Please find information about Winter 2025 themes below. Make sure to enroll in Composition courses as soon as your enrollment window opens!
| Name | Theme | Course | Description | Quarter |
| Becky King | Medieval Romance | WR 50 | This course explores chivalric romance, a medieval genre that focuses on the adventures of noble men and women as they seek love and honor. We will be considering how chivalric romance stories communicated with their original audiences, as well as how the genre continues to affect how we think and communicate about love, violence, gender roles, and social expectations in the modern world. | Winter, Spring |
| Kat Eason | Food for Thought | WR 40 | Everyone has to eat...and everyone has opinions about what they eat. Food for Thought focuses on constructing arguments about food, with an emphasis on choosing specific details and deploying particular strategies for various audiences. Students will read different genres of food-based nonfiction from a diverse group of authors, learn to identify arguments and argument strategies, imitate some of those strategies, and ultimately produce their own original argument using one (or a mix of several) model texts. | Fall, Winter, Spring |
| Juan Carlos Fermin | The Tropical Gothic | WR 50 | “The Tropical Gothic” is a genre that centers the tropical archipelago as a region rife with Gothic elements, which are traditionally associated with European settings. The course surveys the oeuvre of Filipino writer Nick Joaquin, who recontextualizes Gothic tropes to lay bare the horror and weight of the Philippines’ colonial past. Varying in setting and scope, Joaquin’s stories take place as early as the 17th century and as recently as the 1960s. Spanish and American colonialism haunt Joaquin’s characters in different ways, influencing their actions, motivations, and anxieties. Philippine folklore and superstition also figure heavily, striking fear in the hearts of some characters, while for others, promising liberation from repression which is often both patriarchal and colonial. Students will follow discussions and write reflections on how world literature can serve as a window into a given culture or time, and how a window into Philippine culture and history changes through the lens of the Gothic. The course highlights the Gothic genre's unique positioning to illustrate the historical crises of the Philippines and beyond. Thus, while the specific goal of this course is to understand the Gothic genre through a postcolonial register, it will broadly empower students to contemplate the malleability of rhetoric and genre. Note: this course was originally approved by Jackie Way (Writing 39B Course Director at the time) and I taught it Winter 2021 and Spring 2022. |
Fall, Winter |
| Andie Klarin | Medical Humanities | WR 60 | Fall, Winter | |
| Maya Bornstein | Travel Writing | WR 50 | Fall, Winter | |
| Isis Huang | Fairy Tales | WR 50 | Fall | |
| Peter Cibula | Bullshit Jobs and the AI Economy | WR 60 | This course investigates the nature of work, labor, and economic activity in the 21st century. We will begin with David Graeber's suggestive argument in Bullshit Jobs, where he claims that we are being prevented from reaping the benefits of automation as a society. Rather than working a 15 hour work week, salaried workers remain at the office for 40 hours, spending a significant portion of that time on facebook or pretending to work. Meanwhile, workers in jobs that require either care or physical labor – teachers, nurses, janitors, for instance – remain underpaid and work longer and longer to make a basic living. The inequalities of both the distribution of work and the kinds of work we compensate (or do not compensate) will thus be the broad theme of this class. With the rise of Generative AI models (such as ChatGPT), we will also use Graeber's theory of bullshit to investigate the kinds of jobs that these algorithmic technologies purport to replace. Alongside Graeber, we will listen to the podcast Citations Needed, where the hosts discuss the issue of AI hype and labor, the use of child labor over paying workers more, or the use of "anti-racist" policies by Silicon Valley companies to sell exploitative business models. This course thus considers all forms of work and the structural forces that fill this fundamentally human activity with more and more "spiritual violence" and the role of AI technologies and their "slop" in this "bullshitification" of the economy. | Fall, Winter |
| Lia Agudo | Gender, Labor, and Globalization | WR 60 | Fall, Winter, Spring | |
