Undergraduate Courses - Spring 2024
This list includes courses with a special emphasis. Go to the online LSU catalog for general course descriptions not listed here. Refer to the online Schedule Booklet for course times, classrooms, and updates.
ENGL 2000 – Sections 2 and 4 (English Composition)
Nolde Alexius
Our Built Environment
Communication-Intensive Learning. Today's college students are essential to building environments that are just, accessible, functional, and beautiful. Societal problems are the result of human-made environments, both physical and conceptual. Academic disciplines hold the potential to address these problems. Students in English 2000 - Our Built Environment - will consider how societal problems such as racism, gender inequality, environmental pollution, health risks, may be addressed with interdisciplinary solutions. From there they will choose an area of research that interests them and explore it.
ENGL 2000 - Sections 7 and 15 (English Composition)
Sharon Andrews
Writing for Community Action and Advocacy
Includes a Service-Learning Component. This course is a special emphasis course with a focus on the use of language, especially written language, as a tool for empowerment within the community and includes a Service-Learning requirement. Students will be challenged to think about their role in the community and the use of writing to inspire and affect change. Students will be asked to do field research with a community partner; analyze materials, research and document sources responsibly; present professionally written, verbal, and visual reports; and work collaboratively. Students will maintain a Reflection Journal, and actively participate in class workshops and activities.
ENGL 2000 - Sections 67, 75, and 134 (English Composition)
Penda Smith
Cultural Criticism through Memoir
Cultural Criticism is the practice of analyzing cultural artifacts to uncover underlying meanings and societal implications while memoir is a genre characterized by personal experiences, reflections, and memories rooted in the author's life. This course invites students to engage in discussions, analytical essays, and reflections, fostering an understanding of how memoirs can serve as powerful instruments for cultural critique in an ever-evolving world. Students will develop an understanding of cultural criticism and memoirs as concepts and will be equipped with analytical tools to assess memoirs as cultural artifacts and personal narratives.
ENGL 2000 - Section 69 (English Composition)
Ann Martin
Writing and Healthcare
This course focuses on writing about disease, medicine, and healthcare. It considers the perspectives of researchers, practitioners, health journalists, and the average citizen, who will at some point be in need of accessing the health care system. A number of genres that present information about disease, medicine, and health care will be explored. APA formatting and style will be emphasized in some writing assignments. Texts and Materials: open access resources.
ENGL 2000 - Section 76 (English Composition)
Christina Armistead
Cultural Exchanges
Includes a Service-Learning Component. This section of English 2000 will ask you to think globally. You will research and compose arguments about issues with a global impact and will consider how understanding cultural context can help us solve them in a manner that respects the multiple national interests involved. To help you do this effectively, you will participate in a service-learning partnership that asks you to engage one-on-one with an international student. Through one-hour meetings each week, you will help your partner improve his/her spoken English and you will sharpen your ability to engage with and understand cultural perspectives beyond your own.
ENGL 2000 - Sections 82, 83, and 91 (English Composition)
Trey Strecker
Writing About Film
Students in this course will study what constitutes successful film writing through a rhetorical focus on argument. Our reading, writing, and discussion will focus on issues of authorship, genre, representation, and narrative. Students will learn basic film concepts, techniques, and terminology in an effort to think critically about film and its role in our lives. Students will compose in multiple modes to improve their writing skills while gaining a more complex understanding of audience, form, and the contexts that inform effective argument.
ENGL 2000 Section 84 and 93 (English Composition)
Lisa Nohner
Language of Horror
Through studying rhetorical techniques and appeals within horror imagery, true crime media, and horror cinema, students will develop a critical lens for engaging popular culture and learn how to make and support compelling academic arguments.
ENGL 2000 - Sections 90 and 113 (English Composition)
Michele Turner
Nutrition & the Food Industry
This writing course focuses on how the food industry - including the FDA, chemical laboratories, advertisers, grocery stores, food tech innovations, and corporate America- influences our food choices. Through documentary evaluations, social media comparisons, and both popular and scholarly research, students will gain knowledge about our vast nutritional web. We will also research and argue about how our nutritional choices may be linked to our escalating rates of obesity, auto-immune and other diseases, and our mental health issues.
ENGL 2000 - Sections 109, 150, and 153 (English Compositon)
Doug Scully
Composition and Genre in Film
We will investigate what makes good writing through the examination of films from various genres. By using films to explore writing we can think critically about how messages are sent all around us every day. Developing our ability to read and think carefully, we will consider the steps necessary to compose clear and coherent writing in response to other texts and experiences. For this class, our texts will be pulled from the American Film Institute’s 2007 list of greatest American films, such as Citizen Kane, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Nashville, and Blade Runner.
