Upcoming Courses

 

Campus: Cleveland State University

Day & Time: Thursday 6:00-8:50 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENG 610

Registration Contact: m.geither@csuohio.edu

< Course description forthcoming. >

Campus: The University of Akron

Day & Time: Wednesday 5:20-7:50 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENGL 689-801

Registration Contact: David Giffels, dg36@uakron.edu

 

This MFA workshop welcomes writers from all genres and from all levels of experience with creative nonfiction. Community-building will be our priority, as we share everything we know about the craft to help us all get better at it. At the beginning of the term, each student will propose a semester-long writing project tuned toward their individual literary style, goals, and experiences. From there, each student will submit two to three pieces of original work to be read and discussed by the workshop participants, including written responses. An individual reading will also be assigned: a book chosen in collaboration with the instructor, tailored to the writer’s interests and goals. Open only to students in the NEOMFA program in creative writing.

Campus: Cleveland State University

Day & Time: Wednesday 6:00-8:50 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENG 613

Registration Contact: c.pagel@csuohio.edu

 

In this workshop we will discuss poetry’s relationship to the economic conditions, social situations, and global circumstances that it is created in. How do or should our lives (and their institutions, communities, attentions, and technologies) affect language or subject choice; how is form resource; when is content capital; who do we write with/alongside; and how might we tether our poems to specific environments, histories, or means of publication/production? Though we’ll focus on generating and discussing new student writing, we’ll also read work by CA Conrad, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Joe Hall, Audre Lorde, julie ezelle patton, Stacy Szymaszek, and others. This workshop is open to NEOMFA students of any genre wanting to engage with poetry’s possibilities and contexts. 

Campus: Kent State University

Day & Time: Thursday 4:25-7:05 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: English 66895

Registration Contact: cwing1@kent.edu [*This course is full and is no longer accepting registration requests.]

 

The true method of knowledge is experiment.   —William Blake

 

This class will investigate the imagination as it moves, plays, experiments, and operates in the realms of poetry and science. How might the ideas of natural history, evolution, ecology, classification, and dissection lend themselves to the writing of poems? How does metaphor create a scaffolding for both? Our task will be to think about how these categories might be more alike than different, to cross-pollinate the ideas of distinct disciplines through language, and to use the rich source material of the sciences to forge a deeper connection with our own writing and imaginative landscapes. We’ll be hearing from scientists across the disciplines and responding to their research with our own creative work. Two parts science lab, three parts creative writing workshop: we will make poems out of Petoskey stones, sonnets from cell structures, and haiku from Hale-Bopp. This workshop will aim to take advantage of some of NE Ohio’s natural resources and wildlife—bird and bog walks!—and students will have the opportunity to be a part of Kent’s Poets for Science Gathering, happening Nov. 12-14.

< Forthcoming in Spring 2027. >

Campus: Cleveland State University

Day & Time: Monday 6:00-8:50pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENG 600

Registration Contact: Mike Geither, m.geither@csuohio.edu

 

This course provides your introduction to graduate-level literary study. It is designed to give you intensive practice thinking about works of literature in formal terms: that is, analyzing their form or the way they are constructed. That means paying attention to both big and small aspects of each text, from the word- or sentence-level up to the shape of the entire work (the way a poem is organized into stanzas, for example, or the way a novel moves backwards and forwards in time or alternates between the viewpoints of different narrators). As scholars, we can still read with joy and pleasure and get caught up in issues of character and plot. But literary analysis asks us to consider such features with greater sophistication. As scholars, we look for the formal qualities or authorial decisions that create the effects we respond to.
 
In order to dig more deeply into such issues, we will be focusing on just six works written in the three major genres of poetry, fiction, and drama: poems by W. B. Yeats and Terrance Hayes; plays by William Shakespeare and August Wilson; novels by Jane Austen and Toni Morrison. My intention is to provide you with a good foundation for analyzing the different kinds of texts you are likely to encounter in your future graduate seminars: learning the technical vocabulary appropriate to each genre, but also learning how to make an overarching argument firmly rooted in formal analysis. And since this is a graduate class, we will also, in a sense, be analyzing a fourth genre: that of published literary criticism. For each of the six works we read, we will read a selection of recent criticism. As you will see, scholars always ground their interpretations in aspects of literary form, even as they tend also to bring in other methodologies or contexts, from the historical to the political to the theoretical. 

Campus: Cleveland State University

Day & Time: Tuesday 6:00-8:50 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENG 695

Registration Contact: Mike Geither, m.geither@csuohio.edu

 

This graduate seminar will explore a central literary genre—the novel. Readings include not only accounts of the history of the English-language novel but also influential examples of the theory of the novel, written by such figures as György Lukács, Peter Brooks, Franco Moretti, Ann Banfield, Fredric Jameson, Nancy Armstrong, Dorrit Cohn, Wayne Booth, Ian Watt, Northrop Frye, and, in particular, Mikhail Bakhtin. Students will apply the insights provided by these readings to specific major novels.

