Please find information about Summer Session 2024 themes below. Make sure to enroll in Composition courses as soon as your enrollment window opens!
| Last Name | First Name | Course | Theme | Description | Textbooks |
| Chavez | Daniela | WR 40 | Writing about Identity | We will use Personal Essays as our model texts in order to dive into our own identities and learn the power of narrative nonfiction. | Various personal essays posted on Canvas from authors like Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Zadie Smith, Brent Staples, etc. |
| Hyatt | Jacob | WR 45 | Fairy Tales | This course will consider classic fairy tales from all over the world, as well as modern-day and filmic iterations, with the intention of developing knowledge of both genre and rhetoric and critical reading/writing skills. | The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar |
| Nieman | John | WR 45 | American Gothic (horror) | In this section of writing 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. | The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty |
| Wells | Emily | WR 45 | Woolf's Orlando (satire, fantasy, gender in literature) | We examine Woolf's use of satire and fantasy to evade her era's censorship laws | Woolf's Orlando |
| Barbera | Sheryl | WR 50 | Fairy Tales | In this section of WR50, we will explore what fairy tales are, how they work, and why they are so durably meaningful across different cultures. Fairy tales (or “wonder tales”) make up an ubiquitous genre—every society on earth tells fairy tales to adults and children alike. | The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.) |
| Dearborn | Emily | WR 50 | Travel Writing | Our section of WR50 will focus on the genre of travel literature. While you may be familiar with certain travel narratives already, you are not expected to know anything about it prior to the start of class. Our weekly reading and writing assignments will provide you with comprehensive knowledge of travel writing genre conventions, as well as their rhetorical significance. Over the next ten weeks, we will read a variety of travel narratives, as well as academic essays about travel writing. The major writing assignments ask you to analyze travel writing, its genre conventions and rhetorical situations, and ultimately, to apply your knowledge by writing your own travel-related text. | Travel Writing by Carl Thompson |
| Gullaba | Alberto | WR 50 | Naturalism, Moral Satire, and Inner-City Fiction | Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. | |
| Streitfeld | Scott | WR 50 | Speculative Fiction: Gender, Sexuality, and Reproduction | What is speculative fiction? Why has this genre category historically centered experiments with bodies, identities, and forms? These questions will propel our exploration of genre and rhetoric. “Speculative fiction” as a genre term, is the product of debates among writers and critics working in the late-20th and early-21st century, debates about gender, sexuality, and reproduction. But defining any genre category is tricky--are we referring to a set of texts, a logic of inclusion and exclusion, or a set of historical evolutions and processes? Answering these questions requires us to dive into the history of speculative fiction as a term, and to investigate texts in the context of debates over taxonomy, literariness, identity, and politics. | Reading Packets with fiction by Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr, Nino Cipri, Samuel Delany, and the film Everything Everywhere All At Once |
| Atamdede | Aysel | WR 60 | Education Reform | This course will have you investigating education, from grade school to university, and discussing the importance of access to history, context, and resources. We will examine the current atmosphere and rhetoric surrounding the debates on what should be allowed in curriculums, who should be able to decide what is taught, and how access to (or lack of access) proper resources can impact students. | Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch |
| Atkin | Kendra | WR 60 | Environmental Justice | This course thematic focuses on two intersecting sites of inquiry: social justice, and environmentalism. Or "Environmental Justice." We will ask how these two broad social movements are related to one another, discovering how environmental issues disproportionately impact some people more than others on both national and global levels. We will also ask what environmental injustices may exist in our own communities, how social injustice may be at the root of our environmental crisis, and who has a voice in this conversation. | What is Critical Environmental Justice? by David Pellow (handouts given in class) |
| Bell | Korey | WR 60 | Technology and the Future | My theme looks at harmful algorithms dealing with social media and predictive policing. | I use chapters from "AI Ethics" by Mark Coeklebergh. |
| Brouwer | Mo | WR 60 | Climate Change | Climate change theme with a focus on wetlands centring Annie Proulx's "Fen, Bog, and Swamp" | Fen, Bog, and Swamp by Annie Proulx |
| Daher | Pedro | WR 60 | Labor & the Economy | This section of Writing 60 will consider the way people work in the 21st century, the kinds of jobs they do (or don’t do) as well as the wages, benefits, and levels of job security they receive (or don’t receive) for their labor. Much of our discussion will focus on the rise of “gig work” and the “gig economy,” which is to say, the increasing prevalence of work that is temporary, precarious, subcontracted, contingent, casualized. | Louis Hyman’s Temp: The Real Story of What Happened to Your Salary, Benefits, and Job Security (2018) |
| Flores | Brian | WR 60 | Video Games and Technology | In this course we will read about, discuss, and investigate various ways in which video games, video game culture, and related technology interact with culture and society in the U.S. We will also consider the ways in which video games and technological advancements impact current and historical debates. | The Anteater Guide to Writing and Rhetoric (AGWR), 9th Edition; additional reading will be provided |
| Goldman | Matthew | WR 60 | Mass Incarceration | Focuses on issues related to mass incarceration in America | American Prison by Shane Bauer and Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis |
