Winter Quarter 2026

Throughout the quarter, you will read critically, write and revise short stories, analyze your creative process, and offer thoughtful feedback to peers. Each student will have opportunities to workshop original stories and will submit a final portfolio showcasing their revised work.

GEs: AH, WE

This course will provide students with grounding in some of the foundational concepts in contemporary critical theory, focusing especially on traditions coming out of Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminism, critical race theory, and post/anti-colonial studies.  We will spend the majority of the term reading key texts in these traditions that will allow us to develop a vocabulary around ideology, recognition, alterity, and power.  As the quarter ends, we will turn to texts in contemporary literary and cultural studies that ground themselves in the critical traditions that we have been examining. Texts will be provided via a course reader; there are no books. 

GEs: AH, DD, OL, ACGH, WE

This course will focus on queer and trans law and literature. We will examine topics such as the raids of LGBT venues in the early- and mid-twentieth century, the policing of “adult spaces” in the 1980s and beyond, recent bathrooms bills targeting trans people, laws pertaining to conversion therapy, and asylum law that has pertained to queer and trans immigrants. Our literary texts will include Alexandra Villasante’s novel The Grief Keeper, excerpts from Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues, Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Luisa A. Igloria’s “Bathroom Ghazal”, and Jamie Babbit’s film But I’m a Cheerleader. We will read these texts alongside legal writing that includes both statutory and case law, at levels from the Supreme Court decision to the municipal bylaw. 

“Writing Science” examines how scientific knowledge is shaped by texts, writing practices, and persuasive strategies. Using interdisciplinary methods from science studies and literary studies, we will learn how language functions in the profession of science and how scientific messages change as they shift between professional and public contexts. We will focus on the literary structures of scientific arguments and on the textual strategies that researchers, journalists, and fiction authors use to communicate scientific ideas. This quarter’s version of STS 164 has a topical focus of dinosaurs and paleontology.

In our early meetings, we will explore the historical development and modern characteristics of contemporary research publishing. We will then undertake a survey of the strategies scientists use to communicate, including metaphors, audience awareness, visual rhetoric, and engagement with science fiction. In the second half of the course, we will investigate how scientific ideas are transformed as they circulate in our culture more broadly: in the news media, science fiction, and beyond.

This course fulfills UCD’s Writing Experience and Arts & Humanities GE requirements, as it is designed to develop skills in argumentative writing, effective communication, and the humanistic analysis of science. It also fulfills the Scientific Literacy GE requirement through cultivating familiarity with the forms and conventions of scientific writing practices, as well as experience in the close reading of scientific literature.

Memoir and Life Writing: Ethnic, Queer, and Women's Life Writing 

In this class, we will examine several contemporary works of memoir and life writing from different genres including personal essay, creative non-fiction, graphic memoir, and poetry. Among other questions, we will examine the ways that these writers, authors, poets expand and transgress the boundaries of life writing and memoir. At the same time, we will interrogate whether the typical terms often applied to this style of writing and poetry are useful or relevant, as well as how the genres of writing shape the representation of the self. We will also consider how "ethnic," queer, and women's narrative and poetry have historically been conflated with both “self” and “community,” even as they have also rejected these associations at times. We will examine the way that these texts focus on hybrid genres and forms of writing and representing and/or performing the self. And spoiler: Not every text we will be reading is a memoir in the traditional sense.  

How do we sense "race," and how do ideas about racial difference affect how we learn to use our senses? How does the hierarchy of the senses interact with constructions of race? If race is not only socially constructed but sensorially constructed, is it possible to rearrange or reeducate our senses—to attune them to other ways of hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling? This class will consider literature, film, and theory by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color that defamiliarizes conventional ways of sensing—and of knowing, feeling, and relating through the senses. Some topics we will consider include: how to read with attention to the social and historical constructedness of the senses, how ideas about race function in non-visual modes, the surveillance and policing of racialized sensations, and how embodied and unruly sensory experiences can rearrange relations to space, time, and community.

required textbooks: David Chariandy, Brother; Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl; Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth

The medieval authors and texts most familiar to undergraduates in the classroom tend to include Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Beowulf. But late-medieval and early modern England also enjoyed a thriving tradition of literary writing about outlaws, people cast out of society for not only breaking laws but also, in various cases, challenging dominant political regimes. This tradition is often familiar to students not from course syllabi but from cultural commentary – think, for example, of the many comparisons of Luigi Mangione to the popular medieval figure of Robin Hood. This course will focus on the genre of medieval outlaw narrative, which existed in the form of prose texts, short poems, and longer poetic ballads. These narratives often reveal to us the roles of race, property possession, and policing in the lives of these early outlaws and dissidents. We will thus place the medieval outlaw against the background of modern and contemporary political insurgency in the last few years, using the medieval outlaw to help us think about what it means to challenge and disrupt the legal and political status quo now.

