About UW20

Because all UW20 sections are theme-based, with their own individualized readings and writing assignments, it's important that you peruse the course descriptions below to find a theme that is of interest to you.

REQUIREMENTS: The following requirements and workload expectations are consistent across all sections of UW20. Students will complete a total of 25-30 pages of finished writing, developed through a process that may include pre-draft preparation, drafts, and revisions based on instructor's advice and classmates' comments. Each student will complete at least three writing assignments of increasing complexity. Papers will be based on assigned texts and often on additional reading; although instructors will develop assignments that reflect a variety of academic writing projects, one paper will require significant research.

COURSE LISTINGS BY INSTRUCTOR AND DATE/TIME

M Lee. Alexander - Detective Fiction as Art and Social Commentary
CRN 74349 Section 47 | M 1420 - 1510 ( 1957 E B14 ) & WF 1420 - 1535 ( 2020 K 9 )
CRN 75093 Section 83 | MF 11:10am-12:25pm ( 2020 K 22 ) & W 11:10am-12:00pm (1957 E 311)

Emily Bliss - Blacks and Whites in America
CRN 74359 Section 58 | MF 1110 - 1225 ( 1957 E 111 ) & W 1110 - 1200 ( 1957 E 111 )
CRN 74347 Section 45 | M 1420 - 1510 ( FNGR 208 ) & WF 1420 - 1535 ( 2020 K 16 )
CRN 75094 Section 57 | MF 1545 - 1700 ( ROME 352 ) & W 1555 - 1645 ( 1957 E 601J )

Nicholas Boggs - Gender, Sexuality, and Literature
CRN 74046 Section 29 | F 0800 - 0850 ( ROME 202 ) & MW 0800 - 0915 ( BELL 105 )
CRN 74348 Section 46 | M 0935 - 1025 ( ROME 351 ) & WF 0935 - 1050 ( 2020 K 21 )

Christine Choy - Class, Identity, and Writing
CRN 74042 Section 25 | F 0935 - 1025 ( MPA 305 ) & TR 0935 - 1050 ( 1776 G 101 )

Eric Drown - Conspiracy : Theory
CRN 74034 Section 15 | F 0935 - 1025 ( DUQUES 361 ) & TR 0935 - 1050 ( 1957 E 311 )
CRN 74336 Section 33 | F 1245 - 1335 ( ROME 352 ) & TR 1245 - 1400 ( 2020 K 8 )

Brian Flota - Is The Louvre In Your Room?: The Artistry Of The Album
CRN 74352 Section 50 | M 1420 - 1510 ( MPA 302 ) & WF 1420 - 1535 ( OM 305 )
CRN 74357 Section 55 | MF 1545 - 1700 ( PHIL 109 ) & W 1555 - 1645 ( 1957 E B14 )

Sandie Friedman - Culture and Memory
CRN 74339 Section 36 | F 1110 - 1200 ( 1957 E 315 ) & TR 1110 - 1225 (1776 G 109)
CRN 74031 Section 12 | F 1245 - 1335 ( ROME 202 ) & TR 1245 - 1400 ( 1957 E 311 )
CRN 74338 Section 34 | F 1420 - 1510 ( ROME 201 ) & TR 1420 - 1535 ( 2020 K, 24)

Cayo Gamber - Legacies of the Holocaust
NOTE: These are hybrid courses
CRN 75070 Section 65 | MW 0935 - 1050 ( 2020 K 25 ) & F 0935 - 1025 (ONLINE)
CRN 74033 Section 14 | MW 1245 - 1400 ( 2020 K 6 ) & F 1245 - 1335 (ONLINE)

Gustavo Guerra - On the Lyric Essay
CRN 74334 Section 30 | F 0800 - 0850 ( PHIL 414B ) & TR 0800 - 0915 ( DUQUES 360 )
CRN 74335 Section 31 | F 0935 - 1025 ( COR 111 ) & TR 0935 - 1050 ( 2020 K 21 )

Stephanie Hartman - Food Fights: The Cultural Politics of What We Eat
NOTE: These are hybrid courses
CRN 74356 Section 54 | MF 1545 - 1700 ( ROME 202 ) & W 1555 -1645 ( BELL 1058 )
CRN 75071 Section 66 | F 0935 - 1025 ( 1776 G 107 ) & MW 0935 - 1050 ( 1957 E 601M )
CRN 75086 Section 80 | MF 11:10am-12:25pm (1957 E 601K) & W 11:10am-12:00pm
(MPA 302 )

Carol Hayes- New York, New York
CRN 74351 Section 49 | M 0935 - 1025 ( DUQUES 358 ) & WF 0935 - 1050 ( OM 305 )
CRN 74353 Section 51 | MF 1110 - 1225 ( DUQUES 362 ) & W 1110 - 1200 ( PHIL 110 )

Ryan Jerving - Uncommon Knowledge: Intellectual Property and Public Culture
CRN 74036 Section 18 | F 0800 - 0850 ( PHIL 417 ) & TR 0800 - 0915 ( GELM 402 )

Ryan Jerving - U Are Here: Higher Learning Meets the 21st Century
CRN 74035 Section 16 | F 0935 - 1025 ( TOMP 202 ) & TR 0935 - 1050 ( 1957 E 315 )

David Johnson - Names for Themselves: The Making of Abraham(s), Madonna(s), Mohammad (s), and Martin Luther(s)
CRN 75076 Section 74 | M 0800 - 0850 ( PHIL 217 ) & WF 0800 - 0915 ( GELM 609 )
CRN 75074 Section 70 | F 0935 - 1025 ( 1957 E, 308 ) & MW 0935 - 1050 ( 1957 E 111 )

Jennifer Joyce Kissko - Homeless Chic? Poverty, Privilege, & Identity in Contemporary American Democracy
CRN 76802 Section 17 | F 0800 - 0850 ( PHIL 111 ) & TR 0800 0915 ( DUQUES 250 )
CRN 74041 Section 24 | TR 9:35am-10:50am (1957 E 601L) & F 9:35am-10:25am (MPA 302)

Randi Kristenen - Poets of the Underdog
CRN 74360 Section 59 | MF 1110 - 1225 ( 1957 E 311 ) & W 1110 - 1200 ( FNGR 220 )
CRN 74355 Section 53 | MF 1545 - 1700 ( ROME 201 ) & W 1555 - 1645 ( 2020 K 16 )

Kathy Larsen - The Real Thing
CRN 74032 Section 13 | F 0800 - 0850 ( 1957 E 313 ) & MW 0800 - 0915 ( 1957 E 313 )
CRN 74346 Section 44 | M 0935 - 1025 ( PHIL 111 ) & WF 0935 - 1050 ( 1776 G 101 )

Derek Malone-France - Reading (and Writing) the Constitution
CRN 75089 Section 86 | TF 0800 - 0940 ( PHIL 109 )
CRN 75090 Section 87 | TF 1110 - 1250 ( ROME 201 )
CRN 75091 Section 85 | TF 1420 - 1600 ( GELM 502 )

Diane Matlock - City Stories: Washington, DC--Past, Present, and Future
CRN 74039 Section 21 | F 0800 - 0850 ( ROME 201 ) & TR 0800 - 0915 ( GELM 502 )
CRN 74038 Section 20 | F 0935 - 1025 ( GELM 607 ) & TR 0935 - 1050 ( 1957 E 601K )

Rachel McLaughlin - Is Another World Possible?: Ecology, Feminism, and Postmodernity
CRN 74350 Section 48 | M 0935 - 1025 ( ROME 352 ) & WF 0935 - 1050 ( 2020 K 8 )
CRN 74358 Section 56 | MF 1110 - 1225 ( MPA 208 ) & W 1110 - 1200 ( ROME 352 )

Meghan Mercier - Mortal Refrains: Childhood, Death, and History
CRN 75069 Section 64 | F 0800 - 0850 ( PHIL 110 ) & MW 0800 - 0915 ( MPA 305 )

Mark Mullen - I’m Game! Exploring the Art, Science and Economics of Electronic Games
NOTE: These are hybrid courses
CRN 74366 Section M5 | TR 1130 - 1245 ( ACAD 301 ) & F 1130 - 1220 ( ONLINE )
CRN 74367 Section M6 | TR 1300 - 1415 ( ACAD 301 ) & F 1300 - 1350 ( ONLINE )

Duc Nguyen - TBA
CRN 75068 Section 63 | MW 8:00am-9:15am (BELL 108) & F 8:00am-8:50am (PHIL 416)
CRN 75087 Section 81 | M 0935 - 1025 ( DUQUES 360 ) & WF 0935 - 1050 ( 2020 K 11 )

Pam Presser - Firing the American Canon: Symbolic Struggle and Cultural Wars
CRN 76805 Section 69 | M 1420 - 1510 ( 2020 K 20 ) & WF 1420 - 1535 ( 2020 K 20 )
CRN 75075 Section 71 | M 1555 - 1645 ( GELM 502 ) & WF 1545 - 1700 ( GELM 609 )

