teaching

Comic Books and Social Justice, RES98-18, Fall 2024

Enrollment: 12

Course Description: Be they dime-store superhero serials, Sunday funnies, or novel-length illustrated memoirs, comics are a very American medium. As such, comics reveal a lot about identity in the American imagination: that is, reading comics as literature can offer us clues about how race, sexuality, gender, class, and ability manifests in the US imagination. Our reading list showcases authors from a variety of identities, lived experiences, and political and socioeconomic positions. In the course of our semester, we will think through specific historical moments of injustice, oppression, and colonial or racist violence (the Holocaust through Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Israeli occupation through Joe Sacco’s Palestine, indigenous genocide through Gord Hill’s The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, reproductive justice through Leah Haye’s Not Funny Ha-Ha, American slavery through Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner, etc). 

Intro to LGBTQ+ Literature and Media, ENLS128, Spring 2024

Enrollment: 16

Course description: Introduction to LGBTQ+ Literature and Media,” introduces literature and media by and about LGBTQ+ individuals. We’ll watch films and TV, read novels, poetry, and manifestos, listen to popular music, and examine visual art. In addition to the varied genres and media, this course will also introduce theories of gender, sexuality, and queerness, all while grounding our inquiry in the history of gay life in the United States in the twentieth century and up to our contemporary moment. In this class, we will ask: what counts as LGBTQ+ literature and media? How do we read, talk about, and analyze queer lit? What are the ethics of representation? How do historical, material, and social conditions impact queer art? and, importantly, Why should we care?

Fiction of Reproductive Justice, ENLS213, Spring 2024

Enrollment: 7

Course description: Conceived in the wake of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), this course examines works of literary fiction that take up themes of reproductive justice, defined broadly. To that end, we’ll read contemporary novels spanning a variety of categories (science fiction, realist fiction, fantasy, autotheory, etc). Exploring genre, narrative, and literary form, this class asks: how do we understand the place of literature in a post-Dobbs world? What can fiction teach us about abortion rights, adoption, trans rights, gender, parenthood, queerness, economic justice, and racial equity?

Social Justice Learning Community (with Dr. Jennifer Thomson), RESC121, 23-24

Enrollment: 29 (Fall 2023), 26 (Spring 2024)

Course description: This seminar replaces the Social Justice Residential College while it takes a year hiatus. Students will critically examine marginalization based on intersections of age, ability, class, gender, race, religion, and sexuality, with the goal of working towards a more just Bucknell. Includes funded weekly lunch and a trip to D.C.

Queer Country, RESC 098, Fall 2022

Enrollment: 9

Course description: This Foundations seminar in the Social Justice Residential College explores social justice issues at the intersection of “queer” and “country,” defined expansively. Queer studies in the academy often focuses on urban areas, unfairly writing off rural spaces as backward, homophobic, or empty. In turn, social justice surrounding rural communities can discount or ignore queer experience. “Queer Country” examines these two words and worlds, so rarely read together. What material conditions does the assumed separation between “queer” and “country" create? What is to be gained from a greater understanding of “queer country”? To answer these questions, students examine social justice issues through the lens of cultural studies, exploring a wide range of media including podcasts, pop music, film, memoir, political action, literary fiction, and the visual arts. Arming ourselves with historical and cultural knowledge, we pay close attention to those intersections of LGBT*QIA+ life and rural space that are particularly salient to our current space and place: rural central Pennsylvania. What does it mean to “queer” country—or to “countrify” queer—when pursuing social justice in our immediate surroundings?  

Seminar in Literary Theory, ENLS300/600, Fall 2022, Fall 2024

Enrollment: 12 (Fall 2022), 15 (Fall 2024)

Course description: This class surveys the field of literary theory as a range of heterogeneous but interrelated schools of critical methods interested in language, textuality, aesthetics, reading, and representation. In the course of the semester, we gain a thorough understanding of the genealogy of the field of Literary Theory, while also getting a feel for the conflicts and shared interests both

within and amongst said schools. While literary criticism encompasses a wide range of philosophical and historical traditions and has its roots in classical debates about art and interpretation, “critical theory” has a more recent genealogy, and here names a broad arc of transcontinental philosophical critiques of subjecthood, culture, and identity. This class seeks to answer several questions. What is the relationship between the history of criticism, and the theory of literature? How, in the course of the twentieth century, do both “critical theory,” and the study of literature overlap with, differ from, or transform into “literary theory”? How does the encounter of literary studies with critical theory shift, expand, politicize, and complicate traditional approaches to the study of literature, and what does it mean to insist on the specificity of literature and literary study today? 

