Teaching: Fall 2020
WGSS-240.001 Sexualities Studies (AU): This course is an introduction to the history and study of sex/uality. We begin with Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol.1: An Introduction (1978), which centers the course in the post-Victorian era and illuminates the ways in which the policing of sexual discourse only incites a proliferation of sexual discourse, or what Foucault calls, “The Repressive Hypothesis”:
“But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (18).
After Foucault, we trace the origins of the study of sex in the field of sexology beginning with late 19th C. sexologists, like Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Otto Weininger; before moving into the 20th C. with Freud, Kinsey, and Masters & Johnson; from there we explore sexual movements, like the Stonewall Riots, second-wave feminism, and HIV/AIDS activism; beginning in the late eighties/early nineties, we navigate queer and gender disciplines in the academy through the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lisa Duggan, Judith Butler, Cathy J. Cohen, Susan Stryker, José Esteban Muñoz, and others; the course ends with Maggie Nelson’s, The Argonauts (Graywolf), and this fall, for the first time, T Fleischmann’s, Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through (Coffee House Press).
AMST-225.001 LIT-296.002 The Activist Imagination in America (AU): This course explores a range of texts, including fiction, poetry, memoir, film, art, pamphlet, and manifesto, that illustrate how writers imagined social justice in America. As authors and activists of the past found themselves working through the issues, concerns, and anxieties that dominated their particular historical moment, we as readers make use of their texts for a similar kind of understanding, accountability, and demonstration in the present. In this course students actively engage literature with a critical eye toward the present.
AMST-296.001 Text & Context: Reading Toni Morrison (AU): In this course students read the work of author, educator, and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison alongside the cultural moment it emerged in America. Through Morrison's work, the course investigates concerns that shaped our world in the last century and haunt the current one, foregrounding Morrison's writing as the key site of our analysis. Students also discuss the uses of literature for critically reassessing and reconfiguring notions of the self, the citizen, and the human. Throughout the study of Morrison's writing, the course attends to matters of history and the aesthetics of language in the novel, short story, and essay.
ENGL-3620 American Poetry I: Contemporary Perspectives on Early American Poetry (GWU): This course will explore the work of early American poets, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop, all from the perspective of contemporary poets, writers, and thinkers like Mark Doty, Colm Toibin, and Martha Ackmann.