Campus: Kent State University

Day & Time: Tuesday 4:25-7:05 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENG 66705/76705

Registration Contact: atognazz@kent.edu; bviton@kent.edu

This course is the gateway course for our MA/ PhD program, “Literature, Rhetoric, Writing: How Narratives Make and Change the World.” The course will identify multiple ways narratives of all shapes and sizes permeate and structure our perception, thinking, feeling, understanding, beliefs, values, ideals, and actions in all areas of our personal and collective lives. We will investigate how different elements and types of fictional, non-fictional, historical, political, religious, and scientific narratives do this and what the respective consequences are for individuals, groups, societies, and the material world. More specifically, we will study how to analyze and evaluate narratives to identify both their harmful and their beneficial consequences, and to respond to them in ways that maximize their benefits and minimize their harms. We will also explore the central role that narratives play in key aspects of our thinking, including explanation, argument, persuasion, problem solving, decision making, predicting, and planning. And we will see how these thinking skills can be enhanced through various sorts of practice, including reading certain types of narratives, writing certain types of narratives, and engaging in certain types of narrative analysis.

Campus: Kent State University

Day & Time: Monday 4:25-7:05 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENG 66991/76991

Registration Contact: atognazz@kent.edu; bviton@kent.edu

In this seminar, we will read widely in the works of two poets often considered America’s greatest, their primary genres poems and letters, but for Dickinson also aphoristic fragments and for Whitman also fictions, government documents, and journalistic prose. In consequence of long canonical status and the characteristic intensity of expression in the lyric mode, generations of scholars have developed infrastructure that supports the study of both poets: critical editions, facsimile editions, collections of letters, enumerative and critical bibliographies, encyclopedias, annotated lists of criticism, and lexicons and concordances. When set aside the works that support study of less canonical authors—anthology selections, reading editions, classroom editions, instructor guides, journal articles, scholarly monographs, and essay collections—the student or instructor comparatively new to either Whitman’s or Dickinson’s works may be overwhelmed. Moreover, much scholarly infrastructure—but not all—has been transitioning to digital forms over the previous two decades, for these poets the most comprehensive efforts the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org/) and Emily Dickinson Archive (https://www.edickinson.org/). With an emphasis on both poets in relation to digital media, and the concept of remediation (proposed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin), this seminar invites you to explore in addition to their writings Whitman’s and Dickinson’s several social contexts, including today’s digital contexts, anew—or for the first time if you have no previous experience with either. We will read the best-known poems by both, in print and manuscript facsimile forms, and your end-of term project, my first suggestion, is an attempt to guide others (whether scholars or amateurs, including secondary school students) to select from or otherwise engage with the complex archives of digital materials that are now available. For students who contemplate drafting an essay for scholarly publication, my second suggestion for the end-of-term essay will be to reflect critically on the affordances of digital remediation for either poet, preferably with attention also to print infrastructure. Students may also propose their own style of engaging with Whitman’s or Dickinson’s texts in an essay or another project form.

Seminar: Narratives of Animals and Animality

Instructor: Ryan Hediger

Campus: Kent State University

Day & Time: Wednesday 4:25-7:05 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENG 67591/77591

Registration Contact: atognazz@kent.edu; bviton@kent.edu

 

This course investigates the trans-disciplinary field of animal studies. We will study texts from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, investigating the narratives, meanings, and ethics connected to questions of human animality and, more especially, nonhuman animals. Students interested in earlier periods can apply our texts to those materials.

Readings will likely include:

Narrative is essential to animal studies, and the topical nature of this course should make it relevant for the full range of Kent State graduate students, including MFA students.

Campus: Cleveland State University

Day & Time: Monday 6:00-8:50 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENG 497/597

Registration Contact: c.pagel@csuohio.edu

This class is for students interested in indie, small press, or DIY publications and processes. We will begin the semester by studying the history of “the book,” also looking at examples of how particular small presses or “little” magazines transformed a writer’s career, a community’s scene, or a generation’s aesthetic or formal values. We will practice identifying and developing an editorial aesthetic and will discuss practical approaches to budgets, mission statements, submissions, collaboration, design, and distribution. Coursework will include press/journal profiles, author interviews, book reviews, archival research, conversations with contemporary editors, and a final project or publication designed by students. This class is recommended for those interested in literary publishing and/or future editorial, arts admin, or literary programming work.

Campus: The University of Akron

Day & Time: Tuesday & Thursday 3:30-4:45 pm

Delivery Method: Online synchronous

Course Number: ENGL 589-501

Registration Contact: David Giffels, dg36@uakron.edu (**Registration is limited to 3 MFA students.)

This class will examine select plays through stage performances and film adaptation, while also reading them in print. Students will view plays in person and on films. Conversations will work to 1) consider the printed plays as guides for actors as well as texts for readers and 2) think about adaptations and performances as reflections of contemporary audiences and issues.

Campus: The University of Akron

Day & Time: Monday & Wednesday 3:30-4:45 pm

Delivery Method: In-person

Course Number: ENGL 589-001

Registration Contact: David Giffels, dg36@uakron.edu (**Registration is limited to 3 MFA students.)

For almost 40 years, Horace and Evelyn Stewart ran a thriving photography studio that served Akron’s Black community. The memories they captured ​to mark birthdays, weddings, military deployments, and other family occasions offer a valuable glimpse of Akron in the 1930s-1970s, showing the events and people Black families wanted to remember. While over 40,000 of these photographs are visible online via the University of Akron Archives and Special Collections, the names of people and places in them have not always been recorded. This UnClass aims to remedy that. We will be working to identify the people and locations in these photographs, collecting oral histories from members of the Akron community and reconnecting their stories to the memories the Stewarts preserved on film.