| Sandy Oh | How Do We Know What We Know: Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange | WR 40 | Have you ever taken a philosophy course and discussed epistemological theory? Have you ever wondered why your opinion on a heated matter or interpretation of an event was so markedly different from someone else? Have you ever wondered why an author chose certain words or narrative strategies to tell a story? Have you ever applied for a job and wrote a cover letter, explaining how your past experiences prepared you for a prospective role? If any of these scenarios feel familiar to you, it is possible that the question lurking beneath your inquiries was “how do we know what we know?” The applications for this mode of inquiry are broad. This primary question is also fundamental in critically engaging with a piece of writing and also the craft of writing. This core method of analysis will serve as the grounds upon which we analyze readings and produce writings. One of the biggest challenges for writers is to make their audience feel invested in their stories, arguments and analyses. Whether you are a speechwriter for a political candidate running for office, a screenwriter drafting a one-hour drama, a poet describing the sunlight, a literary critic writing for the NY Times, an immunology student demonstrating the significance of new data, or a job applicant for a position in the tech industry, your job is to argue why others should consider your thesis. In order to address this core question, in this class we will discuss how lived experiences, the act of listening and believing someone’s account, educational backgrounds, and particular historical circumstances are all important threads in the reading and production of a text. By untangling these various threads, it will be possible to engage in meaningful analyses to not only understand how an author came to certain conclusions, but also why they may have included certain pieces of evidence to support their claims. Variables to consider will include identity, subjectivity and positionality of writers, characters and audience. |
Fall, Winter, Spring |
| Louise McCune | Housing & Eviction | WR 60 | In this section of WR 60, we will together read a core text, Evicted, in which the sociologist Matthew Desmond follows eight people in Milwaukee experiencing housing instability. These stories of personal struggle expose a broader story about the systems reproducing social inequality in the United States. For their own research projects, each student will develop a list of supplemental readings as they pursue a topic under the umbrella of our course theme. | Fall |
| Jacob Hyatt | Education | WR 60 | In this education-themed iteration of Writing 60: Argument & Research, students will use their studies of and our discussions about the American education system as a springboard for explorations of how to conduct college-level research and how to properly construct effective arguments. With a careful eye towards organization, source integration, and MLA style, students will strive to become exemplary writers and researchers, while also learning about the successes and failures of American education throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These activities will contribute to a quarter-long research project in which students will critically examine a problem in the field of education and then advocate for an effective and feasible solution to that problem. | Fall, Spring |
| Lucy Fang | Safe Spaces, Critical Geographies | WR 60 | What makes a safe space? Public and student programming, education, and activist conversations have often revolved around the difficulties in holding accessible space that protects, shelters, and allows for vulnerability. These are also pressing questions for disciplines such as geography, urban planning, education, and public health, to name a few. A space can be as small as one’s bedroom, the medical examination room, or the workplace, and as big as a city neighborhood, the nation, or even the internet. Yet, some spaces are more accessible and “safer” than others. Through this theme, we will consider the political, infrastructural, and social organizations of certain spaces in order to evaluate their complicity to a sense of safe or unsafe experiences for marginalized communities. | Winter |
| John Nieman | American Gothic | WR 45, WR 50 | In this section of writing 45/50, we will be taking a closer look at gothic texts and examining how they interrogate social structures and social roles. Gothic texts exist to challenge and undermine mainstream ideological commitments, but sometimes they also reinforce existing power structures in surprising ways, too. We will examine gender roles, socioeconomic disparities, the medical community, and other “expert” spheres that gatekeep knowledge to see how gothic texts expose such expertise as a form of social fiction. The point of this inquiry is not merely to become aware of the gothic genre, but more importantly genre itself and how it shapes audience response and evolves according to audience expectations that are socially and culturally situated. | Fall, Winter |
| Jackie Way | WR 45, WR 50, WR 60 | WR 40: What's Funny? WR 45/50: Fairy Tales, Travel Writing, Apocalypse WR 60: "Problematic" Pop Culture, Food Justice, Animal Advocacy |
||
