English course descriptions
The following is a list of course descriptions for the Fall 2023 semester.
- Courses are listed by subject (e.g., Cinema and Media Studies, Linguistics, etc.)
- Course titles are included, along with the instructor name (e.g., ENG 202: Film Analysis and Interpretation (Coake), with full descriptions in each accordion
Silver Core Curriculum courses
The following English courses fulfill Silver Core Curriculum requirements:
- CO9: ENG 412D (Clayton)
- CO10: ENG 413A (Donelson)
- CO13: END 401B (Macauley)
- CO14: END 499B (Fusco)
Rhetoric and Writing courses
Instructor: Anushka Peres
Scholars often claim that arguments are everywhere. From written texts to family conversations to visual advertisements— we are obsessed with arguments. This course wonders why. In this class, we learn about theories of persuasion and analyze arguments in a range of modalities (visual, textile, sonic, embodied, etc.) while we trace the consequences and rewards of argumentation. We consider the role of citizenship and the desires for rights, recognition, and belonging working alongside the injunction to argue. In doing so, we inquire into non-dominant knowledge and ways communicating that emerge beyond argumentation and beyond the push for acceptance in settler societies.
Instructor: Ellery Sills
Survey of argumentation practices in Western and non-Western traditions and new media. Emphasis on written arguments.
Instructor: Beth Greene
This course will help students develop as a writer beyond the introductory level. We’ll focus on extending flexibility and preparation to address a range of writing situations that will arise across majors and in future professions. We will begin with writing in the major, extend that to a workplace-oriented project, and end with a professional portfolio. This course is designed to be practically useful, so student interests, questions, and professional goals will guide what students choose to research and write about.
Instructor: Patrick Harris
Writing of contemporary nonfiction modes.
Instructor: James Webber
What is “document design”? When this course was created at the University of Nevada, Reno, document design meant adding headers, columns, and images to text. Today, “documents” can mean anything from PDFs to websites to presentations, and “design” can mean choices of what to do with text, like fonts and spacing, as well as choices other than text, such as sound, image, and movement. This class will introduce design thinking as a method of adapting writing for different rhetorical situations and uses, and students will create documents for classroom, university, and public audiences.
Instructor: Anushka Peres
In this course, we will inquire into the ways in which various aspects of media-- from algorithms to hashtags to technology’s physical materials-- both constrain and enable users. Drawing from feminist digital media theories, we will analyze and produce digital compositions ranging from games to stories, story-maps to apps. We will critique and create media texts and experiment with various technological platforms, like ChatGPT and Instagram. In so doing, students will cultivate intentional engagement with and across digital media landscapes and build critical awareness of the nuances of knowledge, power, and access circulating in digital environments.
Instructor: Chris Earle
This class will expose students to two important modes of community writing: advocacy and public policy writing. To this end, we will partner with the Nevada Prison Education Project whose mission is to help bring higher education opportunities to all Nevada state prisons. Drawing from scholarly literature on education and the criminal justice system, as well as from discussions with formerly incarcerated students and educators, students will compose a range of advocacy and policy documents, including oral histories and digital profiles, policy briefs and op-eds.
This class fulfills CO14.
Instructor: Elisabeth Miller
Disability Studies has complicated understandings of disability as a medical or individual “problem,” turning attention, instead, toward how our built and social worlds are so often designed for “normal” bodies and minds. In turn, Disability Studies insists on accounting for and valuing the experiences and insights of disabled people. This course explores the exciting theoretical, practical, pedagogical, and institutional intersections between Disability Studies and Writing Studies. Reading and producing scholarly, creative, and activist materials, we will ask what it means to write; how bodies, materials, and technologies matter for writing; and how disability should influence the teaching of writing.