ENGL 2000 - Section 116 (English Composition)
Zachary Bordas
Post-colonial Praxis: Writing from Listening
In this course, students will examine key tenets of postcolonial theory, including ideas of marginalization, racial discrimination, systems of oppression, and circles of poverty. By practicing close reading of critical postcolonial authors, with the intent of listening before acting, students will discover the ways that their prose may serve the needs of their community from a place of compassion and equity.
ENGL 2000 - Section 124 (English Composition)
Spencer Dodd
Composition in Context: Fraud, Forgery, Detection
This course examines our cultural fascination with high-profile cases of fraud and/or forgery, and the detection and unravelling of such deceptions. To this end, we will engage with a wide variety of multimodal sources spanning popular documentaries, trade books, investigative journalism, and academic articles across disciplines to interrogate the place of events like the collapse of Theranos in our culture. As a composition course, our schedule of assignments emphasizes careful reading, writing, and research, culminating in a case study and research paper.
ENGL 2000 - Section 129 (English Composition)
Hayley Phillips
Language and Horror
ENGL 2000 - Section 130 (English Composition)
Amber Jurgensen
Monsters and Writing
This course advances writing and communication skills through the lens of the monster. Vampires, kaiju, creatures of folklore and myth, monstrous people, and more will appear in readings and project work as we form our own definition of the term "monster" over the course of the semester.
ENGL 2000 - Section 140 (English Composition)
Denis Waswa
Writing & Righting the Environment
This course will focus on reading and writing about the environment—how can we imagine, collaborate, construct, share, and write about environmental concerns in the present climate crisis? We will examine the rhetoric, representations, language, and ideas writers create about the environment and nature in general. As we grapple with climate change, how should our writing, rhetoric, awareness, and action about the environment change? This course will explore writings about nature and critique human impact on the environment. In so doing, students will develop their writing skills in ways that promote and enhance environmental concerns, awareness, and sensitivities. The questions we will engage include: What role does writing about nature play in the present environmental debacle? How is the environment connected to contemporary political, ecological, social, and economic concerns? In what ways do questions of agency and advocacy manifest in environment writings? How can we right the environment through writing?
ENGL 2000 - Section 141 (English Composition)
Seohye Kwon
Cultural Interplays
We encounter various perspectives to understand our era of globalization and cultural diversity. In this course, we will first examine how such influence constructs individual identities by writing a personal reflection essay. Then, students will take a case study of a local event, examining how multiple cultural backgrounds have shaped it and contributed to the embracing environment of the local community. Lastly, we will read some articles about cultural imperialism to see the unequal power dynamics that condition cultural production and consumption on a global scale. However, beyond the unilateral understanding of globalization as dominance, students will explore different forms of cultural hybridization, particularly in pop culture.
ENGL 2025 - Section 6 (Fiction)
Nolde Alexius
LSU Fiction
English 2025 examines a 60-year span of fiction writers who were students, editors, and faculty at Louisiana State University starting with 3-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Penn Warren. We will read these writers’ fiction in its various forms: short stories, novels, and novellas. Students will learn to think critically about the fiction they read and write one original essay of literary analysis.
ENGL 2025 - Section 9 (Fiction)
Lara Kees
Mystery and Meaning: Fiction and the Unknown
In this course, we will explore the genre of fiction: reading, discussing, and analyzing fiction in an academic setting and through a critical lens. This section focuses on short stories and novels written from the nineteenth century through the present. Using the broad theme of “mystery,” we can consider what writers mean by “mystery” and why the idea continues to be important to writers and readers.
ENGL 2123 - Section 7 (Studies in Literary Traditions & Themes)
Alison Grifa
Food, Hunger, and Dominion
We are what we eat! Through fiction, poetry, film, and drama, this course examines how our food traditions have influenced our communities, cultures, and civilizations around the world from ancient Greece to the present. Considering recipes of delight and disaster, we’ll discuss food in the context of celebration, security, resistance, and the macabre. How do these texts relate to us even though our experiences might seem far removed from places like Ireland, Vietnam, Nigeria, and the post-apocalyptic U.S.? What are our common folklores, fears, and dysfunctions? Authors may include: Swift, Brothers Grimm, Lahiri, Truong, Esquivel, McCann, and others.