Gender & Sexuality in America: Divas, Drag, and Dirt, ENLS228, Fall 2020/Spring 2023 Enrollment: 25 (Fall 2020); 24 (Spring 2023)

Course description: “Camp” is having a moment. From drag superstar RuPaul’s recent Emmy win, to the scream-queen excess of American Horror Story, to the spectacular extravagance of the 2019 Met Gala, camp—which Susan Sontag famously defined as “a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content”— has recently re-entered the public consciousness. But why? Surveying a variety of genres, time periods, and media, “Divas, Drag, Dirt: Gender and Sexuality in America” explores the various definitions and understandings of camp as a social, political, and cultural practice, as well as an aesthetic sensibility. Our objects of study range widely but be taken mostly from 20th-century US popular culture. This course is primarily concerned with how camp relates to various identity formations, chief among them gender, sexuality, race, and class. As such, central topics of discussion include camp as a gay male sensibility, camp as a black queer aesthetic, camp as it relates to female “divas”, camp as a feminist practice, camp as a way of breaking down gender norms, and camp as a way of grappling with tragedies on the level of slavery and the holocaust. 

Intro to Race and Literature: Queerness & Race, ENLS203, Spring 2020/2022/2023/Fall 2023

Enrollment: 12 (Spring 2020); 10 (Spring 2022); 15 (Spring 2023); 33 (Fall 2023)

Course description: One of many iterations of Literary Studies’ Race and Literature credit course, “Queerness and Race” explores the intersection of two historically determined and everevolving terms. Reading critical texts alongside various media (namely literature, but drama, music, contemporary art, comic books, performance, and film), we ask: what is “queerness,” and how does it relate to “race”? How do sexuality and gender identity interact and intersect with racial identity? What material histories, sociopolitical structures, theoretical arguments, or cultural productions construct, define, and determine U.S. understandings of race and sexuality? 

History of Sexuality in Literature, ENLS364/ENLS694, Spring 2020/Spring 2023/2024

Enrollment: 11 (Spring 2020); 11 (Spring 2023); 11 (Spring 2024)

Course description: This course explores the intimate relationship between sexuality, literature, and literary criticism. Queer theory and sexuality studies not only inherit many of the same critical theoretical practices as literary theory, but also, like literary theory, frequently grapple with questions of language, textuality, aesthetics, reading, and representation. Engaging with sexuality studies’ relationship to literary objects, we’ll also explore how queer theory’s investment in “the literary” plays out in terms of canon formation, critical style, and methodology. Reading critical texts alongside these works of fiction, we will ask: What work are these literary objects doing for queer literary criticism? How do sexuality and gender identity interact and intersect with literary traditions in English? And, ultimately, what is “sexuality”... and how does it relate to “literature”?  

Individual Projects in Literary Studies, ENLS316, Fall 2022/Spring 2023/2024 Enrollment: 1 (Fall 2022); 1 (Spring 2023); 1 (Spring 2024)

Senior Thesis, ENLS379, Spring 2024

Enrollment: 1

How to Be Queer in Central PA (with Dr. Bryan Vandevender), UNIV205-02, Spring 2022 Enrollment: 10

Course description: This course is a quarter-credit “Teach-In,” conceived as an opportunity to engage not only in critical dialogue about the challenges of living out and proud at Bucknell, but also in collective action that could result in the curation of campus programming, the facilitation of community dialogues, the drafting of policy and/or position statements, the creation of artistic work, or the organization of a political demonstration. In addition to engaging stakeholders at Bucknell, students engage with stakeholders beyond the university, as we bring in several guest speakers to dialogue about their experience of being and living queer in central Pennsylvania.  

Queer Reading, ENLS301/601, Spring 2022

Enrollment: 9

Course description: This course is an intensive foray into to queer literary theory. Students practice the vocabulary of literary and film criticism, while encountering and comparing the different methods, styles, and objectives at work in different queer theoretical camps. As we explore the history of queer criticism in the US, we ask: what does it mean to “read queer”? What are the stakes of queer reading? What is the relationship of queer criticism to LGBTQ+ history, politics, and identity?  