Rachel Riedner - Writing from the Margins: Graffiti Artists and Subaltern Writers
CRN 74340 Section 37 | F 0935 - 1025 ( 2020 K 6 ) & TR 0935 - 1050 ( 1776 G 107 )
CRN 74341 Section 38 | F 1245 - 1335 ( GELM 609 ) & TR 1245 - 1400 ( 2020 K 11 )

Matt Riley - The Loss of Contact
CRN 75088 Section 82 | M 1420 - 1510 ( 1776 G 170 ) & WF 1420 - 1535 ( 1957 E B14 )
CRN 75092 Section 84 | MF 1545 - 1700 ( ROME 206 ) & W 1555 - 1645 ( 1776 G 107 )

Robert Rubin - On Pilgrimage
NOTE: These courses are taught at the Mount Vernon campus
CRN 75083 Section M15 | F 1130 - 1310 ( ACAD 331 ) & M 1130 - 1310 ( ACAD 331 )
CRN 75084 Section M16 | F 1430 - 1610 ( ACAD 301 ) & M 1430 - 1610 ( ACAD 301 )

Phyllis Ryder - Writing Matters: On Public Writing and Writing Publics
NOTE: These are hybrid courses
These courses will be taught at the Mount Vernon Campus
CRN 76809 Section M18 | MW 1300 - 1415 ( ACAD 329 ) & F 1300 - 1350 (ONLINE )
CRN 76810 Section M19 | MW 1430 - 1545 ( ACAD 304 ) & F 1430 - 1520 ( ONLINE )

Lauren Sallinger - TBA
CRN 74361 Section 39 | MF at 3:45pm-5:00pm (PHIL 110) & W 3:55pm-4:45pm (2020 K 21)
CRN 75067 Section 61 | MW 8:00am-9:15am ( BELL 106 ) & F 8:00am-8:50am ( PHIL 415 )

Heather Schell - Fan Fiction 101: Media Fandom and Internet Writing Communities
NOTE: These are hybrid courses
CRN 76803 Section 22 | TR 0935 - 1050 ( 1957 E 601J ) & F 0935 - 1025 ( ONLINE )
CRN 74044 Section 26 | R 1110 - 1225 ( 2020 K 24 ) & T 1110 1225 ( 2020 K 16 ) & F 1110 - 1200 ( ONLINE )

Sylvie Shapero - Class as an Important Category of Difference
CRN 76806 Section 73 | M 0935 - 1025 ( DUQUES 362 ) & WF 0935 - 1050 ( 2020 K 13 )

Caroline Smith - Chick Lit: Writing about Women’s “Literature”
These courses will be taught at the Mount Vernon Campus
CRN 74043 Section M1 | F 1000 - 1050 ( ACAD 306 ) & MW 1000 - 1115 ( ACAD 306 )
CRN 74342 Section M7 | F 1130 - 1220 ( ACAD 129 ) & MW 1130 - 1245 ( ACAD 129 )
CRN 75096 Section M10 | F 1300 - 1350 ( ACAD 312 ) & MW 1300 - 1415 ( ACAD 312 )

Michael Svoboda - Warming, Local Ecologies
These courses will be taught at the Mount Vernon Campus
CRN 75080 Section M12 | MW 1000 - 1140 ( ACAD 301 )
CRN 75078 Section M9 | MW 1300 - 1440 (LIBR PRVB)
CRN 75081 Section M13 | MW 1500 - 1640 ( ACAD 302 )

Phillip Troutman - Serious Comics:  Graphic Novels and Animé as History?
CRN 74362 Section 41 | M 0935 - 1025 ( DUQUES 359 ) & WF 0935 - 1050 ( 2020 K 10 )
CRN 74344 Section 42 | M 1420 - 1510 ( TOMP 201 ) & WF 1420 - 1535 ( 1776 G 170 )

David Truncellito - The Sixties
These courses will be taught at the Mount Vernon Campus
NOTE: These are hybrid courses
CRN 74363 Section M2 | MW 1130 - 1245 ( ACAD 302 ) & F 1130 - 1220 ( ONLINE )
CRN 74364 Section M3 | MW 1430 - 1545 ( ACAD 306 ) & F 1430 - 1520 ( ONLINE )

Belinda Wallace - Reading the Black Female Body: Race, Gender, and Representation.
CRN 75072 Section 67 | F 0935 - 1025 ( 1776 G 105 ) & MW 0935 - 1050 ( 2020 K 27 )
CRN 76804 Section 62 | F 0800 - 0850 ( ROME 351 ) & MW 0800 - 0915 ( COR 106 )

Aimee Weinstein - Language and Society
CRN 74030 Section 11 | F 0935 - 1025 ( 1957 E B14 ) & TR 0935 1050 ( GELM 609 )
CRN 74045 Section 27 | TR 2:20pm-3:35pm ( 2020 K 9 ) & F 2:20pm-3:10pm ( PHIL 417 )

Aliya Weise - Beasts Within: Animals, Ethic, & Literature
CRN 74047 Section 28 | MW 8:00am-9:15am ( MPA 302 ) & F 8:00am-8:50am (PHIL 414A)

Lauren Weisholz - Feminist Utopias: Writing New Worlds
CRN 74343 Section 40 | M 0935 - 1025 ( PHIL 110 ) & WF 0935 - 1050 ( 1957 E 601L )

Abby Wilkerson - The Food Voice
CRN 74037 Section 19 | F 0935 - 1025 ( GELM 608 ) & TR 0935 - 1050 ( 1957 E 316 )
CRN 74337 Section 32 | F 1110 - 1200 ( 2020 K 21 ) & TR 1110 - 1225 ( BELL 105)
CRN 75095 Section 35 | F 1245 - 1335 ( GELM 502 ) & TR 1245 - 1400 ( 2020 K 27 )

Zachary Wolfe - Law as a Force for Social Change
CRN 74345 Section 43 | M 2:20pm-3:10pm (DUQUES 258) & WF 2:20pm-3:35pm (2020 K 6)
CRN 74354 Section 52 | MF 3:45pm-5:00pm (PHIL 413) & W 3:55pm-4:45pm (1776 G 102)

Robbin Zeff - Political Junkie: Writing About Politics in the Nation's Capital
These courses will be taught at the Mount Vernon Campus >

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

M. Lee Alexander - Detective Fiction as Art and Social Commentary

Detective fiction makes a worthy study for analysis because of its broad appeal, literary merit, and role as a reflection on society. Its authors have branched out into a myriad of subgenres & created unique and ingenious sleuths who keep the reader guessing, and also thinking. Studying detective fiction lays a solid foundation for building writing skills as we draw from the progression of thought, logic, and deduction in the narratives to create papers that build to a convincing conclusion through compelling argument and reason.

Emily Bliss - Blacks and Whites in America

Last year comedian Dave Chappelle walked away -- abruptly and without any prior explanation -- from a $50 million contract and a hit television show. His reasons, he later articulated to Oprah, included a concern he had become “socially irresponsible” in his portrayals of black people – and that some white members of his audience were laughing at him, not with him. In 2002 Cornel West, an African-American scholar and author, left his black studies professorship at Harvard after a series of conflicts with white Harvard president Lawrence Summers. West charged Summers with showing inadequate support for affirmative action and with rebuking West for his release of a rap album.

These two highly publicized events provoke important questions about tensions between whites and blacks in our culture, in the mass media, and in our personal lives. Despite the way news outlets covered these events and others like them – as discrete occurrences – these incidents are not free agents in human chronology, unattached from historical narrative and unweighted by the freight of our social and cultural pasts. In this intensive writing and researching course we will contextualize black-white relations in contemporary society by connecting the present to the past.

Drawing from two centuries of literature – including the work of James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, John Howard Griffin, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Booker T. Washingon and Cornel West – we will confront what seem to be modern questions: What is race, and how does it function in our society? In our public and private conversations about race, what is the role of humor? Of political correctness? Why does de facto segregation exist within integrated American high schools and universities? Should we have affirmative action? Do race-based categorizations and labels – e.g., African-American studies programs, African-American literature and perhaps even this course – help or harm us? How are blacks and whites represented on our computer, television, and movie screens, and how do those depictions affect us?

This course will challenge your ability to analyze information, connect superficially unrelated concepts, and sever ties among seemingly related ideas. As we study argument, narrative, evidence and language, we will come to view our daily world as an exciting realm of imbedded questions and implications. Part of this substantial work will entail a 20-page research paper that analyzes race in either a historical, literary or cultural context. In addition to your project, you will write several smaller creative papers.

