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
Location: A box discovered during summer cleaning in the ECS Building.Object: Photo of Associate Professor Emeritus Irene Ward teaching ENGL 100 "Expository Writing 1" in the EH 228 technology lab classroom, Fall 1999.Observations: 1) In the late 1990s, the English Department oversaw the installation of a technology lab classroom in Eisenhower Hall for computer-assisted writing … Continue reading Found Object: EH 228 Classroom, 1999
A new Canvas module for the Writing Center (Fall 2020) As the K-State community begins the “semester like no other” (to quote a recent Town Hall speech from President Myers), at least one thing hasn’t changed: many students will have a lot of writing to do this fall. Faculty well know—often from personal experience—that the … Continue reading The Writing Must Go On!
As we get ready for the start of classes on August 17, we’ll soon be back to our regular schedule of twice-weekly posts. In the meantime, watch for another update this coming week, as we prepare for the return of faculty and GTAs to the ECS Building! — Karin Westman, Department Head … Continue reading Found Object: Preparations for a COVID Fall Semester
Counting down the hours until you can experience Hamilton: An American Musical on the small screen? Re-watching to catch all of the details you missed the first time? We've got you covered, courtesy of student projects from our department's Hamilton course which I had the pleasure to teach in Spring 2018 and Fall 2019. … Continue reading Hamilton in Context
I asked the students in my Spring 2020 English 725 "African American Children’s Literature" course to produce a piece of public writing that answers the question of Why African American Children’s Literature Matters. Everyone from ill-informed pundits to well-meaning relatives question the value of courses in the humanities: "Why do universities offer such classes?" Or, … Continue reading “Ain’t Nobody’s Respect Worth More Than Your Own”: African American Children’s Literature, Self-Esteem, Education, and Hope
I turn here to Part Two of two blog posts on teaching, reading, and writing the apocalypse during a moment of real dystopia. Part One sketched out the initial seven weeks of a class on dystopic fiction and film. Part Two below considers the last seven weeks after the rise of Covid-19 and our move … Continue reading On Teaching and Reading the Apocalypse . . . in the Apocalypse — Part II
K-State English 