Reading the Environment (ENG 140)
Syracuse University: Spring 2025 – Spring 2026
Course Description:
"Living in an age of anthropogenic climate-change, it is more important than ever to examine the historical traditions that shape and define our understanding of 'Nature' and 'the Environment.' With a critical focus for how media representation has the potential to shape our ecological future, this course will engage critically with a variety of historical and contemporary texts including literature, film, interactive documentary, visual art, social media, advertisements, and video games that deal either directly or indirectly with the human/nature relationship and which inform domestic policy, international relations, and social values relating to the natural world and our place within it. In an effort to expand our considerations of what it means to be ecological agents of change in what has often termed the 'Anthropocene,' we will discuss issues of environmental justice, non-human agency, aestheticization, and more to examine how our engagement with the environment shapes global ecologies. With these issues in mind, we will construct a vocabulary to discuss ongoing representational trends across various media forms, their formal affordances and limitations, and their real-world potential to shape our response to ongoing ecological crises."
Course Syllabus
Assignment Description for __
Reading Popular Culture (ENG 145)
Syracuse University: Fall 2024
Course Description:
"In this course we will examine various forms of media which we consider 'popular culture' and utilize critical frameworks through which we might come to better understand where pop culture comes from, how it is constructed, and how it functions in a modern, globalized socio-cultural context. We will cover a broad history of popular culture, from classical theater to reality TV and from video games to social media, to examine how culture is constructed and reinforced through economic structures of production. We will examine counter-cultural movements, the construction of fan communities, serialization, and the emergence of streaming and transmedia storytelling as well as many other topics which continue to shape our current media climate. As we work together to reframe how we read the media around us, you will come to better understand how media affects culture, how these influences shape our lives, and how larger forces are involved in creating and perpetuating these forms of cultural production. As such, this course will arm you with tools and frameworks to help you be an informed individual who can critically engage with the various forms of pop culture media which are all around us."
Course Syllabus
Assignment Description for __
American Literature Since 1865 (ENG 118)
Syracuse University: Fall 2023 – Spring 2024
Course Description:
"In this course we will explore American history through the eyes of its artists—those who have sought to process, respond to, and influence their world through creative expression. As the United States emerged from the Civil War era and faced the various social, cultural, economic, and technological changes of the modern era, literature in turn adapted and shifted in response to these ever-changing social and global realities. To examine the shifting dialogues between authors and their socio-economic and cultural surroundings, we will trace the American literary tradition through various historical events (WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Civil Rights Movement, The Vietnam War, the Tech Age, 9/11, etc.) and aesthetic movements (Realism, Naturalism, the Harlem Renaissance, Modernism, Postmodernism, etc.).
In addition, this course will attend to literary forms across various media forms including the novel, short fiction, experimental fiction, poetry, music, film, and video games. By diversifying our understanding of the interactions between various media forms and the literary canon, we will explore not only themes and content, but also the formal and rhetorical strategies that artists use to engage with the world through their work."
Course Syllabus
Assignment Description for __