Nicholas Boggs - Gender, Sexuality, and Literature

Gender, according to conventional wisdom, is one of the most natural of all phenomena. The categories of man and woman define who we are, the roles we play in society, the way we look, and how we think of ourselves. Similarly, sexual orientation is often considered as fixed as either heterosexual or homosexual. Literature, however, often tells a different story. This writing-intensive seminar explores a selection of novels, short stories, and critical essays that complicate traditional categories of gender and sexuality. In doing so, we will be particularly concerned with understanding what literary representation can teach us about the social construction of gender and sexuality, and how these identities are formed in a dynamic relation to other categories of difference such as race, nation, and class. We will study literary works by authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jamaica Kincaid, Honore de Balzac, James Baldwin, Dorothy Baker, Nella Larsen, and Leslie Feinberg. Through a series of analytical papers and a final research paper, students will acquire skills for academic writing that will allow them to engage some of the central scholarly texts from gender and sexuality studies by authors such as Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick.

Christine Choy - Class, Identity, and Writing

The theme of this writing-intensive course will be class and how it shapes our identity. We will read novels, poems, and critical essays that examine class as a critical apparatus through which to understand identity, including, but not limited to, race, gender, sexual orientation. Texts for the course include Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own , Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto , and Carlos Bulosan America is in the Heart .

In any writing, be it academic, personal, narrative, etc., identity – our individual lives, experiences, and thoughts, play a role in what we produce. Some of the best writing produced, (once again, be it academic or otherwise) recognize and embrace this fact, incorporating and interweaving their identity and thinking to produce critical and engaging works. However, there are many determinants of identity: race, gender, sexual orientation, culture – more than can possibly be listed in one course description, or covered in one course. Therefore, in this course we can examine only one determinant of identity in an in-depth manner – class.

This class will teach students how to think critically and apply that thinking into writing academic arguments. Students will shape their own individual writing projects, culminating in a major, in-depth research paper. Within this research paper, students are expected to think and research critically on a variety of texts that provide useful information and evidence on their research ideas, and to use that research to write thoughtfully, analytically, and creatively on their research ideas.

Eric Drown - Conspiracy : Theory

University Writing 20 aims to enhance first-year students' abilities to read, think, and write critically, as well as to equip them with university-level research and project-management tools. In these sections, we'll meet these goals by studying conspiracy theories and the people who create them. On first glance conspiracy theory hardly seems worth studying. What, after all, can be learned from reading the writings of paranoid crackpots given to delusional accounts of the world? But, as you will see, conspiracy theory is a form of thinking to which most Americans subscribe at one time or another to explain some aspects of their lives. Moreover, it is a form of writing with some significant parallels to university writing. Both academics and conspiracy theorists conduct extensive research, use elaborated arguments to convince others to see things their way, and circulate their work in highly critical public arenas. By developing sophisticated analytical methods and conducting first-hand research in conspiracy communities, you'll learn to see conspiracy theorists as astute, if eccentric, observers of society. More importantly, you'll learn how to use academic research and writing to formulate and answer questions that are more than merely academic. Writing assignments may include critical interpretations of select conspiracy theories, an original synthesis of primary sources, and a research-based essay, as well as participation in an online discussion group. Other assignments as necessary.

Brian Flota - Is The Louvre In Your Room?: The Artistry Of The Album

Just as people cherish Picasso's Guernica , the Taj Mahal, Shakespeare's King Lear , Welles' Citizen Kane , Michelangelo's David or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the album has produced its share of masterpieces. Certain albums—such as The Beatles' Abbey Road , Nirvana's Nevermind or NaS' Illmatic —are pieces of artistic expression that often make people reflect back to a specific moment in time in their lives. They also have the ability to move them to pursue areas of experience or intellectual curiosity that might not have otherwise seemed intriguing. In this class, we will examine the ways the sequential ordering of music—the songs and sounds on an album—into a single package can serve to increase our attentiveness to details as writers, analysts and researchers. What are the unwritten rules of “album-making”? What is the role of cover art and liner notes in the listening experience? How are artists marketed? What makes “great” or “horrible” albums? Is it musicality, anti-musicality, the importance of sales figures or the political content of the lyrics and music? How does the powerful critical apparatus that has formed the various lists of “essential” albums shape our assessment of them? What are some of the legends behind the “classics” and how do they shape our reception of them? We will also reconsider the relevance of the album in the age of compact discs, online downloading and iPods. Can the album help us to develop some of the critical, analytical, theoretical and structural skills needed to approach writing in both the university and in the professional marketplace? To explore some of these questions, we will reading various record reviews, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity , Ashley Kahn's A Love Supreme: the Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album , John Harris' The Dark Side of the Moon: the Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece and Domenic Priore's Smile: the Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece . Course requirements will include in-class presentations, many short writing assignments and three essays, with revisions. This class is writing intensive and will culminate with a twelve to fifteen-page research paper.

Sandie Friedman - Culture and Memory

If you had to choose one memory from your whole life, which one would it be? Which aspects of your identity would you want this memory to reflect? What emotions would it contain, and who would be there? The Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu poses these questions in Afterlife , and we begin our semester with an analysis of his film. The characters in Afterlife have died and, at a way station between life and death, must choose a memory in which to spend eternity. Our investigation of the film will give us the opportunity to think about the nature of individual memory: distortion, repression, and the close relationship between memory and identity. For the next essays, students will expand their field of inquiry from individual to collective memory: How do societies choose those memories that come to define them? What do collective memories reveal about the political and cultural forces within the community? The class will consider these questions in a unit on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For the research project, students will choose a memorial site and research its history, developing an argument about how its shape reflects not just what it commemorates, but the values of those who built it.

Cayo Gamber - Legacies of the Holocaust

One of the primary legacies of the Holocaust has been the call to remember. In this course, we will discuss the various ways in which the Holocaust is remembered.  We will bear witness to first-hand testimonies of memoirists (for example, in oral histories collected at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) and the video testimony of survivors (in Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive). In addition, we will question the ways in which the Holocaust has been "interpreted" in middle-school and high-school curricula, in documentary film (for example, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah), and in art (such as, Alan Jacobs' "Then and Now"). Finally, we will interrogate the "Americanization" of the Holocaust (for example, in Art Spiegelman's Maus I and II, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Donna Deitch's film of The Devil's Arithmetic).

Over the course of the semester, you will choose a topic - related to the theme of the course - and will dedicate yourself to locating pertinent research; evaluating the merit of your research; fully attending to the arguments made by the scholars; thoughtfully and accurately incorporating those scholars' ideas into your own writing; and using their research findings in order to shape your own engaged and engaging arguments. Each of these tasks is incorporated into the series of assignments you will perform, in stages, over the course of the semester. In addition, one-on-one conferences, peer review, drafting, and revision will aid you as you develop coherent, complex, and compelling arguments.

Hybrid Course: "Hybrid" is the name given to courses that blend face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning to improve learning outcomes. Hybrid courses thus move a significant amount of course work to an online environment. If you have any questions about this class, please contact Professor Gamber at cayo1@gwu.edu

Gustavo Guerra - On the Lyric Essay

This is a course in experimental critical writing that hopes to help writers develop their own voice and to uncover the rhetorical possibilities available under the rubric “lyric essay.” Recent developments in writing theory have focused on this particular genre as a highly desirable way to address a number of contemporary social problems. A lyric essay tends towards hybridity, often combining and borrowing freely from art, rant, manifestos, poetry, and drama. Often highly idiosyncratic, the lyric essay reveals a neurotic personality that obsessively attends to its own process of creation. This class will read a wide sample of authors and of topics. Because this is NOT a “topics” class as such, students will be given the opportunity to develop their own research topic as the semester progresses. Authors discussed may include Walter Benjamin, Severo Sarduy, Amitava Kumar, Joan Didion, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Antonio Gramsci, Jose Lezama Lima, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Eduardo Galeano, Christopher Bollas, Adam Phillips, and others

Stephanie Hartman - Food Fights: The Cultural Politics of What We Eat

So what was the last thing you ate? Whether it was a hamburger or a granola bar, French cheese or fried chicken, it had a story behind it that goes far beyond your personal history. There are countless ways of making sense of what we eat: historical, economic, aesthetic, anthropological, spiritual, and ethical, as well as nutritional. If you want to be able to blithely enjoy a snack without thinking about where it came from and why you're eating it, then maybe you'd better not take this course.

“Food Fights” will examine the forces that determine what foods are available to us, how we eat, even what tastes good to us. There is nothing inevitable about the ways in which we produce and consume food today. Readings will include scholarly articles from several disciplines, the book Fast Food Nation and other journalism, manifestos, memoirs, and recipes. We'll start small, with first-person essays, and then will expand in scope to analyses of global issues. But whether we're reading a humorous tribute to local barbecue by Calvin Trillin or an article about the future of genetically modified food, we'll be tracing connections between the personal and the political, and attending closely to the writer's use of language.