Literature courses
Instructor: Aaron Schneeberger
This class focuses on U.S. writers of color from the early 20th century to the present. It is divided into three units, each focusing on a different era and set of thematic concerns. Unit one addresses how writings from the early 20th century, focusing on the Harlem Renaissance, articulate and wrestle with ideas like ethnic and cultural identity, community, and selfhood. Unit two addresses intersections of ethnic, gender, and sexual identity in texts from the 1950s through the 1980s. Unit three focuses on writings from the 1990s to the present, addressing themes like multiculturalism, borders, and globalization.
Instructor: Jen Hill
“The Romantic Tradition” will introduce you to the cultural history and representative poetry, prose, politics, and theory of the aesthetic movement known as Romanticism. Economic uncertainty? Social inequality and racism? Environmental depredation? Political instability? How does literary culture respond to and shape resistance? Our own moment shares a lot with the Romantic moment. Focusing on developments in “media” at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain, we’ll try to understand Romantic writers in their own contexts and their relevance to our moment by reading literature and philosophy of early nineteenth-century Britain by Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Ottabah Cugoano, Percy Byshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley and others. In addition to comprehending the central tensions of what we now call “Romanticism” and understanding how Romantic aesthetics are part of larger cultural movements that still exist and reverberate today, you will have opportunities to sharpen your critical and creative reading and writing skills, focusing on reading and writing (about) poetry and prose.
Instructor: James Mardock
Devils, Alchemists, and Other Perverts: the plays of Marlowe and Jonson: In this course, we’ll be reading the work of the two English poet-playwrights who’d be the most famous of their generation if it weren’t for their pesky rival, Shakespeare. The plays of the atheist spy Christopher Marlowe and the jailbird poet laureate Ben Jonson feature devil worshippers, con men, quacks, queer kings, scheming Machiavels, cross-dressers, plagues, poison, and fake fairies. These two outrageous geniuses, in comedy, tragedy, and lyric, strike at the heart of the human experience and the social upheaval of Renaissance England, lampooning the conflicts arising from new early modern conceptions of gender and race, emergent capitalism, and religious controversy, using drama to ask what it means to have an individual self in a chaotic world.
Instructor: Ashley Marshall
This course covers some of the most important plays, 19th century to the present. Our works will include Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House—about marriage and gender expectations; G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion—about the games we play to fit in socially; Samuel Beckett’s existential masterpiece, Waiting for Godot; August Wilson’s Fences, about race relations in 1950s America; Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, about the price of ambition; and Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night, about a Jamaican immigrant family dealing with sudden and cumulative grief. There will be a special focus on adaptation: we’ll spend time on page vs. stage/screen versions of our works.
Instructor: Ashley Marshall
We’ll read several masterpieces of British fiction, from the 19th century to now. Among others: Charlotte Brontë’s gothic-romantic Jane Eyre; the gender-bending fantasy Orlando (Virginia Woolf); the provocative Northern Irish Milkman (Anna Burns); and Bernardine Evaristo’s multi-generational Girl, Woman, Other, revealing a very different Britain from the earlier novels. We’ll be reading of class wars; generational conflict; clashes between families, religions, societies; the logic and justice (or not) of social conventions; the way the past and present are transformed by “modernity.” We’ll encounter huge changes in the ways novels were written and narrated, exploring the implications of this formal experimentation.
Instructor: Katherine Fusco
In this class will consider some of the major themes and challenges of the U.S. Novel in the 20th century, centering on the question of the self’s relationship to others and to a broader American society. We will discuss topics such as subjectivity and alienation in the modernist novel, the constraint of gender roles at midcentury, and the weight of historical legacy in postmodern fiction. Please note that this class will have a strong focus on themes of gender, race, and sexuality. Novels we will read works from William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Julie Otsuka.
Instructor: Nasia Anam
Intro to Postcolonial Studies: In this seminar we will explore the relationship between colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization. What are the long-lasting legacies of colonialism through the eras of decolonization and into our globalized present? What are the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic effects of theHi colonial encounter and its aftermath? How does the history of colonialism influence the ways we think about race, identity, migration, and citizenship today? We will examine literature, theory and film by Rudyard Kipling, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Deepa Mehta, and Gillo Pontecorvo.
