Syllabi

I have linked below syllabi for the undergraduate courses and graduate seminars I have taught at the University of Connecticut. For those classes that I teach often – Children’s Literature, Young Adult Literature, and Professional Development – I have included my most recent syllabi.

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

ENGL 2101: British Literature II

An undergraduate course enrolling 40 students from across the university, British Literature II explores British literature from Romanticism to modernism. Readings cover a wide variety of genres — poetry, essays, novels, short stories, and children’s literature — and class discussions consider both texts’ formal elements and how authors represent and respond to historical, cultural, and political contexts. To provide structure through this broad span of literary history, the course pays particular attention to how each period represents growth and development.

ENGL 3119W: Modern British Literature

A writing-intensive undergraduate course enrolling 19 students, this class explores modern British literature in context through the theme of new voices and sounds. Students read texts by writers from George Bernard Shaw to Tom Stoppard alongside cultural and historical shifts that transformed the literature and art of twentieth-century England. Included on the syllabus are soldier-poets who crafted new representations of war, female writers who subverted heteropatriarchal narratives, Imagists who redefined the voice of poetry, city environments full of new sounds and movements, imperial voices that reflected and reformed the language of the empire, and regional dialects that disrupted and harmonized with London accents.

ENGL 3420: Children’s Literature

This course, an undergraduate class enrolling 40 students, explores a range of children’s literature in English, including fairy tales, picture books, fantasy, nonsense, poetry, and historical fiction. The primary task of the course is to help students think critically about what these texts tell us about literature for young readers, what children’s literature reveals about how we (and others) understand childhood, and how these books participate in larger movements of history and culture.

ENGL 3422: Young Adult Literature

Enrolling 40 undergraduates and designed for juniors and seniors within and without the English major, this course approaches young adult literature in all its critical complexity, focusing on the historical, social, and aesthetic factors that shape the genre. Students think about YA texts as cultural artifacts that reveal important information about the construction of adolescence and as literary texts approachable through a range of critical frameworks, including theories of narrative, gender, and trauma.

ENGL 4600W: Once or Twice upon a Time: Fairy Tales and Adaptations

Advanced Studies are small, writing-intensive, seminar-style courses designed for senior English majors. This seminar examines fairy tales and their transformation across place, time, and genre. The reading list includes stories considered fundamental to the fairy tale canon, primarily from Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, as well as narratives inspired by those stories for a spectrum of audiences, including children’s and young adult literature, novels, short fiction, poetry, and graphic narrative. Throughout, students are attentive to the tales’ historical and cultural contexts; to how they respond to critical lenses such as queer theory, psychoanalytic theory, and adaptation theory; and to the shifting cultural discourses that surround fairy tales and their retellings.

GRADUATE SEMINARS

ENGL 5160: Professional Development

This seminar, required for the English PhD program, provides graduate students the opportunity to discuss the contours and direction of their intellectual careers at UConn and beyond. Readings and assignments balance theoretical and practical approaches to academia and their intersections. Throughout the semester, I explore with students larger issues of the profession, such as the myriad cultures of academia, the politics of diversity and difference in university settings, and the changing nature of the academic job market, including opportunities for non-faculty employment. Students also develop concrete strategies to navigate the professional expectations that underpin a career in the academy: publishing in scholarly journals, writing and responding to readers’ reports (which involves some vital talk about failure in academia), presenting and networking at conferences, thinking strategically about research and teaching agendas, applying for grants and fellowships, composing instrumental documents such as teaching philosophies and research statements, and designing effective and relevant syllabi for undergraduate courses.

ENGL 5200: Children’s Literature

This seminar is designed as a survey of critical approaches to children’s literature for graduate students inside and outside the field. The course takes advantage of the generic messiness of literature for young people, using its unpredictability and polyvalence to approach it with a range of theoretical tools. Students consider perennial questions related to the field — including matters of definition and history, audience and author, and word and image — as well as newer debates — including matters of child agency, shifting generic boundaries, and the advantages and challenges of interdisciplinary approaches to child culture.

ENGL 6200: Becoming Boys: Children’s Literature and Masculinity

This seminar examines constructions of boyhood in British and American children’s literature, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and moving forward through the mid-twentieth. Students explore shifting paradigms of boyhood in a variety of genres — adventure stories, dime novels, comics, school stories, feral child tales, and others — considering how ideas of young masculinity vary across time and space and are inflected by race, class, and sexuality. Readings are situated in their historical contexts (such as the Boer War, the Scouting movement, and Muscular Christianity) as well as in critical contexts from children’s literature and gender studies.

ENGL 6345: Around 1900: Apes, Aesthetes, and Auras in British Literature and Culture

This seminar investigates the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in England as a moment of cultural and historical border-crossing — a moment that crystallizes ideas and debates that both look back to the great social changes that marked the Victorian period and carry forward into modernism. In particular, the seminar examines some of the period’s most resonant conflicts and concepts in science, art, politics, and gender, such as degeneration, sexology, psychical research, Decadence, Aestheticism, the New Woman, and imperial decline. Through a range of genres (novels, short stories, essays, children’s literature, poetry, and art) considered both “high” and “low” culture, students interrogate how authors and artists responded to, reinforced, or rejected the changing intellectual climate at the fin-de-siècle.

ENGL 6345: Growing Up Victorian

This seminar explores nineteenth-century culture through the child, real and imagined. From Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist to Henry Mayhew’s match girl and James Sully’s evolutionary child specimen, children and representations of them bring to the fore discourses of subjecthood and human development, progress, class, nation, empire, science, gender, and sexuality. After an initial review of a few cornerstone texts, primary and critical, we read literature for children and adults and explore textual and visual artifacts of Victorian childhood in four overlapping settings: in the classroom, on the streets, in the colonies, and in the laboratory. While one seminar cannot provide an exhaustive exploration of all elements of nineteenth-century childhood, these focal points offer a representative survey of the many uses to which childhood was put — and, occasionally, how children and adults acknowledged, revised, or challenged those cultural scripts.