The main project will be to research, write, and revise a substantial paper with a focused argument. Shorter writing assignments will ask you to try out different genres of food writing, such as a food memoir, to develop your awareness of writing for a particular purpose and audience. As well as preparing you for the rigors of college writing, this course should make you more aware of how we think about food (or don't), and why this matters.

Carol Hayes - New York, New York

Times Square, Central Park, Greenwich Village, the Bronx. New York City thrives on crowds, controversy, and contrasts. We'll begin the semester by exploring Hip-Hop and rap, analyzing the lyrics – and harmonic/rhythmic structures – of these musical styles to help us explore the place of these musical genres in New York's social, political, gendered, and racial landscapes. You'll then build on these close reading skills by developing an independent research project (12-15 pages in length), focused on any aspect of New York that interests you. As you develop this independent project, we'll be using our readings about New York to model a number of the skills that you'll be incorporating into your paper. For instance, we'll read several accounts of the 1984 subway shootings where Bernhard Goetz – a white man – shot four black youths. These readings will model not only the variety of perspectives you'll be expected to bring into your own research and writing – there's almost always more than two sides to a story! – but also the importance of context (Gladwell's The Tipping Point argues that the Goetz shootings could only have taken place on the graffiti-laden subway). Finally, we'll use our readings throughout the semester to model how scholars working at the university level frame their work within academic discourses – discussions of race, gender, politics, religion, and sexuality, among others – and you'll learn to frame your own work in these ways, so that by the end of the semester you'll not simply be reporting on what other scholars have said, but actively engaging as participants in university-level writing and research.

Ryan Jerving - Uncommon Knowledge: Intellectual Property and Public Culture

You might think your thoughts are your own, but you'd be wrong. That melody stuck in your head, that clever putdown, that elaborate critique of the global military-industrial-media complex that you've devised — all of it, in part or whole, comes from some other place within the common cultural storehouse of ideas and expressions. And increasingly — paradoxically — that material is likely to belong to someone else too, as copyrights, trademarks, and patents work to enclose much of what you might otherwise safely consider "yours."  In this course, we'll consider the implications of this tension between the cultural reality of collective creation and the legal/economic reality of private claims to intellectual property. And we'll ask what these implications might mean for you as a 21st-century citizen, consumer, and writer.

You will design the specific case studies the class will tackle concerning issues such as sampling, fan fiction, identity theft, indigenous cultural property claims, freedom of/from information, folklore, scriptural authority, or the patents/patients divide. You'll take some of this work public as you contribute to the evolving, student-authored http://www.gwu.edu/~uw20ip/home.htm Uncommon Knowledge web site. We'll frame our discussions within the broader questions that concern us as writers: of cultural authority, intellectual autonomy, language communities, and the work of art in the age of mechanical (and now digital) reproduction. And, as we learn to conduct, cite, and document primary and secondary research; develop arguments that incorporate and rework the ideas and language of others; engage in academic "fair use"; invoke and tinker with established writing genres; and revise in collaboration with our peers — as we do all that, we'll explore the  particularly murky waters of intellectual ownership to which the act of writing inevitably leads.

Ryan Jerving - U Are Here: Higher Learning Meets the 21st Century

For at least the next four years, the university will be a site in which you develop as a researcher, writer, and thinker. It will also be a site in which, in however small a way, you make and remake history — as we all do, though never in conditions of our own making. And as we reshape those conditions, they reshape us as people and as scholars: encouraging us to regard some kinds of research as more legitimate than others; disciplining us to write in voices that would be unrecognizable to our younger selves; not necessarily telling us what to think, but certainly nudging us toward a sense of what we should be thinking about. So in this course we ask: What kind of place is this, anyway? How might its structure, culture, and particular crises at this historical moment shape us? And how do we push back?

In training our research and writing on the institution that aspires to train us, we’ll read widely in academic scholarship, news sources, and less traditional venues that address key issues facing higher learning. Our particular focal issues — whether tuition trends, dorm culture, neighborhood relations, intellectual property and privacy, political organizing, the place of scholar/athletes, or national ranking systems — will come from you: in working groups you will design, prepare, and lead a major course unit on an issue of your choice. We will write in a range of academic and professional genres to include proposals, bibliographies, lesson plans, web sites, finding aids, and critical research essays. And we’ll have the chance to think about how the recent emergence of collaborative, non-institutional forms of research and writing such as blogs and public wikis threaten or extend what we do as university writers (the answer will surprise you).

David Johnson - Names for Themselves: The Making of Abraham(s), Madonna(s), Mohammad (s), and Martin Luther(s)

While it is unarguable that Abraham the Patriarch, Madonna the Mother of Jesus, The Prophet Muhammad, and Martin Luther significantly impacted their respective societies as leaders of religious movements, it is perhaps also certain that their namesakes—Abraham Lincoln, Madonna, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King—ambitiously sought to influence their own cultures as reinvented leaders of socio-political movements. In each case, the new principal players on the cultural stage made names for themselves either by reworking customary beliefs or by embodying rather strange and uneasy behavior. These second-comers harked back to their influential lineage for support, but moved uniquely ahead to forge more progressive environments.

This course will pair these important individuals by name, will identify appropriate cultural contexts, will discern rhetorical practices, and will detect common methodological patterns for producing change within any social order. In sum, this course will reveal the ways people invent names for themselves.

The upshot of this course is for you to study these lives through history, autobiography, writing, film, and video, so that you can arrange your discoveries in several informed and organized essays, and so that you can apprehend your own lineage and begin to invent a name for yourself.

Jennifer Joyce Kissko - Homeless Chic? Poverty, Privilege, & Identity in Contemporary American Democracy

Lately, actress Mary-Kate Olsen, among other celebrities, has been captured in the tabloids sporting a fashion style dubbed “homeless chic.” This highly coveted current trend in Hollywood often entails wearing dirty rags, mismatched items, and even fingerless gloves.

Meanwhile, there exists another growing movement in the United States in recent years. Legislation from city to city across the nation aims to remove the presence of visible homelessness in an effort to clean up the streets and provide a feeling of security for others to enjoy. These criminal acts targeted by local ordinances include cutting across or loitering in parking lots, urinating in public, sleeping in or near subways or on public benches and tables, and panhandling.

What might be at stake for the face of an American culture that salutes mass media images which reflect the very identity the legal system works to hide? In this course, through careful analysis of contemporary works of literature, film, TV, music, essays, sociological studies, and news accounts, we will read, discuss, and write about the connections between class, identity, nation, and power. What does examining homelessness tell us about the meaning of democracy? How is “homelessness” defined? Why and how do homeless subjects, arguably the least powerful class within this country, have such an impact on so many fundamental institutions?

Throughout the semester, you will use our readings on class to model how writers frame their work in accordance with their academic and professional genres. Then you'll incorporate some of these techniques into the expansion of your own writing voice, as demonstrated through a range of smaller, creative assignments. For your final assignment, you will develop an original research proposal and project that analyzes a particular aspect of poverty or privilege that interests you, challenging you to insert your own voice (armed with support) into the current conversation about class in America. Extensive collaborative sharing and revision of work will also be required. Writing about homelessness will provide you with the unique opportunity to make connections between how, why, and by whom accounts get told and to acknowledge and consider the material consequences of those accounts. By confronting your own predetermined beliefs about class and about writing, this course should enable you to become a more nuanced and empowered voice.

Randi Gray Kristensen - Poets of the Underdog

Poet Audre Lorde claims that poetry “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Peoples of African descent around the world have engaged in struggles with language and image in multiple media—writing , film, and music—to communicate their “hopes and dreams toward survival and change” within their own communities, some of which has reached and affected global audiences.

This is a course in critical reading, thinking and writing that focuses on the representations of those who are often absent from powerful discussions and decision-making about their lives. Student researchers will choose a typically ignored constituency and research an area that affects them, both with and for them. Since marginalized groups often first enter public consciousness through the arts, we will consider works of art that represent those constituencies as well as the academic discourses that address them. Examples of such research include developing a guide to understanding and changing the new Medicare prescription benefits for seniors at a local senior agency; evaluating the effectiveness of Colonial Inauguration for particular groups of students for the Colonial Cabinet and the Student Association; and investigating the impact on Hispanic immigrants of current discourses of immigration, housing, and “the border.” Writing assignments include an autoethnography, in which students reflect on their own relationship to language and culture, the major collaborative research paper on an aspect of life in Washington DC, and a hybrid creative/analytical assignment. Shorter assignments ask students to consider the process described by Lorde above, how hopes and dreams become action, and to evaluate and critique texts and their production. Texts and/or authors may include Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; essays by Audre Lorde, Beverly Bell’s Walking on Fire, and others selected by students. Poets, musicians and other artists considered may include Sekou Sundiata, Mos Def, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Wyclef Jean, Toni Morrison, Boots Riley, and student selections.

