Recent special topics courses include:
ENGL 291: Animal Minds
Contemporary studies of cognition across animal taxa have broadened our understanding of how animal minds operate — they’ve also forced us to rethink human exceptionalism — that our own minds are special and apart from those of other animals. One of the great paradoxes in cognition studies is that we cannot really know how other minds operate, despite our best efforts to study them empirically. But, exceptional or not, our minds are well-equipped to imagine other realities, which lets us take off creatively beyond the frontiers of our current scientific understanding of animal minds.
This course in creative writing has only one goal: to tackle “the mind” in its diverse animal (and not-so-animal) forms. We may consider the hive minds of social insects; the collective decision-making of pack vertebrates; tool-using octopodes; nest-weaving birds; the extended sensory networks of spider webs; and even the underground root networks of plants. We might contrast human neurodiversity, early childhood development, memory loss and senescence with the exploding field of artificial intelligence. Our primary texts will be research papers in fields ranging from animal behavior and cognition studies, neurobiology, philosophy, and related studies. We will also read some examples of short fiction or poetry that explore other mindscapes (think science fiction, persona poems, choral narratives, and artificially generated texts). Your writing may straddle genres (fiction, poetry, and nonfiction) and you are encouraged to experiment, using the primary scientific texts and literary pieces as jump-off points to imagine minds unlike your own.
ENGL 291: Making Science and Nature Comics
This creative writing course uses visuals and text in tandem to communicate stories about science and nature. Students will be asked to doodle, draw, diagram, collage, photograph, photoshop, diorama, shadow-puppet, fingerpaint, or otherwise use visuals as a fundamental component of your creative process. Students will also pair your visuals with text, which means you will label, caption, thought-bubble, lyricize, define, describe, recall, recount and narrate with words what you do not express in images. Images and text in conversation come in many forms, ranging from comics and graphic narratives to illustrated guides and technical manuals, to maps, journals, graphs and more. We will use this hybrid medium to explore topics in science and nature writing, including but not limited to describing the form, function, and relationships between living and nonliving systems in interaction, ruminating on our dis/connections with built and natural environments, and rejoicing in the complex beauty of a world that demands multisensory appreciation.
Adding visuals to science and nature writing expands its possibilities because visuals can capture in shorthand the microscopic (think molecules and endoparasites) and macroscopic (think animal migrations and carbon cycles). Visuals can simplify complexity, or amplify signal from noise. Visuals and text in combination offer a multidimensional, non-linear platform for exploring important topics in science and nature “writing,” and their aesthetics can package serious, weighty questions in an approachable format. Our core texts will include "Making Comics," by Lynda Barry, and "Understanding Comics," by Scott McCloud. We will also look at a selection of works by print and webcomics artists, visual poets, natural historians, science illustrators, animators, and documentary filmmakers to consider the possibilities of visual/text hybrids as a narrative form. There are no prerequisites to take this course — to quote Lynda Barry, “You don’t have to have any artistic skill to do this. You just need to be brave and sincere.”