Erica Haugtvedt, Ph.D.
PROPOSED COURSES
This proposed course will compare serial narrative across media and time, charting the experience of consuming stories through time from the Victorian period to the internet age. We will cover print, film serials, television, radio, and web media. Students will consume two main texts serially over the semester: the graphic novel From Hell and the 2014 podcast Serial. Students will maintain a serial reading blog where they record their impressions of and desires for the stories they are reading over time, as well as think about the serial form of those stories.
Other assignments include group "Media Histories" composed at the end of each unit: students will synthesize and interpret course material as the course progresses, and they will do this within a community of their peers. The course will culminate with a "Serial Reception Report" where students study an instance of serial storytelling and its reception. Examples would include analyzing a particular piece of fan fiction and its readers' reactions in the comments. This report can take the form of a traditional prose essay, or students can elect to create videos, podcasts, or websites. Students will consult with me about ideas and resources before undertaking the project.
This proposed survey course would review representative works of British literature from 1800-present, sampling from the Romantic period, Victorian period, Modernist period, and Post-modernist period. At the end of the course, students will be able to recognize the distinctive characteristics of each literary period, as well as contextualize works of British literature in their original cultural and historical context.
Selected texts will be accessed via digital facsimile so that students can better imagine how the text was received in its original publication format. Students will journal their progress through the class by writing adaptive responses to the reading where they, for instance, draw the setting of a poem and/or rewrite a passage from a different character's perspective. Students will choose two of these responses to contribute to a class-wide Tumblr, meant to showcase their creativity as well as serve as a discussion forum for studying for mid-term and final exams.
This proposed course will read four Victorian novels and supplementary poetry and essays through the lens of fantasy and realism in the nineteenth century. The course will focus on critical reading and analysis. We will interrogate what “fantasy” and “realism” might have meant for the Victorians, and how these concerns manifest throughout the texts we read. We will question whether fantasy shades into realism and whether realism shades into fantasy, and what we might achieve by collapsing these categories.
The principal assignments will be an on-going reading journal in which students respond to designated questions for the week's reading, and a literary analysis paper that students will draft and revise through consultation with peers and me, their instructor. The reading journals will document the students' reactions and interpretations throughout the semester. Students will use this journal as inspiration and resource for their literary analysis paper, which they will draft and then expand and revise later in the semester.
At the end of this course, students will be conversant with the major themes and issues of the Victorian period from social, historical, and cultural perspectives. Most importantly, students will able to make original interpretive claims about Victorian literary texts.
This proposed course will introduce students to technical communication. Students learn how to create documents that explain ideas and present arguments in clear understandable ways for specialist and non-specialist audiences. Technical communication encompasses a wide variety of writing genres, including memos, letters, manuals, proposals, policies, procedures, documentation, and work logs. Technical communication also includes oral forms, like speeches, briefings, consultations, and knowledge-transfer sessions.
The scope of technical communication continues to expand as technology changes how we communicate. Email, online help systems, websites, documentation databases, object-oriented documentation, and other technology-driven genres provide resources and challenges for technical communicators.
Projects for this class will include writing for and evaluating the effectiveness of technical writing in hypothetical case studies, developing job letters and resumes for a potential job search, and identifying a real organizational problem and proposing a viable solution through a research report.
This proposed course offers a thematic approach to human values, stressing the relationship between technology and the humanities. The course traces the development and social impact of our major technologies.
We will consider the development and social impact of mobile technologies, focusing on telephones, mobile phones, and smart phones. Smart phones give us nearly instant and constant access to social media and the internet, but how do they change the way that we live and relate to one another? Are we smarter with smart phones, or just lazier? Do smart phones and social media enable us to connect with others, or to retreat? What about our privacy—is trading our data for the ability to use an app for “free” worth it? We will consider these kinds of questions and more throughout the course.
The principal assignments will be weekly contributions to a class Commonplace Tumblr blog where students will reflect on passages from the assigned reading and put that reading into conversations with ideas they find in the world about common topics. Students will also develop arguments for two Oxford-style class debates, create an artistic project, and write a final 5-7 page essay.
At the end of this course, students will be able to articulate how diverse values, beliefs, and ideas relate to science and technology, and they will be able to knowledgeably consider the ethical consequences of how we use technology in our everyday lives.
This introduction to Humanities course is premised on the principle that narrative competence increases medical competence. In other words, it assumes that medical practitioners who become aware of the importance of stories and storytelling and are knowledgeable about how stories work will become more effective caregivers. We will explore this principle asking the following questions and more throughout the course: How does narrative give us greater insight into illness, medical treatment, doctor-patient relationships, and other aspects of health and medicine? How do illness and other experiences within the realm of medicine influence ways of telling stories? How do doctors’ perspectives and patients’ perspectives differ, and what, if anything, should be done to close those differences? In order to increase our own narrative competence, we will look at narrative in different media--print (fiction and nonfiction), comics, and film--and consider core concepts of narrative (plot, character, space, time, perspective, dialogue, ethics, and aesthetics) both academically and creatively.
The principal assignments will be an on-going personal Commonplace book in which students reflect on the assigned reading and connect that reading to their own lives. Students will take a mid-term exam testing them on the concepts learned and discussed in class. The class will culminate in a personal memoir based on the student's own encounters with the medical establishment, experiences of health and wellness, and ability/disability.
At the end of this course, students will demonstrate knowledge of how diversity is embodied in the human experience, especially in terms of how medicine encounters patients, and people encounter pain and illness.