| Louise McCune | Housing & Eviction | WR 60 | Our Fall 2024 course theme is housing and eviction. Together, we will read a core text, Evicted, in which the sociologist Matthew Desmond follows residents of Milwaukee, WI who are experiencing housing insecurity. These stories of personal struggle expose a broader story about the systems reproducing social inequality in the United States. For the culminating research projects, each student will select supplemental readings as they pursue a topic under the umbrella of our course theme, on an issue related to housing affordability, equity, and access. | Fall |
| Hannah Bacchus | Mass Incarceration | WR 60 | With its focus on mass incarceration, this course explores the history and contemporary state of policing and prison industrial complex. Moreover, we will discuss and analyze how injustice developed and sustains within this American system while it continues to victimize its poor, racialized, and vulnerable populations. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander helps us consider how America’s modern dependence on mass incarceration coexists with a contemporary representation of colorblindness and a postrace society. While The New Jim Crow acts as one our core texts for this course, we’ll be reading excerpts from other texts engaged in topics surrounding surveillance, policing, social movements like Black Lives Matter, and class struggle. This course encourages you to think about ways race and bias play a role maintaining America’s new racial caste system, particularly as it relates to our criminal justice system. | Fall |
| Gabriel Garofano | The Fiction of Fiction: Exploring Narrative in the Postmodern Age | WR 60 | In this course, we’ll dive into postmodernism—a genre that doesn’t just tell stories but asks why we tell stories. Postmodernism isn’t about following the rules; it’s about breaking them, reassembling them, and playing with them in ways that let us experience writing—and ourselves—differently. Through themes like metafiction and self-reflexivity, postmodernism invites us to turn inward and examine the very act of writing, asking profound questions about its purpose and possibilities. Our journey begins with the experimental spirit of modernism in the 20th century—a movement that was radically avant-garde in its approach to storytelling. Modernist writers weren’t afraid to disrupt genre conventions, fragment time, or dive deep into the inner workings of consciousness. But postmodernism takes this experimentation even further, embracing not just disruption, but a self-awareness that fundamentally reshapes how we think about narrative, truth, and reality. We’ll explore these ideas as they evolve into contemporary forms like hypertext fiction, where stories become interactive, and the reader navigates countless pathways through the text. This kind of storytelling opens up new possibilities for what fiction can do—how it can engage with us, challenge us, and reflect the complexity of our world. At its core, this course is about more than just understanding literary techniques. It’s about you, and the ways postmodernism allows us to experience writing in personal and unexpected ways. We’ll ask the big questions: Why do we write? Why do we study writing? How does fiction help us process the world and ourselves in it? Through a mix of readings, essays, and creative projects, you’ll engage with postmodernism in a way that challenges traditional forms of storytelling and asks you to reflect on your own writing. The course will culminate in the creation of e-portfolios that showcase not only your engagement with postmodern themes but your personal journey as a writer—your exploration of how writing can illuminate the world and your place in it. |
Fall, Spring |
| Amanda Malone | Race After Technology | My course takes Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology as its core text, examining issues of bias in technology and artificial intelligence. | Fall, Winter, Spring | |
| Scottie Streitfeld | Mass Incarceration in the U.S. | WR 50 | The impacts of the last sixty years of mass imprisonment have been devastating for the U.S. Since the 1960s, the number of prisons and prisoners across the country has exploded, and the effects have been most keenly felt by minority populations, in particular, Black Americans. Our section of WR 60 will draw from a collection of texts, both scholarly and non-scholarly, that have defined current efforts to end mass incarceration in the U.S. This field of study and this archive of research writing will serve as the foundation for our own broad introduction to the topic, which will then feed into students’ individual research projects. As a class, we will explore the problem of mass human confinement as one entrenched in America's 400-year legacy of racism, colonialism, and nationalism. We will read a diverse body of introductory work from historians, social scientists, and legal scholars who analyze mass incarceration in relation to questions about race, class, and the enduring legacies of slavery. We will also read work that confirms or challenges the argument, perhaps most