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Erica Haugtvedt, Ph.D.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Anchor 1
This upper-level English major course introduces students to the history of the British novel, focusing on the eighteenth-century novel as an experimental genre still in its formative period. We read Aphra's Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little (1751), Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768), and Frances Burney's Evelina (1778).
The course explores competing theories of the novel's rise in the context of the rapidly changing British literary marketplace in the eighteenth century--we discuss the boom in population, the expansion of empire, and the rise in literacy in terms of class, race, and gender. Key assignments for the course include a digital database project and a collaborative essay and final oral defense. In their database project, students research a key term or character name (like sentimentalism or Robinson Crusoe) and trace that term's legacy throughout several years. For their final defense, students will write a collaborative essay in which they theorize how a key term applies to four out of the six novels we study; then, as a group, they defend their thesis to their instructor in a 30-minute conversation.
Click here to preview or download the Learning Managment site for this course at Canvas Commons.
Introduction to Popular Culture Studies is designed to introduce students to the critical study of the cultural phenomena we (often loosely) call “popular” across a variety of media. The course explores a variety of critical, historical, and philosophical approaches to the role of popular culture in the present, throughout history, and across geographies. The assignments in this course are designed to promote both individual and collaborative critical thinking about elements of popular culture. We will focus on examples of various forms of mass media-- including print, comics, radio, music, television, and film--to better understand how and why we engage with the popular as well as how we are shaped by it.
This course surveys British Literature from 1800-Present. Students study representative works of British Literature from four periods--Romantic, Victorian, Modernist, and Post-Modernist--encountered in reverse order. Lectures focus on close reading, cultural developments, and visual analogies to literary texts, including a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers. For each literary period, students learn to identify styles, themes, and authors in the context of each work's historical moment.
My responsibilities included leading two discussion sections of 40 students each, for whom I evaluated and graded all assignments. Discussion sections focused on close reading texts that we were not able to cover in lecture in further depth.
This second-level writing course emphasizes persuasive and researched writing, revision, and composing in various genres and media. Students build upon and improve their mastery of academic writing with and from sources; refine their ability to synthesize information from scholarly databases and scholarly books; create arguments about a variety of discursive, visual, and/or cultural artifacts; and become more proficient with and sophisticated in their research strategies and employment of the conventions of standard academic discourses.
Students read The House of Mirth (1905) and study the history of marriage in the context of the New Woman novel through twenty-first century marriage and family formation debates.
In this first-year writing course, students develop their capacity for undertaking academic research and analysis through an original research project and presentation of the results of their work to an audience of their peers. Students identify an area of interest within the course theme—the country and the city—and they find materials to analyze, develop analytical research questions, explore secondary texts, and make claims that are connected to the evidence they have discovered. Students then reframe what they have learned for a public audience. During the research process, students prepare for the English 1110 Symposium by working on their own Symposium Presentation, a 5-minute presentation consisting of 15 images, each accompanied by 50-65 words of narration. The creation of their Symposium Presentation provides significant opportunities for considering the nature of their research, the relationship between visual and written text, and issues of writing craft.
This course focuses on the study of principles and the practice of techniques associated with business and professional writing; emphasis on the style, organization, and conventions appropriate to business letters and reports. Students develop their competence in assorted forms of professional communication—such as the email, memo, business letter, resume, oral presentation, and report—and learn how to analyze and respond to a variety of professional rhetorical situations. The course emphasizes standards of communicative professionalism suitable for a work environment.
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