Teaching College English (ENG515) - This course will investigate both theoretical and practical issues related to teaching First-Year composition. Topics will include developing effective syllabi, identifying and articulating learning objectives, designing effective writing assignments, assessing college writing, understanding and creating rubrics, and developing an effective critique process. Students will develop a portfolio that includes a teaching philosophy, syllabi, and sample lesson plans. The final assignment will be the development of a syllabus with a paper explaining the rationale for that syllabus in terms of pedagogical goals for the course and best teaching practices.
British Literature (ENG561) - This course surveys canonical texts in British literature from Beowulf to the twentieth century in a variety of genres, including but not limited to poetry, drama, short stories, novels, utopian literature, and manifestos. Authors and works may include, but are not limited to, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Sydney, Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, Pope, Swift, Wollstonecraft, the Romantics, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Wilde, and the Modernists.
American Literature (ENG562) - This course surveys canonical texts in American literature from the Native American period to the present in a variety of genres, including but not limited to poetry, drama, short stories, and novels. Authors and works may include, but are not limited to, early Native American literature, literature from the period of Spanish colonization, British colonial-era literature, nineteenth-century literature, American modernism, sixties literature, and contemporary American literature. Authors and movements may include Bradstreet, Freneau, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Eliot, Pound, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Salinger, Updike, Pynchon, Oates, Erdrich, Dillard, literature of the Puritan era, Transcendentalism, Realism, the Harlem Renaissance, Modernism, the Beat Poets, and 60s literature.