famously articulated by Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow (2010) that mass incarceration, like segregation in the south, was deliberate--a strategic web of policies and practices specifically intended to control and confine black Americans. As part of our discussion of this theory, and responses to it, we will scrutinize these policies and practices within and without the prison walls and examine their long and short term effects on communities and individuals. Finally, we will explore different approaches, and debates over approaches, undertaken by advocates seeking to improve outcomes, whether that means lower prison populations, or envisioning a future in which prisons will ultimately not be necessary. The U.S penal system is a warehouse, some scholars argue, but it also involves manipulation, surveillance and punishment beyond carceral architectures. In the policy arena, we see evidence to support this argument in felon disenfranchisement, mandatory minimum sentences, harsh punishments for minor parole violations, and a whole industry designed to exploit prisoners and their families that includes bail bonds, telephone contracts, and commissary markets. But in the wider arena of social and cultural givens, the carceral state serves an even more disturbing purpose: it makes the suffering of individuals and communities who are victims of this system appear to be self-inflicted. By examining multiple contexts--historical, legal, technological, and others--our goal will be to lay a foundation for research into prison expansion’s causes, impacts, and possible pathways for ending mass incarceration. |
Fall |
| Loren Eason | See current about page | No changes to current page | ||
| Spencer Seward | Writing 60: Contemporary Housing Problems: What Are They and What Can We Do About Them? | WR 60 | Our course focus is the complex problem of housing in the 21st century, asking both “Where are we now, and how did we get here?” and “Where do we go from here?” Though our model textbook focuses on homelessness in America, you may choose any housing problem anywhere in the world, as long as that problem is narrowly and specifically defined and meets the assignment requirements. Housing problems exist in a variety of forms globally, apply to all of us in one way or another (often more than one!), and as such, you’ll have a chance to follow your own interests, passions, and curiosities, and if you so choose, research any of the housing problems that exist in the communities around you. | Fall, Winter, Spring |
| William Eng | Liberation: memoirs and narratives from writers who have escaped oppression. | WR 50 | The first half of the class will look at how writers have written about their liberation journeys from the North American Slave Narrative to Modern stories about Immigration. The second half looks at the nuance of stories written under oppression and without liberation like Native narratives, Queer literature and War. The last week we look at speculative fiction and how modern authors push the boundaries of genre to imagine stories about oppression in literature, Manga and even video games. | Fall, Winter, Spring |
| Tagert Ellis | Immortality Projects | WR 45, WR 50 | This course theme invites students to study ideas of human legacy and collective memory, considering how we're remembered after we die, and the ways that humans are attempting keep themselves (or at least their memories) alive for much longer. We also study attempts to communicate across enormous distances of time and space. This description sounds really boring but the course is actually pretty sick. For example, you will learn about a mad scientist who lived in a giant castle and tried to implant monkey parts in people to make them live longer. By the end of the course students will have written poetry that is put on a stone tablet in a salt mine in Austria-- an archive ominously referred to as "MOM." None of these other courses can say that. That salt thing puts them to shame. This description is over. | Fall, Winter, Spring |
| Ivy Olesen | “Sliding into DMs: Epistolary Literature from the 1700s to Today" | WR 50 | Our section of this class, “Sliding into DMs: Epistolary Literature from the 1700s to Today,” will examine epistolary (letter-based) literature from the genre’s first heyday in the 1700s to today. We will study works of fiction and non-fiction, and consider the epistolary genre broadly – not limiting ourselves to stories told through analog letters, but also critically considering the combination of text and images, emojis, voice memos, and memes that characterize our contemporary correspondence. | Fall |
| Carolin Huang | Rhetoric on the Mother | WR 60 | This course will examine a range of social, political and economic issues through the figure of the mother. The substratal position of the mother in relation to society opens up questions on work, violence, ethics, and particularly, the structure of our social order. | Winter, Spring |