Instructor: Dan Morse
Writing about James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot remarked sagely that “it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” This course interrogates Eliot’s suggestion by reading Ulysses and some of the many novels written in response, from recent examples like Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935). The course assumes no familiarity with Joyce: all who are curious about the genre of the novel are welcome into this supportive reading community.
Instructor: Katherine Fusco
This class will focus on U.S. literature from the early twentieth century to the present to consider the relationship between gender and genre. We will discuss literary genres that have been important to the construction of masculine and feminine identities, the gendering of certain genres and readerships, and the way gender itself operates much like a genre via repeated codes and scripts. In particular, we will be reading from the following genres: noirs, melodrama, romance, and science fiction. We will read Fannie Hurst, James M. Cain, Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Hughes, Octavia Butler, and Carmen Maria Machado.
Linguistics courses
Instructor: Ignacio Montoya
In this course, we will explore fundamental questions about language. Among the topics we will investigate are the following: the basic nature of language (what exactly is language?), variation within and across languages, how languages change over time, the connection between language and writing, the nature of multilingualism, core concepts in the field of linguistics, and basic ideas from the primary subfields of linguistics. Our explorations will focus both on English and on a wide variety of other languages from around the world.
Instructor: Ian Clayton
This course will provide an introduction to modern syntactic theory, with an emphasis on the Principles and Parameters approach to formal syntax in the Chomskyan tradition. The course will cover parts of speech, constituency, structural relations, binding, and the X-bar model of representation. Functional categories, theta theory, and movement will also be considered. Data from a wide variety of languages will be considered in addition to English.
Instructor: Ignacio Montoya
This course focuses on morphology, which is the structure of words. Among the questions we will address are the following: What exactly is a word? What are words made up of? How are words related to one another? How is word structure related to sound structure and to sentence structure? How many different ways are there to organize words across languages? In order to answer these questions, we will consider linguistic patterns from English and a wide variety of languages, many of which have patterns that are very distinctive from English. This course fulfills the CO9 Silver Core requirement.
Instructor: Ian Clayton
ENG 414A investigates the history of the English language, emphasizing the medieval and early modern periods. We examine both the linguistic aspects of English and its sociohistorical context. We begin with the Indo-European origins of English, before moving to the Anglo-Saxon era, where we consider the earliest works of English literature, from Beowulf to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. We then turn to the massive reorganization of English during the Middle English period, pausing to appreciate writers as diverse as Layamon, Orm, and Chaucer. We move thence into the Early Modern era of Shakespeare. Finally, we will discuss contemporary developments in English.
Cinema and Media Studies courses
Instructor: Christopher Coake
The course introduces the critical study and interpretation of film art, exploring aspects of film style and basic theoretical concerns while presenting a survey of important film genres, both narrative and non-narrative. Students will watch feature-length film on their own time in preparation for class discussion, and will write and take exams on concepts introduced via discussion, a course textbook, and various online readings. Contact Prof. Coake (cjcoake@unr.edu) with questions.
The course fulfills CO7.
Creative Writing courses
Instructor: Joanne Mallari
This course will explore writing processes in fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. Students will draft, workshop, and revise original work in all three genres. By submitting workshop critiques and responding to assigned readings, students will develop strategies for interpreting and evaluating creative work. English 205 prepares students for the upper division creative writing workshops, in addition to satisfying core objectives CO1 and CO7. For questions regarding the course, please contact Joanne Mallari via email: jmallari@unr.edu.
This course fulfills CO7.
Instructor: Christopher Coake
This seminar for residential MFA fiction writers will focus on the workshopping of student-produced fiction, either stories or excerpts from longer works. In addition, students will write critiques of their classmates’ works, as well as complete other smaller assignments that enable them to practice self-assessment. We will also read and analyze a selection of published fiction, as well as texts on fictional craft. (MAs/PhDs may enroll, but should email Professor Coake at cjcoake@unr.edu to discuss the class, and their experience writing fiction, before doing so.)