ENGL 2123 - Section 9 (Studies in Literary Traditions & Themes)
Anna Bills
Animals & Literature
The pages of literature have long been filled with depictions of animals, indicative of the ways in which they have become intertwined with human societies, ideologies, and value systems. In this course, we will examine a diverse selection of novels, poems, and films that use animals as symbols; as narrators; as characters; or figures whose presence allows us to consider these texts in new ways. Additionally, by employing the field of Animal Studies, we will consider what these depictions reveal about the relationship between humans and animals, as well as broader social, political, ethical, historical, and cultural questions.
ENGL 2231 - Section 1 (Reading Film)
Lisa Nohner
Gender and Horror
This course is concerned with the study of gendered representation in horror films. Students will engage an array of classic and contemporary horror texts, paying special attention to the gendered social desires, fears, crises, and anxieties in each. We will examine how horror cinema's depictions of masculinity and femininity represent or reconfigure notions of sexuality and gender, and the ways they reinforce or challenge social norms.
ENGL 2231 - Section 4 and 8 (Reading Film)
June Pulliam
The International Horror Film
This course introduces students to the language of film analysis and gives them tools to write critically about formal choices and themes represented on screen. The horror genre offers a unique window into societal and individual fears through the form of the monster. These fears vary with the culture and historical period in which a horror film is produced. Throughout the semester, students will watch between 16-20 horror films from around the globe ranging from the silent to the CGI era.
ENGL 3035 - Section 1 (Readings in Pre-1800 Literature)
Richard Godden
Monsters, Marvels, and Magic in the Middle Ages
The literature of the Middle Ages positively teems with monsters and marvels, with magic and the miraculous. In this course, we will use the confrontation between human and nonhuman, and between natural and supernatural, to survey diverse genres of medieval literature, including the epic, romance, travel narrative, dream vision, and drama. We will encounter carnivorous giants, rather mundane demons, talking birds, pious werewolves, magical objects, otherworldly landscapes, and even the undead. In our journey through medieval literature, we will consider the monstrous and the marvelous as a site of contested identities and as an opportunity to interrogate cultural assumptions and anxieties. All readings will be in translation.
ENGL 3304 - Section 1 (Special Topics in Writing and Research)
Brannon Costello
Southern Fiction
The aim of this course is to introduce (or reintroduce) students to a range of tools, methods, and critical perspectives useful for writing and conducting research in advanced English classes. Our focus this semester will be on fiction from and about the U.S. South, with an emphasis on contemporary novels. How do such literary works help us to understand the multiple and contradictory ways that the idea of “the South” works in the region, the nation, and in the world? How does “southernness” intersect with experiences of race, class, gender, and so on? How have our ideas of what defines “southern literature” changed over time?
ENGL 4173 - Section 1 (Studies in Southern Literature)
Michael Bibler
Southern Gothic
What makes Southern Gothic so popular, and what can we make of southern gothic literature from our 21st century perspective? We will read southern works from the 19th century to the present that challenge our ways of thinking about race, sexuality, gender, the body, power, violence, horror, and mystery.
ENGL 4550 - Section 1 (Studies in Diverse Perspectives)
Benjamin Kahan
Queer American Fictions
This course explores queer American fiction during the period of homosexuality’s scientific and medical formulation (in the 19th and early 20th century). What new aesthetics did this “invention of homosexuality” make possible? How did the secrets, codes, and double lives of queer authors come into new articulacy in relation to this medicalization? What resources did these fictions provide for survival? These are just a few of the questions we will explore as this course introduces students to canonical queer authors like Gertrude Stein and Henry James and to lesser-known authors like Jose Garcia Villa and Mercedes de Acosta.
ENGL 4593 - Section 1 (Studies in Women & Literature)
Casey Patterson
Black Feminist Novels
During the late 1960s, movements for Black Power and Women's Liberation raised consciousness around the need for Black and feminist art. In the years that followed, Black feminist writers began responding to their erasure from these literary movements dominated by Black men and white women. Together, we will read novels by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor.
ENGL 4680 - Section 1 (Studies in Post-colonial Literature & Culture)
Pallavi Rastogi
Good Books, Bad Books: Reading Global Fiction Today
How do we decide if a book is good or bad? Or perhaps even just mediocre? Who gets to make these judgments? Whose literary opinions matter and why? We will reflect on these questions of “quality” while reading some of the best-known global fiction from the last 25 years. Class discussions will also center our subjective assessment of the goodness and badness of these texts.