Kathy Larsen - The Real Thing

A quick quiz:

1. What do Chaucer, Andy Warhol, Courtney Love and The Backstreet Boys all have in common?
2. What do Byron and Aerosmith have in common?
3. What do Cleavland, Ohio, Senecca Falls, New York, Bonner Springs, Kansas and Newport, Rhode Island have in common?

The answers in a moment.

We have always been fascinated by the famous, those people who seem somehow larger than life no matter what their fields of endeavor . We’ve also been interested in the infamous, insane monarchs, serial killers, playboy spies, bank robber folk heroes. Recently, it would seem, we have also become fascinated with our fascination.

In this course we will investigate what we value as a culture (substance over sound bites?) our relationship with authenticity, our paradoxical encouragement of the inauthentic (The Real World) and shock when the fabrication is revealed (James Frey), and how concepts of fame shape our everyday reality. You will be undertaking a variety of writing assignments (letter, review, personal reflection) but the emphasis will be placed on the development and execution of a research project that questions some aspect of celebrity past or present. Readings and viewings will, in part, be decided upon by the class itself.

And now, how well did you do on the quiz?

1. They all commented on the effects of fame. The first in a poem, The House of Fame, the second in a famously misquoted quip, and the last two in songs lamenting the price of fame.
2. Both had groupies.
3. All are sites of Halls of Fame (Rock and Roll, Women, Agriculture and Tennis respectively).

Derek Malone-France - Reading (and Writing) the Constitution

As the Roberts era of the US Supreme Court begins to unfold, questions abound regarding the future jurisprudential character of the nation's highest judicial body. Not surprisingly, the dominant theme in the current discussions surrounding the Court is the long-standing conflict between ‘progressive' and ‘conservative' approaches to Constitutional interpretation. Ever since the Constitution took effect in 1789, American's have debated the proper scope and nature of judicial activity and its relationship to this foundational document. How should judges read the Constitution? As an immutable bedrock of stability, the development of which is the sole province of the legislative branch and the amendatory process? Or as an evolving document, whose productive vagaries allow for each new generation to adjust its meaning to fit changing circumstances and social norms? To what extent should judges “make law,” as opposed to merely “applying” it? And is it always possible to clearly distinguish between the two?

In this course, we will examine such questions through the lens of two leading statements of alternative positions on Constitutional interpretation by two of the current Court's senior justices. We will read Justice Antonin Scalia's articulation of the conservative or ‘originalist' position in A Matter of Interpretation and Justice Stephen Breyer's articulation of the ‘progressivist' position in Active Liberty . We will compare the perspectives of these two texts—along with those of other documents by leading figures in American law—to the positions outlined by the influential Constitutional framers Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in The Federalist (and to the anti-Federalist arguments in the letters from ‘Brutus').

In many ways, such an examination presents an ideal basis for the pursuit of the goals of the UW20 course. By studying the historical, political, and theoretical context of the Constitution; the rhetorical and logical structure (and ambiguities) of the document itself; and the ongoing dialogue between competing theories of Constitutional interpretation, we will immerse ourselves in the issues of authorship, meaning, intent, argumentative structure, rhetorical strategy, and discursive debate that characterize academic (or “scholarly”) work as such. Thus, our examination of the particular issues and debates surrounding the Constitutional text will provide us with a productive framework within which to develop our capacities as critical-analytic readers, researchers, and writers in general.

Diane Matlock - City Stories: Washington, DC--Past, Present, and Future

The “official” tourist website for Washington, D.C., claims that “the District of Columbia's neighborhoods, people, history, and culture truly embody the American experience--from Duke Ellington to John Phillip Sousa and from the Civil War to civil rights.” Produced by the Washington, D.C., Convention and Tourism Corporation, the website also offers visitors the opportunity to discover the capital as “more than just a tourist.” To do so, we must experience the diversity of Washington, D.C.—one of the few cities in the world designed specifically as a national capital. Built to embody the new Republic's aspirations, the city has come to represent what it means to be an American. In this course, we will explore Washington, D.C., as a site, space, and symbol of the American experience. We will therefore examine texts, images, objects, and places as we interrogate the interplay between material practices and the realm of ideas, and show that we can, and need to, analyze everything about the places we inhabit. To investigate what different types of evidence reveal about the District of Columbia's role in the creation of the American nation and American identity, we will employ a variety of approaches—including such disciplines as art and architecture, cultural studies, environmental studies, urban studies, history, literature, political science, and tourism.

As we explore Washington, D.C., both intellectually and physically, we will engage in a series of interconnected reading and writing assignments that will develop our analytical skills and culminate in a major research project using primary sources from the special collections of local libraries and museums. We will also engage in activities analyzing “our” Washington, D.C., and what we uncover during our semester of investigating the capital as day-trippers and scholars.

Rachel McLaughlin - Is Another World Possible? Ecology, Feminism, and Postmodernity

How acceptable is it to modify the genome of a potato? How about that of a mouse? Who has a right to clean air and water? Should animals be raised solely for the purpose of being eaten? Do the disabled automatically deserve access to the same services as the able? Is deforestation acceptable if the profits provide food and medicine to human beings? Should corporations provide restitution for the presence of industrial chemicals in breastmilk?

This course will investigate the philosophical and activist ideas behind social movements that aim to recast the distribution of power among the different forms of life on earth. Ecofeminists believe that humankind's domination of the natural world is causally linked to other forms of social injustice and oppression such as racism, poverty, and violence against women and children. Ecofeminism asserts that both forms of oppression draw from systems of meaning, emerging out of “modernity,” that legitimate unequal distributions of power. The grand narratives of modernity relied upon ideas such as hierarchy, struggle, anthropomorphism, dualism, and progress. Postmodernity, however, represents a shift in thought that can allow for a successful ecofeminist intervention. In contrast with the themes of modernity, themes of postmodern life include destabilization, multiplicity, pluralism, randomness, and fragmentation. We will explore how postmodern thinking helps us think about alternative ways of living and co-existing on earth.

While we will spend the first half of the course analyzing the central themes of ecofeminist and postmodern theory, the latter half of the course will focus on one central question: “Is another world possible?” Students will write a substantial research paper on a topic of their choosing that makes use of the conceptual framework explored in the first half of the course. Possible topics include preservation of biodiversity; genetic engineering; globalization and development; environmental racism; disability rights; animal rights; overpopulation; agribusiness; conservation movements; and water rights.

Meghan Mercier - Mortal Refrains: Childhood, Death, and History

The thought of death and the dead weigh on us: television programming schedules are full of literally and figuratively speaking dead (the CSIs, Cold Case, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Danny Phantom, etc). This course takes as its topic of inquiry some of the refrains (or recurring themes) that surround death in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century culture.  We will pay particular attention to children and their relationship with the (historical) dead, childhood death, and attitudes about history, that kingdom of the dead.  The personification of death, funerary customs, and explanations of mortality and mourning for the young may also figure in class discussion.  Films, images, nonfiction, novels, and short stories will provide material for analytical papers, rhetorical analysis, argument, and research projects. The class will feature several short papers and two more extended projects, including class presentations.  Possible texts include The Others , The Sound of Her Wings, The Water Babies , and The American Way of Death Revisited

Mark Mullen – I’m Game! Exploring the Art, Science and Economics of Electronic Games

Playing games is one way through which we humans refine our skills, test our limits and define our potential. In Western culture, however, two mutually contradictory discourses about games exist side-by-side. On the one hand, games are supposed to be purely recreational, and game- players are merely people seeking a little escape from other aspects of their lives. On the other hand, games are held to be capable of powerfully influencing those supposedly separate aspects of our lives. Usually the influence of games, particularly electronic games, is considered to be a negative one Our course, then, will begin to construct more sophisticated ways of exploring electronic games as an emerging artistic, technological and economic force in our culture.

This course will challenge you to develop your writing skills in new directions. If you have an interest in art, technology, or economics, you will find that exploring electronic games will yield much that speaks to those interests. You will also find that new media require very different analytical approaches to those to which you may be accustomed. Tackling these writing assignments will force you to re- think some of your own preconceptions about both games (concerning the gender of plays and the influence of gender on gamer's perceptions, for example) and writing (some of the assignments may strike you as a little unorthodox!). You’ll be formulating truly investigative research projects with little pre-existing research to guide you and will need to develop a sophisticated balance of descriptive and analytical modes, and a mastery of both aesthetic and technical vocabularies.

Note: While most of the assignments in the course will allow you to choose the game and platform (Playstation, PC, Mac, etc.) you examine, our first assignment will involve a game that the entire class will be exploring. Of necessity this will be a PC/Mac game. It will not be a “bleeding edge” game, but you should be reasonably sure that your computer will provide you with a suitable game-playing platform (laptops can work but some, particularly those with small keyboards, can be physically uncomfortable to use).

