Fall 2020 Course Details:

This course will cover a variety of topics related to contact linguistics, including, but not limited to, borrowing and loanwords; bilingualism; code switching and mixing; second language acquisition; diglossia; Sprachbunde (speech areas); language endangerment; and the creation of pidgins and creoles. Students will gain an understanding of basic theoretical frameworks to describe and explain the outcomes of language contact. Recommended prerequisiteː LING 405, any other course in linguistics, or permission of instructor. Counts as an elective towards the TESOL minor.

English 725/810S: Seminar in English Teaching — Methods for Teaching Writing

In this English teaching methods course, we will focus on theoretical and practical issues in the teaching of writing. We’ll explore how, every day, teachers must meet the needs and interests of a richly varied population of young writers. Together, we will review the varied English teaching standards used in NH schools, construct and critique teaching documents, and discuss and apply the work of master writing and literacy teachers.

You will have the opportunity to compare philosophies of teaching and learning, and to develop your own approaches to writing instruction. In class, we will discuss theoretical and pedagogical ideas in large and small groups, engage in reading and writing exercises, produce and practice instructional activities and assessments, and evaluate teaching approaches in peer groups and conferences. Overall, the aim of the course is recognition of students' writing and literacy skills (which include reading, writing, listening, speaking, and viewing) and consideration of how they can be used for learning goals including comprehension, expression, analysis, description, and evaluation.

You may also devote thirty hours to a lab/practicum project (see 725L) in which you will work with a teacher in a local school or conduct a small research study of the writing and literacy practices of young adults. Students enrolling in ENGL 725 should consider enrolling in ENGL 725L simultaneously.

Students must have JR or SR status at the start of the course. Permission of instructor required. Contact instructor via email and then send your permisison to enroll to roxanne.brown@unh.edu with the last 4 digits of your UNH ID number. 

Fall 2020 Course Details: 

Following WWII, Britain’s minority populations swelled with the influx of immigrants from the British colonies in the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent.  Through the reading of creative and critical works, we will engage with unique history and character of race in the U.K., which is inseparable from the history of the British Empire, colonialism and immigration (or rather, “colonization in reverse,” as calypso singer Louise Bennett styled it).   Students will be exposed to concepts like the black Atlantic, double consciousness, structural racism, “minor literatures” and diaspora identity as we encounter them in fiction, poetry, essays and performance by first and second generation British writers with roots in the Caribbean, Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

In Fall 2020 this course satisfies the Race Requirement for English Department majors. 

This course fulfills a Post-1800 Literature requirement for English Department majors.

World shifts and doomsdays: these possibilities have excited our imaginations from time out of mind.  In Dark Worlds, we’ll consider novels, short stories, plays, poems, and a few films that conduct thought experiments about an array of future states.  In our discussions, we’ll take up questions of power and social order, individual morality and group ethics, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, genetics, pandemic, and the global environment.

In general, we’ll follow two major strands as they develop from foundational sources: the apocalyptic, linked to the book of Revelation, and the utopian/dystopian, linked to Thomas More’s Utopia.  Works will include Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Naomi Alderman’s The Power.

English 787/800: English Major Seminar: Dark Worlds is a Writing Intensive course that fulfills the Poetics requirement, as well as part of the Capstone requirement, for the Literary Studies option and the Digital Language Arts option within the Literary Arts & Studies major. It also counts towards the B. A. in English Teaching.  Prerequisite: English 419, or instructor’s permission.  Although the course is titled “English Major Seminar,” students from other majors are very welcome and may find the subject matter of interest.