Staff profile

Fall 2017 Courses

ENG 102-Practice in college level writing, includes preparation of a research paper.

ENG 204-Writing About Literature—focuses primarily on helping students to engage more effectively in the type of intellectual and aesthetic dialogue higher education is hoped to foster in society.  Reading literature and writing about it, especially when done in fellowship with other readers and writers, is a good way to sharpen the skills on which such dialogue depends.  It can and should be a personally rewarding experience, too.  As we read, write about, and discuss different works of literature this semester, we will find ourselves contemplating a variety of important ideas and issues.  This course is designed to help you express more effectively and develop more fully your own thoughts on these ideas and issues, and to do so in a way that takes into account other people’s thoughts on them.  Each piece we read—whether it’s a short story, a poem, a novel, or a play—represents not only an individual’s thoughts and feelings about his or her subject matter, but an individual’s engagement with a larger, cultural discourse concerning it.  This course invites you to participate more thoughtfully—to add your own voice—to the ongoing conversation from which the literature we will read has emerged.

ENG 502-In English 502, we will read and write about contemporary schools of thought in college writing pedagogy, in conjunction with readings from and about composition studies history (mainly from the 1960s to the present).  The seminar will culminate in a first-year college writing course plan, accompanied by a paper articulating and reflecting on the pedagogical values underlying this plan.  As they develop their own ideas about teaching writing throughout the semester, students will be encouraged to situate their teaching philosophies among those of prominent composition theorists, old and new.