This semester I am teaching the ENGL 825 graduate seminar class as "Narrative Medicine," which is an interdisciplinary field that unites the narrative skill of close reading/listening and creativity to address the need for a deeper communication in healthcare. To kick things off, we started with hefty texts like Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and … Continue reading The Body as Metaphor
Zoom gets a bad rap. We’re all familiar with—and probably suffering from--Zoom fatigue, if not actual Zoom burnout. Many of us have never spent so long staring at our own faces and many of us never want to see ourselves again. No wonder students turn their cameras off. But despite it all, the past … Continue reading Adventures in Zoom
Poet Sean Hill reads from his work (19 Feb 2021) Visiting Writer Sean Hill made multiple appearances for K-State students this year, despite the COVID pandemic’s cancellation of his in-person visit to campus. Students were studying his collection Dangerous Goods, especially the way historic research feeds his poems, both in their formal composition — using … Continue reading Undergraduate Poetry Reviews: Sean Hill
Video essay by Sariah Cheadle (MA '22) for ENGL 625 (Fall 2020) on "What an Eighteenth-Century Novel and The Big Bang Theory Taught Me About Surviving a Pandemic." For the final project in ENGL 625 “Eighteenth-Century British Women Writers” (Fall 2020), students were asked to devise an original topic pertaining to one or more of … Continue reading How to Survive a Pandemic: Connection, Vulnerability, and Empathy
Location: Discovered between books from Associate Professor Emeritus Michael Donnelly. Object: Course materials for the Humanities course sequence on "Classical Cultures" and "Medieval and Renaissance." Observations: 1. We usually think of a syllabus as the schedule of readings and assignments for a given course, but this thick spiral-bound "syllabus" is more of a course pack. … Continue reading Found Object: Humanities Course Materials, c.1964
From The Prince of Egypt Today we share the final entry selected for publication from an assignment in ENGL 801 “Graduate Studies in English”: a piece of public scholarship (700-1,000 words) which tailors an academic paper and its scholarly intervention of 10-12 pages for a general-interest audience. Read more about the assignment and the first … Continue reading The Prince of Egypt: The Exodus Story in (Re-)Translation
Uncle Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender Today we share the second of three pieces of public writing selected for publication from an assignment in ENGL 801 “Graduate Studies in English”: a piece of public scholarship (700-1,000 words) which tailors an academic paper and its scholarly intervention of 10-12 pages for a general-interest audience. Read … Continue reading Uncle Iroh’s Got Abs?
Artemisia Gentileschi, "Judith Slaying Holofernes" (1620). Uffizi Gallery. In ENGL 801 "Graduate Studies in English," a required course for incoming M.A. students, we have always asked our graduate students to develop an original contribution to a current scholarly conversation about a literary or cultural text. This fall, we added a final writing assignment: we asked … Continue reading Judith and the Vikings
Image Credit: Goodreads ENGL 251 "Introduction to Literature" students usually are not English majors; they have backgrounds in everything from architecture to physics, psychology to dietetics. Adaptation assignments, which create new art from course texts, allow students to hone reading skills via talents developed in other contexts. Taylor's project below supports her literary analysis of … Continue reading Halloween Horror: The Tell-Tale Heart
The #keatscore mood board that Hannah Rollison (MA '22) created for ENGL 801 "Introduction to Graduate Studies" This fall semester, our M.A. students in ENGL 801 "Introduction to Graduate Studies" are reading and discussing John Keats's ode "To Autumn" as they enhance their skills at close reading. Also this fall semester, during COVID-19, we are … Continue reading #keatscore Mood Boards
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