Graduate Courses

Examine fundamental assumptions and procedures for conducting research in rhetoric and writing studies, including the links between theory and methods, qualitative, quantitative, archival, critical approaches, assessment, and research ethics. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Graduate standing. 

Examine major theoretical movements in rhetorical studies, writing studies, and related areas. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Graduate standing. 

Explore persuasive traditions, disciplinary histories, and historiographic considerations in rhetoric and writing studies. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Graduate standing. 

Examine the theory, practice, and study of public rhetorics, including social movement rhetorics, community advocacy, and professional/technical communication. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Graduate standing. 

Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Offered on the credit/no credit basis only. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, consent of instructor, and appointment as an assistant instructor in a lower-division rhetoric and writing course. 

Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) was introduced to writing studies in the mid-1990s as a theoretical and methodological framework, offering a materialist approach to bridging individual and social perspectives in how people develop and practice writing. It has especially impacted genre theory in studies of educational and workplace settings. In the intervening decades, CHAT concepts such as “mediation” and “activity” have made their way into the larger discourse of writing studies. But CHAT also has specific limitations — like any theoretical framework. In this seminar, we will review the history, theory, and concepts of CHAT, including its limitations and contradictions (as well as the scandals and conflicts that characterized its early development); review how CHAT has been applied to writing studies, specifically digital texts and technologies; and apply CHAT to the production of digital texts. 

This course explores feminist rhetoric during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and introduces students to key debates, concepts, and contributions emerging from feminist theories and movements. We will analyze diverse texts to learn how feminists construct arguments, while students develop their own positions in relation to feminist claims. We will interrogate why some articulations of feminism have become prominent and who gets to speak for women as a group. These questions then turn us to how feminism frames its object(s) of analysis and foments social change, focusing specifically on theorizations of the sex/gender/sexuality matrix and constitutive entanglements with race, class, culture, and region. Topics covered include the existential nature of Woman; the discipline of Women’s Studies; housework, sex work, and gendered divisions of labor; citizenship; violence; and biopower. Students will also become versed in texts addressing liberalism, materialism, feminist standpoint theory, intersectionality, transnational feminism, black feminism, and queer and transgender feminism. To engage with the diversity of feminism, assigned texts reflect a robust range of methodologies, analyses, and rhetorical styles. 

This course serves as a broad overview of environmental rhetorics as an interdisciplinary subfield and is designed to familiarize students with key texts and issues in the field, including but not limited to theoretical concepts, sociolegal concerns, and public controversies. Our central theme of “witnessing” serves as an ideal topic for reading broadly in environmental rhetoric, given how scholars have acknowledged that humans—as the last on the evolutionary stage—have much to learn from plants, animals, glaciers, coastlines, and other forms of testimony that emerge from natural environments. Acknowledging the realities of the climate crisis, we will consider questions such as: When models and predictions are a primary way of bearing witness, what do we miss? If numerical data is requested by decision makers to consider testimony “credible,” whose accounts do we dismiss? How might we allow natural environments to speak, as much as possible, for themselves? Finally, because environmental rhetorics encourages “being there” with our subjects of study, students will engage in field work. 

How can we understand the category of the human? To what extent should we focus on our minds, our bodies, or our societies? These are pivotal questions in what have become known and the “human sciences” and have significant implications both for how we understand ourselves and how we organize and govern our communities. Insights from the human sciences reach across disciplinary boundaries engaging rhetoric, philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, and so on. In so doing, they inform science, technology, medicine, the humanities, pedagogy, and more.  Given the central importance of the human sciences for academia and beyond, this course will be devoted to exploring this multidisciplinary area’s emergence, rhetorics, dangers, and futures. 

This seminar centers genre-bending criticism that draws from creative forms. We will consider their rhetorical strengths and weaknesses and engage “creative critical” writing as method. Readings will include a range of approaches including counterstory, autoethnography, counterdiagnoses, and other story-based forms of rhetorical criticism. We will also discuss the craft of critically-engaged creative nonfiction. Students will adopt a story-based method for a final project informed by their area(s) of study. This class will be part seminar, part writing workshop, so students will be expected to share their drafts and provide thoughtful feedback for one another. By the end of the semester, we should have a deeper understanding of how marginalized authors and artists use creative methods to challenge prevailing assumptions and policies. Students should also leave with a more diverse toolkit for engaging in academic and public deliberations.

In this seminar, we will explore the trans and national in trans/national rhetoric. Each responds to and impacts imaginaries of the nation, citizen, and other; rhetorical exigencies that speak to these imaginaries, and (ethical) responsibilities of the rhetor, rhetorician, and educator. Against the background of the trans/national, rhetoric can be used to center or obfuscate global capitalist forces, promote or undermine coalitional possibilities, question or limit belonging and weaponize other(ing), deny (im)mobility and precariousness facing peoples, celebrate intellectual tourism, or call forth a global citizen who has rhetorical skills commensurate with an increasingly transnational world. Questions  that will guide the exploration of trans/national rhetoric include:  

• How do rhetoric and writing studies address the intersection of rhetoric and nation (building)?   

• Why is there a call for a global and transnational turn in rhetoric and writing studies? What theoretical and analytical frameworks and research methods inform/pave the road for this turn?   

• What are the relations between language policies, writing theories, pedagogy, and a trans/national orientation?   

Panel 2. Add body text in this space.

Panel 3. Add body text in this space.

Panel 4. Add body text in this space.

Panel 5. Add body text in this space.