Teaching

Interactive Digital Storytelling

This seminar class focuses  on multi-sensory and interactive digital stories, including choose-your-own-adventure/ hypertext narratives, multimedia digital documentaries, visual narratives, world-building, transmedia stories, and narrative video games. We will consider how features like choice, interaction, image, location, touch, and sound contribute to the meaning of a work, to its cultural, artistic, and social relevance, and to the experience of the reader/user. In addition to reading and writing about interactive works, students practice making their own interactive stories.

Mapping Spaces

Representations of Place and Mobility in Literature

In this class, we study literature about travelers, immigrants, local pedestrians, and other mobile people and consider how writers represent places, create connections between people and spaces, tell stories about home and the world, draw mental or real maps, and enforce or cross borders. Part of the course focuses on how local spaces and grounded mobility contributes to our personal and community identity. A second part focuses on global travel and national and international border crossings.

Ways of Walking

This First Seminar class begins with the question: How do everyday practices of walking shape how we understand our world and ourselves?

We consider walks that get us places as well as those that move towards self-discovery, spiritual renewal or social justice, and pedestrians who walk through cities, towns, and rural landscapes, giving shape and structure to the spaces they traverse and allowing their thoughts to take shape along the contours of the path.

Castaways and Cannibals: Stories of Empire

In this seminar, we evaluate the premise that many contemporary geopolitical realities have been shaped by the imaginative work of British imperialists who, by capitalizing on terms like “cannibal” and “castaway,” claimed the land and the resources of colonized territories and dismissed the rights of the indigenous peoples that populated them. Readings include British colonial narratives of travel and settlement and  post-colonial responses and revisions to the worldview created by imperialist expansion.

E-Lit: New Media Narratives

Electronic literature pertains to literary works designed to be read or experienced on a computer. These works often require  multi-sensory engagement, asking readers to make unusual connections between words, images, sounds, or movement, and, sometimes, to put themselves into the story.  This First Seminar class surveys a wide range of e-lit, including works of hypertext, digital games, multi-modal narratives, digital documentaries, and social media narratives.

Diversions: Experimental Stories and New Media

In this seminar, we read, view, listen to, and interact with writing that exceeds conventional boundaries of narrative and asks readers to reconsider the relationship between form and content.  We read experimental print fictions and technologically innovative stories and multi-modal works to consider how we engage with and are shaped by media.