Graduate Courses

This course focuses on examples of Shakespeare's best-known tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances. Graduate students will be required to prepare and submit a seminar paper at the conclusion of the course in lieu of the final exam given to undergraduate students. Graduate students will also be tasked with leading and participating more actively in ongoing online discussions.

This course is a survey of the major British writers from the 19th and 20th Centuries. These literary periods are of special interest: The Romantic Period, the Victorian Period, and the Modernist Period. The class examines all the genres but focuses primarily on poetry, drama, and fiction.

This course presents a survey of American literature with the purpose of helping graduate students understand and recognize important American literary movements and cross-currents. Students will read American literary works that have shaped and defined a period. They will also read a selection of secondary works that provide historical, political, and cultural contexts for the literature.

This is a graduate course in which students will learn some of the key issues related to digital writing; understand effective digital writing environments and assignments for students; evaluate digital writing tools for particular pedagogical and writing goals; and develop pedagogically-sound assessment procedures for digital writing assignments. 

This course provides graduate students with an introduction to concepts integral to the discipline of rhetoric and composition. By exploring the terms rhetoric, literacy, and composition, students will be exposed to the fairly recent development of the study of written discourse as a key area within the broader field of English studies. Students will also have the opportunity to apply these concepts to the history and practice of teaching and assessing writing.

This is a graduate writing course that introduces students to the research method of autoethnography. Students will have the opportunity to learn how the self-reflexive practice of autoethonography can be used as valid means for studying the efficacy of the self in a professional context such as a classroom. Students will be required to apply this learning by authoring an autoethnographic study related to some aspect of their work as English teachers, tutors, students or scholars.

This five-week course offers one graduate credit in English and requires at least one full day of attendance at the annual *Minnesota Writing and English (MnWE) conference.  Students will choose a concept presented at the conference as a research focus for the course, and then produce an annotated bibliography of fifteen peer-reviewed journal articles and a formal research paper at least fifteen pages in length.  This course may be repeated twice, so long as the concept(s) explored differ significantly enough to require completely new research.