Hybrid Course: "Hybrid" is the name given to courses that blend face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning to improve learning outcomes. Hybrid courses thus move a significant amount of course work to an online environment. If you have any questions about this class, please contact Professor Mark Mullen at ishmael@gwu.edu

Pam Presser - Firing the American Canon: Symbolic Struggle and Cultural Wars

The writing classroom is a site of intense symbolic struggle. What exactly is good writing? How important is emphasis on aspects associated with traditional writing instruction, such as punctuation, word choice, or sentence structure? What set of ideas should be developed and promoted in the classroom? What are the connections between writing and knowledge production? What constitutes rigorous research? Questions like these provoke heated debate in the academy.

This course will start with the assumption that classrooms are contested spaces, and instructors don't agree how best to choose classes to teach, or how to study the texts once they are selected. These debates are often referred to as "culture wars." As a student, you are well-equipped to participate in this conversation, since you have expertise about which pedagogical strategies work best for you, encouraging you to become engaged with the subject you are studying, and you also know what methods fail to inspire you.

The course title is intended to invite inquiry about key terms such as "American canon" and "culture." As a class we will discuss and write about pedagogical issues such as: Do critical theories have practical applications? Is popular culture a suitable academic subject? What constitutes American literature? What can comics, movies and children's books reveal about the culture which produced them? How does time/culture/location/identity/ impact on our literacy, language use, rhetoric and consciousness? 

Class members will participate in the selection of course readings and the design of writing and oral presentation assignments. Writing assignments may include a reflective essay on educational experiences and a collaborative research project involving the construction of a syllabus.    

Rachel Riedner - Writing from the Margins: Graffiti Artists and Subaltern Writers

This course will use graffiti and other contemporary examples of counter cultural writing as a means to think the following questions: What does graffiti writing do? What is its purpose? Who is writing (graffiti)? Why are they writing? What are the contexts for writing (graffiti)? What are the uses of writing (for graffiti artists)? How does (graffiti) writing transform public spaces? What is it that this writing wants to do? How do we interact with (graffiti) writing? How do we listen to voices from counter cultural/political spaces? What would it mean to develop a politics of listening to writers who come from counter cultural spaces?

Course texts focus on graffiti and other examples of writing from counter cultural spaces. These texts include, but are not limited to, Jenny Edlbauer, “(Meta)Physical Graffiti,” Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Subcomandante Marcos “Letter to John Berger,” and Nancy Fraser “Rethinking the Public Sphere.”

All students will complete a ten page argumentative paper that is developed from shared class reading and several short writing assignments. All students will complete a major research paper. In this paper, students will have the opportunity to independently develop a research project that emerges from the ideas of the class. In this paper, students will approach research as a complex, scholarly project that richly engages with the ideas of others and that develops well-thought, well-written, sophisticated arguments.

Matt Riley - The Loss of Contact

Is our civilization losing contact with nature? Surely, in a physical sense, we have steadily moved from a natural environment to an artificial one. We wear synthetic clothes, eat processed food, build with plastic wood, and have little contact with the wild. But are we losing contact in a more fundamental sense? Are we forsaking the belief that there is something inherently right about the natural order of things? After all, we hardly notice hormone-enhanced athletes, senior citizens without wrinkles, and cloned cattle—and we’re just around the corner from genetically altering babies for greater intelligence, powers of concentration, and beauty. So, why not give people four arms and two sets of eyes? Now, that would be multi-tasking. And if the polar ice caps melt and the polar bears die, then at least Canadians won’t have to winter in Florida.

In this intensive reading and writing course, students will critically examine what is at the heart of modern civilization that allows us to think we know better than nature. Readings will include Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild, Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, and essays on genetics and ethics. Students will complete a research project that investigates how we should respond to this situation.

Robert Rubin - On Pilgrimage

From Egyptians rowing up the Nile to Abydos, seeking Osiris’s tomb 3,500 years ago, to Rascal Flatts proclaiming that “Life is a highway/ I want to ride it all night long” this summer in Disney’s CARS, pilgrimage has offered an enduring metaphor for the human experience. But what does it really mean to be a pilgrim? What did it mean in ancient times, when divinity dwelt in temples and burned on mountaintops? What might it mean today, when wisdom seems just a Google-click away, and enlightenment comes packaged in glossy cases? Who are today’s pilgrims? Where are they going?

This class will explore ways in which the yearning to journey in search of understanding has manifested itself in history, literature, mythology, politics, and scientific inquiry. We’ll read accounts of different kinds of pilgrims and pilgrimages, ranging from medieval visionaries before the Reformation to American Muslims taking the hajj to Mecca shortly after the September 11 attacks. In the process, we’ll also look at what it means to search for knowledge at a major university such as George Washington, and the conventions and standards of writing and research by which that inquiry is conducted. As we investigate the ways in which an idea such as pilgrimage extends across a range of academic disciplines, we’ll also be focusing on the writing techniques you’ll need to make yourself heard here, whatever your major. Requirements will include in-class presentations, short writing assignments, longer critical essays, intensive revision work, and a substantial researched argument.

Phyllis Ryder - Writing Matters: On Public Writing and Writing Publics

A university student ladles soup and offers the bowl to a hungry citizen. Outside the White House, peace activists stage a die-in, dropping onto the sidewalk while their companions trace their outlines in white chalk. Thousands of Americans log on to find email from Moveon.Org, inviting them to critique a draft of a political TV ad. A GW student meets with a young girl from a DC charter school to talk about books and college.

All of these events—whether groups staging national protests or students helping individuals in DC—are integral to American civic society. Yet what is their function? Do special interest groups distort the democratic system by allowing wealthier organizations more influence, or are they a positive extension of democracy—a method through which more people define the problems and enact solutions? And what goes on within civic organizations: what does it take to develop a strong and powerful organization? What are the qualities of a good leader? What kinds of research and rhetorical skills does one need to create a community or to provoke the larger public to care about one’s cause?

As part of our study of community organizations, you will read theories of social change, “special interest” groups and democracy, and the nature of the “public.” You will test these theories by working with and observing community organizations in DC. And, finally, you will write about your findings for public audiences. Through this process, you will learn the power of writing and the ethical demands of writing about real issues for real people.

This UW20 section includes a service learning component: as part of your course work, you will work in community organizations.

Heather Schell - Fan Fiction 101: Media Fandom and Internet Writing Communities

In 1987, William Shatner, still famous for his role as Kirk on Star Trek, appeared on Saturday Night Live. During a skit in which Shatner played himself at a Star Trek convention, fans asked him detailed questions that suggested they were taking the sci-fi series too seriously. He finally yelled, “Get a life!” In the aftermath of this hugely popular skit, debates raged among “Trekkers” about whether or not Shatner had really meant what he said. The incident raises a number of questions about fans, expertise, and creativity. For example, how do we decide which ideas or texts or people are sufficiently important to merit close study? (Does Shakespeare deserve it? Anne Rice? General Hospital?) How devoted can fans be to their chosen topic, without provoking concern or contempt? And what about fans who use some preexisting story as the springboard for their own stories or art: are they authors in their own right, or thieves, or pathetic parasites? How do we compare a fan novella drawing on characters from the Harry Potter universe to such a work as Jean Rhys’s critically-acclaimed Wide Sargasso Sea, which rewords the characters of Jane Eyre? These questions will lead us to larger philosophical mysteries, such as the line between copyright violation, plagiarism, and scholarly citation. This semester, we will read, research, write, and talk about fan fiction communities. We will investigate scholarly theories about fan fiction, postmodernism, and originality. Every student will spend the semester as a member of an internet fan fiction community (for example, Full Metal Alchemist or Lord of the Rings) and, after securing the community’s permission, use the experience as the primary research for several essays. Also, students will be producing short weekly podcasts that engage with the student’s chosen fandom. Students who enroll for this class should be prepared to master basic audio editing technology. You are invited to check out the podcast web site from my Spring 2006 class http://home.gwu.edu/%7Eschellhm/

Hybrid Course: "Hybrid" is the name given to courses that blend face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning to improve learning outcomes. Hybrid courses thus move a significant amount of course work to an online environment. If you have any questions about this class, please contact Professor Schell at schellhm@gwu.edu

Sylvie Green Shapero - Class as an Important Category of Difference

Class isn't a topic we often talk about, which means it isn't a topic we often read about, write about, or think about. Why is it such a touchy subject? Do the rich feel guilty? Do members of the working class think that, eventually, they too can achieve the American Dream? Do most of us consider the poor to be invisible? What is middle class?

We need to speak about class—just as we need to speak about race, gender, and sexuality—because class is an important category of difference, especially in the United States, where we are led to believe that society is largely egalitarian.

According to the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, “This erasure of class has denied individuals an important source of understanding of their experiences.” Class consciousness is necessary in order to overcome “powerful feelings of alienation and resentment both by and toward members of the working class.”

You the students will determine the direction of this course. We will begin by choosing our course texts, which will help you to develop necessary research skills. Since research, like writing, is, first of all, a process, exercises and activities will build on each other so that you will not feel overwhelmed by final writing projects; instead, you will complete them little by little, focusing on revision, which is substantially different than editing, and, as a class, we will learn to articulate our thoughts and create class conscious pieces of academic writing.