| Hays | Toni | WR 60 | Cyberspace | What is cyberspace? How can conceptualizing cyberspace as space in its own right rather than its representative form of the internet further our understanding of how it functions? What do these fundamental shifts in how we perceive “space” mean, when we discuss the terms “writing” and “research”? Cyberspace is a newfound space that operates under unique, yet as of yet undefined rules, and as such is constantly shifting for better or worse. This course strives to answer the above questions by inviting conversations on how cyberspace functions as an independent space outside of time and physical space. By doing so, this course will serve to challenge how we have come to conceptualize the term “space” and its characteristics have fundamentally shifted how “writing” and “research” are being utilized in a space where information is simultaneously eternal and fleeting, and constantly updated. Through this course, students will be expected to ponder the initial questions by first, recognizing and contemplating what are the characteristics of cyberspace. These include but are not limited to: lack of time zones, physical spaces, and accountability. Second, they will research how these characteristics account for, but also allow for social issues to be exacerbated, created, and/or addressed. These issues include, but are not limited to: Hashtag movements (#MeToo #HongKongProtest #Savetheturtles), Online based movements that have articulated themselves as global physical incidents such as Marches & Protests (Climate, Science, Women’s, BLM, etc.), Online Groups (ANTIFA, Anonymous, Wikileaks), as well as the physical world’s rules’ inability to keep up with issues that do not manifest in a physical space (Cyberbullying, Impersonation, Data Mining etc.). Finally, they will analyze and present the significance of their findings through 1 midterm research paper that describes and expands upon the the causes of the issue of their choosing, and 1 final research paper that describes efforts to help mediate said issue and present next steps. This course will utilize a variety of readings and media to help enable students to understand and analyze various permutations of similar problem across genres such as scholarly/ philosophical material, news articles/ popular resources, and Fiction*. | n/a |
| Hoffer | Rachel | WR 60 | The First Amendment | We study free speech case law throughout 20th century US History | "Free Speech on Campus" |
| Klarin | Andie | WR 60 | Medical Humanities | Students will research topical themes in the field of medical ethics | Various current articles and podcasts about medical news and research relevant to the students research interests |
| Lee | Jungmin | WR 60 | Education as the Practice of Freedom | This course will investigate the meaning and practice of education. While institutional education will indeed play a big part in our inquiry, our priority is in articulating what education means and has meant to us. | AGWR and pdf files will be in Canvas |
| Schubert | Kathryn | WR 60 | Gender, Labor, and Globalization | This course will examine the relationship between gender, labor, and globalization, exploring such topics as transnational families, the invisible labor force, domestic labor and worker protections, immigration, sex tourism, and modern-day slavery. We will think about how these problems—connected to gender, education, economics, culture, and politics—are embedded into a complex world system that often thrives on the exploitation of women of color. | All texts will be provided as PDFs through Canvas (the core text is Ehrenreich & Hochschild's Global Woman, but we are only reading two chapters, so I will provide scans) |
| Tham | Kelin Sophia | WR 60 | Critical Education | Course Description: The theme in this course explores education in relation to power structures, systemic oppression, and empowerment. | Anteater's Guide to Writing and Rhetoric, and all other readings will be provided as PDFs on Canvas. |
| Weinberg | Dara | WR 60 | AI vs. Workers: Artificial Intelligence, Labor, and the Law | This course will explore the ways in which the increasing use of generative AI and/or automation in the workplace have affected the landscape of labor for workers of all kinds, from manual workers to gig workers to those who rely upon intellectual property for their work. Students will focus on a particular kind of labor and, over ten weeks, explore how those jobs and those workers have been affected--or may be affected in the future--by AI and automation. | We will be using journalism and scholarly articles, but texts will be provided via PDFs or links; students are not required to buy textbooks apart from the AGWR. |
| Cibula | Peter | WR 139W | Living in the Sprawl – American “Heartlands” | This course examines the “heartland” as a political, cultural, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and economic category in American culture as a way to understand how disciplinary genres produce and change knowledge. We will continually work against the vagueness of the term and a host of associated terms and language – for instance “Main Street U.S.A.,” “Middle America,” or “Real America.” Our course will take as its starting point the argument, from Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi of Citations Needed, that these terms are euphemisms for suburban and rural white grievance; moving forwards we will consider the ways that the idea of the “heartland” also draws upon a long tradition of pastoral and georgic aesthetics even as it fails to represent the agricultural realities on the ground in the geographic middle of America. We will also examine the ways that American television and film represents this aesthetic “region” and its sexual and political mores. Keeping in mind that the “heartland” is an ideological and political construction that is overlaid on real material conditions, we will also look examine the economic and material realities on the ground of the “heartland” today, which is portrayed as in decay. | All texts provided online |
| Varela | Chris | WR 139W | The "Ends" of Education: Writing through Campus Communities | Taking a cue from a growing interdisciplinarily field of study often referred to as Critical University Studies, our theme this quarter asks you to critically engage with discourse around issues/problems in higher education today as well as explore your own relationships with, interests in, and stakes around your particular fields of study. | Articles and essays provided through CANVAS. |