Graduate Courses

University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

Professor Mark Netzloff

This course offers an introduction to a variety of critical practices of literary and cultural theory.
 it is designed for students just beginning graduate study as well as those looking to expand their training with a broader survey of theoretical methodologies. Although much of our discussion will cover major intellectual and disciplinary shifts in English studies over the past several decades, we will also emphasize critical intersections and situate critics representing different theoretical traditions in dialogue with one another. Critical readings will include essays by Marx, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Adorno and Horkheimer, Habermas, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Williams, Hall, Said, Jameson, Spivak, Latour, Bhabha, Butler, Sedgwick, Ahmed, Gates, Moretti, and Guillory, among others.

 

Professor Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

How should one approach the writing of media history? Who narrates the course of events, and for whom? Who are some of the central figures for the development of media history methods, and how can we trace their impact on the larger field? What, finally, does it mean to write a history of media? In this course, we will consider varying texts and methods of media history in order to approach these questions. Rather than engaging in criticisms of accuracy, we will interrogate the authors’ methods, politics, foci, and lacunae; in other words, we will work as media historiographers documenting the process of historical writing. Our goal will be a larger understanding of media and cultural history’s dimensions so that students are prepared to engage in their own research in thoughtful, insightful ways


University of Califonia, Berkeley

Professor Clancy Wilmott

This course provides a broad historical and theoretical background for new media production and practice. The class will map out theoretical approaches from different disciplines and allow graduate students to discuss and apply them to their own research projects. 

Professor Rahul Parson

This course offers a survey of some of the key texts in Hindi literary studies, with excursions into other South Asian language literatures. The class is designed to provide a comprehensive study of the scholarship on modern Indian literature and particularly movements in Hindi. As part of the course, we will discuss various methodological and ideological approaches to the study of literature. The texts have been selected to illuminate the important moments in the history of a modern literary idiom and the debates around the formation of the canon and the various exclusions. All the texts will be in English, though a small selection of the optional texts will be in Hindi.

Professor Clancy Wilmott

From postcards and maps to mobile phones, this course considers the history and future of locative media, as technological, situated, and navigational ways of expressing and understanding space, location, and bodies. This is a theory and making course. It is designed to help students traverse the nuances between a) critically engaging with theoretical ideas and implementing the questions that they raise into their practice and b) critically engaging with the technological production of space and place, and implementing the questions that it raises into theory.

Professor Sukanya Banerjee

Focusing on the Victorian novel, this course will examine why it emerged as the dominant literary form in nineteenth-century Britain. What made the novel so popular, and in what ways did the novel shape—and was shaped in turn—by the prevailing social, political, and aesthetic preoccupations of the time? What accounts for the Victorian novel’s abiding hold on us today? In addressing these questions, we will read different genres of the Victorian novel, the bildungsroman, the “industrial” novel, the sensation novel, and the fin de siècle gothic. In doing so, we will also focus on enhancing our analytical skills: close reading, developing a thesis, and structuring an argument. It will appear as an indepent study in my transcript


Professor Greg Castillo

This seminar examines the historical legacy of symbiotic countercultures that emerged in the Bay Area during the ‘long-‘60s.’ Intersectional maker cultures linked the parallel projects of revolutionary social transformation mounted by ecofreaks, cyberfreaks, and ‘outlaw builders’; Black, Chicano, and Native American activists; lesbians and gay men; and children and ‘free school’ educators. Course readings from Design Radicals: Spaces of Bay Area Counterculture (Univ. of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) explore topics including the spatial politics ‘liberated territories’ at occupied spaces like People’s Park and Alcatraz, hand crafted architecture and the ‘Outlaw Builder,’ the ‘ecofreak’ and the birth of ecological consciousness, underground publishing as consciousness raising media, political posters as a protest medium, LSD as a catalyst of cultural breakthroughs, and the spatial tactics of intentional communities. Our discussions will assess these practices for their potential as a ‘usable past’ capable of informing and inspiring design radicals in the present.

Professor Rahul Parson

An undergraduate seminar which looked at a variety of novels from early modern and modern India with a special emphasis on Bengal. Lecture and discussion on the novel as it arose on the Indian subcontinent during the 19th and 20th centuries, using English translations and original works in English. Critical discussion of the novel as a modern genre adapted to local conditions and coexisting with older traditions of writing. Examines the novel as a window on Indian modernities. Interpretation of Indian society, culture, and history through literature.

Professor Hannah Zeavin

A seminar where we worked through the methodologies of producing research with each student producing a journal length article for review.

This course will cover methods and approaches for students considering professionalizing in the field of STS, including a chance for students to workshop written work. 

Professor Hannah Zeavin

This is an introductory graduate level course in Science and Technology Studies where we worked through the basics of STS, both through new and old scholarship. We worked on the evolving nature of STS and how this new multi-disciplinary 'discipline' is established.

Professor Rahul Parson

This is a graduate seminar in Hindi where we worked through the various forms of Hindi literature and its urban imaginaries and how we can see it in context of liberalization and beyond. One of the central texts was Kalikatha by Alka Saraogi.

Literature plays a crucial role in representing and imagining the city, providing acute observations on urban life and social processes (David Harvey). Novels, in particular, explore urban desires and motivations in relation to social forms, institutions, and conventions. The class will read excerpts from recent novels in Hindi, published after the 1991 initiation of neoliberal reforms.

Professor Andrew Jones

In the first semester of the pro-seminar, we discussed various research methods that helped us proceed in our career as researchers and academics in area studies. In the second semester, we worked on different research methodologies, and how we can apply that in Asia centric scholarship.


Course Descriptions are taken from syllabus of these courses.