Caroline Smith - Chick Lit: Writing about Women’s “Literature”

Seventy-two years ago, Virginia Woolf advised women that if they wanted to write they should obtain some money and a room of their own. Woolf, and women like her, wrote essays that asked questions about the role that women writers can, and should, play. In this course, we will explore both the challenges that women writers like Woolf have faced and the complexities of their cultural expressions. For instance, how do women writers portray women in their texts? What themes do women writers explore in their works? How might issues of race, female sexuality, and economics influence women’s writing? Have changing, historical circumstances altered perceptions of women writers? And, finally, is there even such a thing as “women’s writing?” We will look at a variety of genres throughout the semester, including “classic” works of literature (short stories, poems, plays, and novels) and pop culture creations (songs and movies). In turn, these texts will serve as the starting points for our writing assignments, which will be as varied as the texts we will consider. Students will write response papers and short essays, and they will pursue an independent research project on the topic of their choice. As a class this semester, we will explore – through reading, researching, and writing – the multifaceted creations of women writers from the past and present.

Elizabeth Sokolov - Moral Representation and the Literary Response to September 11

September 11, 2001—a fateful autumn day when “everything changed.” Having witnessed that day and lived in its aftermath, you are now in a unique position to investigate how literature, too, “changed” or responded to September 11. We will ask the following questions regarding September 11 literature: What does a literature look like that responds to an unimaginable horror? Is there an appropriate way to artistically represent September 11? Should we be bothered by representations that risk triteness or sentimentality? Is there, in effect, a “moral” way to artistically represent September 11, or does any attempt to approach the horror fall short?

Our study will include poetic, fictional, and musical responses to September 11. Poetry underwent a national resurgence in the aftermath of the tragedy, and we will examine both previously-written poems that were given another life, and poems written in direct response to the tragedy. We will then study one of the first novels to fictionalize the events of September 11: Jonathan Safran Foer's, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close . In our last weeks we will model a research project in class by analyzing Bruce Springsteen's album “The Rising,” also inspired by the events of September 11.

In all of the above genres, it is not only the words or lyrics that lend meaning, but how those poems, songs, and novel are structured . Through assignments in each genre, you will become comfortable making the sophisticated leap from writing about content only, to writing about content and form. You will learn to interpret the significance of line breaks, rhythm, and meter in poetry; dynamics and mood in music; and how to understand the blank pages and occasional nonsensical prose in Foer's novel. For your final research paper, you will study an artistic response to September 11, which may be one of the genres we studied, but may also be a new genre such as comics, architecture, children's literature, memorials, film or documentary. You will leave this class fearless in your approach to any new text, and, through our emphasis on drafting and revision, fearless toward any new writing assignment that comes your way.

Kimberley Stern - Close Encounters: Travel, Empire, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The British were everywhere in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the literature of the period reflects a deep investment in representations of empire, travel, and close encounters with non-British cultures. Gypsies, the “wandering Jew,” English expatriates, African explorers, and colonial officers – all were salient parts of the British cultural imagination. From works dealing explicitly with issues of race and empire (such as Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim) to more imaginative depictions of travel (such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), this writing- intensive seminar examines the literature of travel in the nineteenth century. Over the course of the semester, we will consider the role writing may have played in helping travelers to assert their cultural identity, navigate conflict, and – in a sense – to redefine the worlds they inhabited.

As we engage with sources from a range of media – including short fiction, the novel, poetry, film, photographs, travelogues, and scholarly essays – we will continually ask what it means to take a stand in academic writing and thus to take part in a wider community of scholarship and ideas. In a sense, writing is itself a form of wandering, and in this class we will often use writing as a way of thinking through ideas. As you produce short academic papers, creative pieces of writing, and an independent research project, we will thus raise some important questions about the role of writing in British culture and our own. For example, how does the traveler adapt to new audiences, contexts, and ideas in writing? To what extent did writing help travelers to come to terms with new surroundings or to enter important cultural debates? In short, is writing itself a necessary part of wandering?

Michael Svoboda - Warming, Local Ecologies

We live in worlds of words. For this reason, a better understanding of the written word is a prerequisite for our effective engagement with any world, including the natural world. To effectively engage the ominously changing world of nature, however, we must read and write about it at two different levels: the global and the local.

At the global level, we face the specter of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. Skeptics still challenge this fundamental claim, but how should we read their skepticism? How can one distinguish legitimate questioning from the self-interested fabrication of doubt? In the first part of this course, you will develop the critical thinking and writing skills needed to answer these questions. And by working through the complexities and contingencies of this issue, you will better understand the role writing plays in research and policy.

But as we will learn in our review of the global warming debate, we don’t live in a uniform global environment. We come to GWU from very different local and regional environments, each of which will be affected differently as global weather patterns change. In our second encounter with the natural world, we will reexamine global environmental issues, including climate change, in the context of local and regional ecologies. While our class discussions will focus on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, the regional ecology in which Washington, DC is situated, in your major project for the semester you will be invited to research and write about an environment of particular interest to you.

These two extended engagements with “the environment” will be supplemented by brief encounters with environmental works by artists, comics, essayists, musicians, naturalists, playwrights, politicians, poets, and screenwriters. And by some good, green fun of our own. Expect to spend some time outside!

Phillip Troutman - Serious Comics:  Graphic Novels and Animé as History?

Can comic books and cartoons do serious historical interpretation? Is there a legitimate image-based writing of literature? How do visual media help us see the world in new ways? How do we decide how to evaluate this work? Students may analyze graphic novels (essentially, very long comic books) and animé (animated films) in a variety of "serious" modes, including autobiography, journalism, fiction, fantasy, and documentary. Students' research and writing will expose and analyze the research and writing choices made by artists and authors. Emphasis is on the process of writing a major research paper: identifying analytical interests, developing topical problems; researching for argument and interpretation; writing an annotated bibliography; engaging and making use of other scholars' work; sketching, drafting, revising, and editing—as distinct phases of writing; and most importantly, responding responsibly to peers' drafts and revising responsively to readers' comments. Students will also help develop the new Gelman Graphic Novels Collection, identifying and recommending titles for purchase. Students will learn to anticipate the expectations of academic readers while developing their own research interests and their own analytical writing styles.

David Truncellito - The Sixties

The decade beginning on January 1, 1960 and ending on December 31, 1969 was a momentous, and tumultuous, period of American history, marked by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, and the moon landing. The era known as The Sixties is a time of protests, counterculture, and social movements, including Women's Liberation and the civil rights movement. (Although these two periods overlap, they are not identical; one of your assignments in this course will be to present your own argument as to when The Sixties began and ended.)

In this course, we'll examine the writings of The Sixties, with special attention to the arguments presented therein, the way they approach their audiences, their rhetorical style. In other words, while we will address The Sixties as a period of historical, political, and sociological interest, we will primarily be concerned with the writings of the time and their influence on it.

We'll draw most of our readings from The Sixties Papers, but some of our readings will be proposed by you and selected by your classmates. I imagine that these could include news articles, literature, song lyrics, or policy statements, to name just a few examples. Indeed, there will be lots of room for personal choice – not just in the readings that you select, in your assignments, in the topics that class discussion addresses, and in many aspects of the course.

Hybrid Course: "Hybrid" is the name given to courses that blend face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning to improve learning outcomes. Hybrid courses thus move a significant amount of course work to an online environment. If you have any questions about this class, please contact Professor David Truncellito at truncell@gwu.edu

Belinda Wallace - Reading the Black Female Body: Race, Gender, and Representation

The central question is: What does gender tell us about ourselves? This is a course in critical reading, thinking and writing that focuses on representations of race and gender in African American women’s literature. Ideologies about black femininity occupy a complex place in American history and culture. In order to explore this complexity, our work will involve an examination of the ways in which race intersects gender and influences our understandings of black women and culture in the US. A key part of our work will be the development of critical written responses to the course material. Through our use of interdisciplinary analysis and cross-cultural methodologies, we will investigate how we, as authors, can use writing as a way to construct and contest cultural, ideological, and political parameters of black womanhood.

Our guiding question will be: How does race intersect with gender and what role does this racialized gender play in our lived reality, our perceptions of the world and our understanding of US history? For example, the course will begin with an exploration of Audre Lorde’s biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, where we will examine the role of genre and form in writing. Thus, our first writing assignment requires students to investigate the meanings and histories of their given names. This assignment is designed to introduce students to the idea of viewing gender as a social construct (and how language and writing maintain or subvert this construct). In addition to “What’s In A Name,” another writing assignment, “The Impossible Gender,” requires students to reflect on their own relationship to race and gender. These are but two examples of several writing assignments. The final research paper will focus on an evaluation and critique of racialized gender in an aspect of contemporary African American women’s culture, as chosen by the student.