Graphic Memoir, ENLS213, Spring 2021

Enrollment: 27

Course description: Since the underground comix of the 1960s (and even before), comic book authors have experimented with using comics to convey personal, autobiographical, or confessional stories. Beyond tales of caped crusaders, autobiography remains one of the most popular topics within graphic literature. This course examines the world of graphic memoir – that is, autobiographical comic books – in order to figure out just what it is about the memoir genre and the comics medium that so frequently brings the two together. Throughout the course, students engage with a vast array of graphic novels, tracing differences and continuities in approach, style, themes, narrative structure, and voice, examining how each memoir deals with and complicate identity, memory, and narrative.  

Modernism and Crisis, UNIV200 (with Dr. Bret Leraul), Spring 2021/2022

Enrollment: 35 (Spring 2021); 32 (Spring 2022)

Course description: This seminar explores the pervasive sense in modern culture that fundamental shifts in cultural patterns and paradigms have occurred, changing our relationship with tradition, the physical world, and the ways we think and feel about ourselves and others. This sense of cultural instability has threatened some and liberated others. We trace the development and contestation of modernity and modernisms through an interdisciplinary corpus of texts—from philosophy, literature, history, anthropology, film, art, and other fields—that reflect or address cultural change in the long twentieth century. This team-taught, interdisciplinary Integrated Perspectives course stages the crises of Western modernity by drawing out the dialogues and contradictions among this tradition and its racialized, gendered, and colonized others. Units feature guest lectures by Bucknell faculty members from diverse disciplines. 

Passing in Literature—Race, Gender, Class, ENLS301/ENLS601, Fall 2020

Enrollment: 20

Course description: Passing—in other words, the practice of strategically crossing identity categories through one’s identity performance—can tell us a lot about how those categories are constructed in the first place. Examining a vast array of narratives from a variety of historical periods and contexts—including the Harlem Renaissance (Passing, 1927), the golden age of Broadway (My Fair Lady, 1957), the early-2000’s box office (White Chicks, 2004), and many more—this course asks: Why does passing hold such sway over the American 20th-century imagination? How might narratives of passing disrupt, complicate, or reinforce structures of power that are premised on identity categories? What is at stake for the various “passing” characters we encounter in these texts, and why? And, crucially, what can narratives of racial, gender, and socioeconomic passing tell us about how race, sex, and class are (differently) constructed, enforced, and hierarchized? 

Comix, Comics, Graphic Novel, ENLS101, Fall 2020

Enrollment: 14

Course description: “Comics, Comix, Graphic Novel” is a course in academic writing. It is also a crash course in how to read, analyze, and write about comics—be they dime-store superhero serials, Sunday funnies, or novel-length illustrated memoirs. Throughout the course of the class, we will consider a wide range of sequential art from the early comic strip to the contemporary “graphic novel,” all while honing our skills in academic writing. Among other questions, this class asks: What makes comics unique as a medium? How do text and image interact? What is the history of sequential art? And, importantly, how do we write about comics?  

Sexuality and Memoir, ENLS213-01, Fall 2019

Enrollment: 22

Course description: Memoir can be, and often is, a coming out story. Within the genre, authors tell narratives of gender transition, relay tales of sexual awakening, or replay experiences of sexual violence. When they do, we are left asking: What is the relationship between the personal and the sexual? Between the autobiographical and the creative? And, perhaps most importantly: how do we write about sex, sexuality, and gender? Exploring a wide range of contemporary memoir, graphic non-fiction, and autotheory, “Special Topics in American Literature: Sexuality and Memoir” tackles these questions.  

Interracial Intimacies, ENLS290-01, Fall 2019

Enrollment: 6

Course description: From films such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Pulp Fiction, and Get Out, to classic US literature such as The Great Gatsby and Native Son, to TV and novels in the new millennium, the United States has an obsession with stories of black-white intimacy. “Special Topics in America Literature: Interracial Intimacies” asks why. The stakes of the cultural productions we explore are high: from the rape of black slaves by white masters, to the re-emergence of contemporary white nationalist movements, the history of gender and sexuality in America is also a history of racial tension and violence. This course explores that history, turning to fiction as a lens through which to ask tough questions about representation, desire, and identity. 

Queer Reading, ENLS101-03, Fall 2019

Enrollment: 15

Course description: This is a course in academic writing. It is also a crash course in queer reading: the art of sneaking queerness into a text by reading between the lines. From its beginnings, queer reading has defined itself beyond regular idea of both “reading” and “queer”— so this class deals with all sorts of subjects: the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Aardman Studios’ Chicken Run, Ursula, Batman, Shakespeare, and Dolly Parton. As we tour this vast array of material, we will ask: what does it mean to “read queer”? Who can “read queerly”? Can any text be “queer”? And finally, what are the stakes of queer reading?