg. Beauvoir, Foucault and Butler) who also eschew the humanist model of the autonomous individual, replacing it with a model of a subject who is dispersed into networks of language, technology and power. How does this phenomenon of a "dispersed" or "hybrid" subjectivity transform how we think of ethical responsibility? This question will guide our inquiries into some of the most urgent contemporary ethical issues: racial and sexual inequality, state violence, the environmental crisis and finally the exacerbation of all of these issues through the applied logic of technological systems. Possible readings/selections include: Totality and Infinity (Emmanuel Levinas); The Primacy of Perception (Maurice Merleau-Ponty); The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir), Ethics and Politics (Jacques Derrida), Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault), Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? and The Force of Non-Violence (Judith Butler), The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon); The Ethics of Resistance (Drew Dalton); Taking Turns with the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction and Generational Justice (Matthias Fritsch); Technology and the Virtues (Shannon Vallor); Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America (George Yancy); Being and the Screen: How the Digital Changes Perception (Stéphane Vial); "A Phenomenology of Whiteness" (Sara Ahmed).

HU 5002 Rhetoric & Composition | Romney

CRN 84748 |7:00 – 9:30 p.m. | Tuesdays

Course Overview

Rhetoric's recorded history dates back to the time of Socrates, but Rhetoric and Composition is a much more recent invention, with origins in the peculiar political, social, and philosophical exigencies that characterize modern society and, most specifically, the modern university classroom. This course explores how this relatively young discipline has encountered and responded to these challenges, with a variety of pedagogical and research methods that, amidst their diversity, continue to speak to the broader philosophical and political challenges that face students, teachers, and the academy. At issue will be the changing economic and institutional role of higher education, the challenges that a variety of civil rights movements put and continue to put to the academy, the increasing integration of technology and literacy, and debates with other allied disciplines about what academic traditions are best positioned to teach the means of effective communication. Throughout the course, we will keep in mind that these contemporary issues are not so much a departure from the rhetorical tradition as they are a continuation of rhetoric's propensity to contest both with and against philosophy, as well as composition's long history of exploring how communication is vital to the health of political agents and their agency.

HU 5008 Critical Approach to Literature & Culture | Fonkoué

CRN 84749 | 9:30 – 10:45 a.m. | Tuesdays/Thursdays

Course Overview

This seminar introduces students to key concepts and foundational texts in literary and cultural criticism. Students will explore theories and critical concepts from influential authors in both fields, and gain familiarity with core areas as well as recent development, and study the various ways on which they differ from one another and inform interpretations of the text. Particular movements within the critical tradition include new criticism, structuralism, Marxism, and cultural studies, feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism and race studies as well as ecocriticism and disability studies. Using a couple of literary texts, course participants will go beyond biographical or historical contexts to test new avenues into the study of literary texts and the range possibilities that they open offer for textual interpretation.  In the meantime, they will work toward figuring out ways in which they can incorporate some the theories and concepts discussed in the class into their own research interests, and making these integral to their own scholarly work.

HU 5012 Communication Theory | Hristova

CRN 84750 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. | Tuesdays/Thursdays  

Course Overview

Traces the development of communication theories as they relate to oral, written, and visual  communication in pre-industrial as well as mass-media environments. The course is designed to help students develop an understanding of theory and research for application in their own fields, and to interpret the effects of mass communication in a variety of contexts. Emphasizes interactions among theoretical, political, historical, and socio-cultural factors.

HU 5931 Composition Pedagogy | Romney

CRN 83289  Time:  TBD

Course Overview

A study of pedagogical techniques, technologies, evaluation, and assessment. Topics may include practical strategies and theories of rhetorical analysis, reflective speaking practices, critical visual design, and composition. GTAs in the RTC program in their first year of teaching are required to enroll in two consecutive semesters of this course

HU 6060  Special Topics in Philosophy: Phenomenology & Religion | Bowler

CRN 84751 | 12:30 – 1:45 p.m. | Tuesdays/Thursdays

Course Overview

This course examines phenomenological approaches to religion, for example, phenomenological approaches to the sacred, the divine, religious epistemology, ontotheology, etc.  Beyond simply considerations of religious phenomenon the concepts considered and discussed will have important application to broader issues such as the limit of language and conceptualization (e.g., the via negativa, approaching the other), the limit of metaphysics (e.g., the Good beyond Being), the limit of phenomenon (e.g., saturated phenomenon), ethics at/in/through the limit, place and time, etc.

HU 6111  Special Topics in Gender Studies | Bergvall/Shoos/Sotirin

CRN 84752  | 3:30 – 4:45 p.m. | Tuesdays/Thursdays

Course Overview

This course draws together insights from three overlapping disciplinary fields of communication, language, and media to examine the work of theorists and practitioners who have defined and debated many of the core issues of feminism. Some of the topics we will examine include the roles of biology and society on the formation of sex/gender/sexualities and the practices of feminist researchers (including linguists, scientists, social scientists, and philosophers) in analyzing these categories, across a variety of socio-cultural, intersectional, transnational/postcolonial/decolonial settings. We will take up issues of family, relationships, disability, and work. We will look at the complexities of visual representations in the media, including foci on intimate partner violence, bodies, and post-feminism. The theorists we will read will include Anne Fausto-Sterling, Deborah Cameron, Michelle Lazar, Deboleena Roy, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Maria Lugones, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Nancy Fraser, Lauren Berlant, Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Melissa Gregg, Rosalind Gill, Susan Bordo, and Jack Halberstam. Students will write both short analyses drawing together the theorists and some practical applications of their work, plus a longer project that focuses on some issues of mutual interest, working closely with one (or more) of the course professors.