Graded work for this class will include in-class writing exercises, reading quizzes, a midterm, class presentations, and a series of papers that will build toward a final research paper project.

“Narrative Ecology”

Course Description: Advanced topics in literary theory and criticism. Preparation and evaluation of research paper.

Cross-list with CRI 200B. Environmental Humanities DE elective.

“Every place,” Tim Ingold observes, “is a knot of stories.” Narratives, Eleanor Hayman writes, “emerge from and are co-dependent with ecological processes.” Humans, according to Sylvia Wynter, are “a storytelling species” that has come to tell a powerful story that denies “the storytelling origins” of our identities.

This seminar will explore theories of narrative in the environmental humanities, including the way different disciplines and subfields—such as environmental history, anthropology, and ecocriticism—define their contributions to interdisciplinary conversations through their distinct approaches to storytelling. We’ll ask: how do narratives represent non-linear change, emergent phenomena, adaptation, and resilience in complex socio-ecological systems? How should we understand the ecological implications of key concepts of narrative theory, such as equilibrium, sequence, change, pace, delay, irresolution, closure, and causality? What are the stakes of understanding nonhumans as narrative agents—or even as storytellers?  What are the implications of defining narrative as a definitively human form of meaning-making or even as an underlying form of all knowledge, what Fredric Jameson calls “the central function or instance of the human mind”? Is climate fiction a form of “cultural geoengineering”? How might planetary dynamics be incorporated into theories of world literature? How can literary studies broaden its terrain of narratological inquiry by recognizing non-textual forms of “storywork,” including oral storytelling If we ascribe a world-making power to narrative, what is the role of the listener or reader, the critic or theorist?

Potential readings include: 

Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future”; Hamilton et al., “Do Stories Need Critics? Environmental Storyism and the end of ecocriticism”; Veland et al., “Narrative matters for sustainability: the transformative role of storytelling in realizing 1.5C futures”; Le Guin, “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”; Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”; Bergthaller, “Climate Change and Un-Narratability”; Woods, “Genre at Earth Magnitude: A Theory of Climate Fiction”; Spellberg, “Myth and Anarchy”; Benjamin, “The Storyteller”; Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative”; Van Dooren, Flight Ways (selections); Levine, The Activist Humanist (selections); Haraway, “It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories”; Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse (selections); Miller, “The Ecological Plot”; Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (selections); Iseke, “Indigenous Storytelling as Research” 

This course will offer an introduction to the enormously influential genre of saints’ lives (hagiography), with particular attention to the new approaches to gender and sexuality that Christian beliefs and practices brought to the late-Roman and medieval worlds. From the young Roman matron Perpetua, who dreamed of herself as a man the night before entering the gladiatorial arena, to the virgin martyrs who rejected familial and governmental pressure to marry, to kings like the martyred Edmund or the childless Edward the Confessor whose lives and deaths challenged traditional masculine ideals, saints were often in conflict with their cultures’ traditions around appropriately gendered behavior, dress, marriage, and procreation. Beginning with work on saints in early Christian culture by Peter Brown, Virginia Burrus, and others, and reading up through recent scholarship in gender, sexuality, and trans studies, we will consider how the narratives and characteristics of this resilient and widely represented genre intersect with modern concerns about identity, authenticity, and self-expression.

           Works in Latin and Old French will be read in translation; those in Middle English will mostly be from editions with substantial glosses, and we will practice working with the language in seminar. No previous knowledge of Middle English is expected or needed. 

Topic: The Tarot and Western Esotericism

This course will serve as an introduction to the history of Western Esotericism, but it will focus specifically on the emergence of the Tarot at the end of the Nineteenth Century-- from the rise of Eliphas Levi to the collapse of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn-- as an occult response to modernity. We will be treating the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909) as a portable and symbolic archive that serves as a crystallization of the 2000+ year history of Western Esotericism; through our specific focus on the Tarot, we will consider the fundamentals of the earlier movements and beliefs that contributed to its production: Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Astrology, Alchemy, the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Symbolist poetry. and Ritual Magic among other systems of belief and representation. Time permitting, we will also take a look at the role the aesthetic form of the Tarot played in the work of the Modernist poets W.B. Yeats and H.D. The reading list is yet to be finalized, but alongside excerpts from the source materials, it is likely to include Levi's The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic (1854-1856), Papus' The Tarot of the Bohemians (1889), A.E. Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) as well as more contemporary writing about the Tarot that will enable us to consider how it contributed to the emergence of Theosophy, Wicca, and Neopaganism. Prospective students for the seminar will be expected to have obtained their own personal Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck before the quarter begins and to bring it to every class session.