Aimee Weinstein - Language and Society

Imagine sitting with your friend and talking over a problem. Now think about discussing that same problem with your parents. Do you use the same words? Do you frame the issues in the same way? Now picture yourself sitting on a streetcorner in your hometown. Is the language of the passers-by the same as the language you hear in your dorm? What are the differences between the language you hear in your dorm, your hometown and on the street? And, most importantly, how do those differences affect the world in which you live? English is used differently in various countries across the globe - those differences are important in the way both the language and the society is constructed. Think about it: GOOGLE is a verb in the dictionary! In this class, we are going to consider the ways that language shapes society AND the ways that society shapes language. Via literature, film, and first-hand ethnographic research (think: street-corner!) we will consider the worlds in which we live as well as the roles that language - or LANGUAGES - play in those worlds.

Imagine sitting with your friend and talking over a problem. Now think about discussing that same problem with your parents. Do you use the same words? Do you frame the issues in the same way? Now picture yourself sitting on a streetcorner in your hometown. Is the language of the passers-by the same as the language you hear in your dorm? What are the differences between the language you hear in your dorm, your hometown and on the street? And, most importantly, how do those differences affect the world in which you live? English is used differently in various countries across the globe - those differences are important in the way both the language and the society is constructed. Think about it: GOOGLE is a verb in the dictionary! In this class, we are going to consider the ways that language shapes society AND the ways that society shapes language. Via literature, film, and first-hand ethnographic research (think: street-corner!) we will consider the worlds in which we live as well as the roles that language - or LANGUAGES - play in those worlds.

Aliya Weise - Beasts Within: Animals, Ethic, & Literature

On one hand, our culture has become increasingly concerned with the ways we treat animals, exemplified by the overwhelming support for the PETS Act, which will require local and state authorities to include pets and service animal in their emergency evacuation plans. However, while our ethical concern for certain animals has increased dramatically over the past few decades, so too has our production of animals for food, clothing, entertainment, and medical experimentation. What characterizes humane treatment of an animal? When is it permissible to treat an animal like an animal? What line has been crossed when we treat a human like an animal? How do we distinguish animals from humans? And what does such a division mean for the exclusion or inclusion of animals in our sphere of ethical concern?

This course aims to cultivate students’ reading and writing abilities to prepare them for future academic and professional literacy tasks. By working with the complicated and problematic topic of animal ethics we will have the opportunity to think critically, question rigorously, and write articulately. Readings will include brief philosophical excerpts, contemporary fiction, and recent public writings such as news articles. Assignments will likewise be diverse as students write in a variety of genres, from a short research article to an Op-Ed piece. Our focus will be to question and to respond responsibly and articulately in a variety of writing tasks.

Lauren Weisholz - Feminist Utopias: Writing New Worlds

In this course we will examine the strategies by which feminist theories and feminist utopias seek to remake society by interrogating a broad array of gender assumptions, critiquing existing social structures, and imaging new social and cultural possibilities. As we do so, we will focus on the ways in which these texts ask us to examine critically our “common sense” notions about a variety of social constructions such as language, gender roles, education, labor, motherhood, and government. In examining these texts and the social constructions they address, we will be engaged in substantial reading, writing, and critical thinking. Class time will include several peer writing workshops, which will provide you with the opportunity to give and receive extensive feedback on your rough drafts. Writing assignments will include several shorter papers and a longer research paper that tackles a topic of your choosing that is related to the concerns of utopia, feminism, or feminist utopia. By engaging in a process of writing that requires critical thinking and critical imagination, you will have the opportunity to engage in a variety of writing tasks that will develop your academic writing skills and prepare you to participate in an ongoing dialogue with your peers, the academic community, and the world outside of academia.

Abby Wilkerson - The Food Voice

How does food speak for us? How does our talk of food reveal the literal and figurative places we occupy in the world? How are ways of life expressed and realized through particular foodways? How does food convey social dissent or social belonging? How are our identities and personal relationships shaped and expressed through food? How are our lives and communities shaped through relations of growers, producers, consumers, preparers, sellers, and servers? How do food practices reflect and reveal the norms and hierarchies that shape and are shaped by specific social worlds? How can we use the food voice as a means of critically evaluating these social norms and hierarchies?

This course considers food as a medium for human interaction, a point of contact between public and private worlds. We will explore how food and food writing serve as tools for meaning-making by (1) examining autobiographical narratives as well as scholarship which provides critical frameworks for these readings, (2) creating personal narratives and reflections, and (3) conducting ethnographic-style research projects presenting and analyzing personal interviews.

Zachary Wolfe - Law as a Force for Social Change

"Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and . . . when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress." -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

To be sure, concepts of law have been used many times throughout our history to prevent social progress or even create intellectual justification for injustice, such as the once-revered concept of "separate but equal" and the notion that a person can be property. Despite this history, progressive movements continue to claim the law as their own, invoking the language of rights at every stage and ultimately turning to the court system and to new legislation to effect their demands.

This course will explore the language of law, as used by the legal system and by advocates for change. We examine changing conceptions of equality, competing ideas about the role of government, and most fundamentally, the seemingly incompatible ways in which movements for change both rely upon the law and strive to revolutionize it.

Class meetings typically consist of intense group discussion of the complexities of assigned readings, which include Dr. King, a civil rights lawyer's autobiography, judicial opinions, and contemporary human rights advocacy pieces. Students then explore these concepts even more thoroughly in their scholarly writing. In addition, students will produce a major final research paper on a self-selected topic, allowing them to apply the general principles we explore in class to advance contemporary social discourse.

Robbin Zeff - Political Junkie: Writing about Politics in the Nation's Capital

Washington, DC, is the ultimate political town-where national politics is local. This writing-intensive course will explore the exciting world of contemporary American politics by monitoring how political issues are debated and observing how national policy is made. Students will conduct original research on a topic of their choice that will have them digging deep into the inner-workings of the library's database holdings and doing fieldwork into the hallways of Congress. Both short and long writing assignments will be used to learn the rigors and expectations of academic writing. Course reading will cover the craft of research and writing as well as contemporary political issues and events. In addition, students will be required to monitor daily news sources to stay on top of the current political landscape. A significant amount of work for this course will be conducted online; students will participate in online class discussions, use content management software, and use digital technology to facilitate research, writing, and revision.

Hybrid Course: "Hybrid" is the name given to courses that blend face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning to improve learning outcomes. Hybrid courses thus move a significant amount of course work to an online environment. If you have any questions about this class, please contact Professor Robbin Zeff at rzeff@gwu.edu

Christy Zink - The Illuminated City: Artists and Intellectuals on the Urban Experience

From the first flips of the switch that overwhelmed the metropolis into electric light in the 19th century to recent discoveries of underground cities cast in darkness, writers, artists, and urban scholars around the world have struggled with just how to decipher and encapsulate the modern urban landscape. Now that the city is your home--or, at least, your adopted one--you belong to this urban experience, are responsible to it, create it, reinvent it by your very living within its borders and under its bright lights. You walk the sidewalks and take in the emotional life of the city in the grand tradition of writers and scholars such as Walter Benjamin, who brought together in his Arcades Project a blend of experience, critical reading, history, philosophy, poetry, photography, and his own inventive arguments, resulting in what he called a “magic encyclopedia” of the city.

This writing-intensive course, then, will examine how artists and intellectuals have illuminated and reimagined contemporary urban space and its experience in both American and international cities--in effect creating the city through their works. As we involve ourselves in critical inquiry about the interplay of the individual and the city, we'll follow other writers and artists under the thrall of the bright city of promise, but we'll also accompany them down shadowed alleyways to look into the secret, darker city as well. You'll be invited out into the city streets to critique, research, and conceive as a writer with a developing artist's eye just what the city means, what its “grittier” realities entail, and how it might be reinvented through your words.

Conducted in a hybrid format, the course involves both in-class meetings and interactive online study. You don't need preexisting computer expertise for this class. Here, you will creatively and critically engage with multiple genres and multimedia presentations of writing and work as part of a physical and virtual community of writers. Course readings themselves address hybrid and multidisciplinary sources--the scholarly, interdisciplinary work of urban studies; poems, stories, and creative nonfiction; works by visual artists; film; and web and multimedia projects. Materials may include Fritz Lang's Metropolis , Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities , Diane Arbus' photography monograph, Marc Singer's film Dark Days , and the magazine The Next American City , among selections of other critical, theoretical, and creative works. Writing assignments invite you further into the city of Washington to interact with the writers and artists here, delving into intensive research and then creating a multimedia writing project involving your own reimagined, fully illuminated city.

Hybrid Course: "Hybrid" is the name given to courses that blend face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning to improve learning outcomes. Hybrid courses thus move a significant amount of course work to an online environment. If you have any questions about this class, please contact Professor Christy Zink at czink@gwu.edu