| Mariel Rowland | Education | WR 60 | Alongside the Anteater Guide to Writing and Rhetoric, we will also be reading a number of essays concerning U.S. education and its inequities. We will read with an open mind and critical lens meaning that as we take the information in we can each choose how to interpret and utilize it. Some of us will agree, disagree, question, or maybe feel ambivalent and all of that is welcomed. As we go through the material on our own terms, the classroom space will be a place to share notes, ask questions, and think critically together. I have chosen essays on education because they closely relate to my graduate research on black feminist pedagogical histories but this only means that I have a passion for the topic and not that know more about it than you. You each have your own relationship to education and I hope that the research topics you choose will address your own interests and experiences as much as possible. Overall, I am most interested in learning your thinking and less focused on answers and knowing everything. I will be your guide and I ask that you all show up as leaders in your own way. | Fall, Winter, Spring |
| Henry Ward | The Environment | WR 60 | Issues encompassing climate change, pollution, conservation, to more conceptual treatments of environmental or atmospheric pollution such as advertising, propaganda, and influence. | Fall |
| DeShawn Dumas | The Biopolitics of Racial Whiteness | WR 60 | Works written under the rubric of “biopolitics” are above all interested in the tension between competition and cooperation, moral obligation and aggression, relations of dominance and the construction of hierarchies that stem from evolutionary mechanisms or occurrences that lead to the formation of new dispositions, affects, capacities or proclivities for judging that guide individuals in the direction of “biological beneficial” morally and politically reciprocal behavior. In contrast to this evolutionary conception of biopolitics, the philosopher and historiography Michel Foucault views the biopolitical as a novel technology of the modern liberal democratic state, wherein race and racism become the precondition that makes captivity, criminalization, neglect and extermination of human populations acceptable. | Fall |
| Gretchen Short | Adapting to the Alien | WR 50 | This course explores science fiction as a genre which uses the figure of the alien or unknown to explore human adaptability in the face of change. Though sci-fi is an expansive genre open to exploring the unknown through technological advances, robots/AI, space exploration, and many other imagined divergences from our current lives and societies, this class will focus specifically on how sci-fi uses tropes of the alien or extra-terrestrial to make us question everything we think we know. | Winter, Spring |
| Candice Yacono | Medical Humanities | WR 60 | Please use previous version :) | Fall, Winter, Spring |
| Chimee Adịọha | The Criminalization of Immigration | WR 60 | This course pursues an institutional critique of immigration enforcement, asking how and why it has changed, in what ways it has negatively impacted communities, and who has stood to benefit. Students in this course pursue a range of research projects related to problems in immigration courts and due process violations, the mass incarceration of immigrants and the connections between immigration and criminal law enforcement, and harms suffered by asylum seekers, immigrant laborers, undocumented youths, and other groups affected by an expanded set of laws dictating as criminal the everyday activities of undocumented migrants. | Fall, Winter, Spring |
| Michael Andreasen | Memoir | WR 45, WR 50 | This course will examine the conventions of memoir and the elements that make for compelling personal narrative. | Winter, Spring |
| Jack Fixa | Climate Justice | WR 60 | This course will examine the climate crisis through the eyes of Californians whose communities are disproportionately and acutely feeling its effects but whose advocacy efforts are also making inroads in the environmental justice movement. | Fall, Winter, Spring |
| Flynn Mixdorf | Climate Change | WR 60 | Taking our lead from science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, we'll approach the issue of climate change with an "all hands on deck" mentality. After getting acquainted with the history of our knowledge about climate change and where scientists think our planet is heading, students will be tasked with researching and writing about more specific, smaller-scope areas where climate change can be addressed. Examples might include carbon recapture, electric vehicles, clean energy, reforestation, low-albedo agriculture, glacier interventions, sulphur dioxide solar engineering and other geoengineering, and beyond. To paraphrase Kim Stanley Robinson, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to solving climate change – it will take myriad solutions across myriad sectors and industries to save the planet we love. | Fall, Spring |