GRADUATE ENGLISH FLIER
FALL 2024
ENG. 110: INTRODUCTION TO THE PROFESSION (70882)
T. 5:00 – 7:00 PM HYBRID: IN PERSON AND SOMETIMES SYNCHRONOUS ONLINE
Dr. Steve Mentz
Email: mentzs@stjohns.edu
This course introduces students to graduate work in English as a discourse, a community,
and an active practice. We will explore tools and techniques for scholarly research,
practice strategies for successful academic writing and presentation, and discuss
pedagogical models and methods. MA and PhD students are welcome. The course will
alternate between in-person and Zoom meetings. There will also be some optional “Field
Seminar” events either on campus or around New York City
For more information, contact Dr. Steve Mentz, mentzs@stjohns.edu.
ENG. 130: INTRODUCTION TO LITERACY STUDIES (75314)
LITERACY AS PRAXIS
M. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Steven Alvarez
Email: alvares1@stjohns.edu
This course will be an overview to the field of literacy studies, focusing on the study of
literacy as praxis informed by social theory. Literacy as praxis posits that individuals
perform from their language repertoires to make existential changes in their
sociohistorical circumstances. From this position, we will examine literacy not as
decontextualized rote skills, but, rather, as transformative actions communities enact
when forming liberatory solidarities in different situations. Readings for the course will
include works by Pierre Bourdieu, bell hooks, Shirley Brice Heath, Antero Garcia,
Valerie Kinloch, Paolo Freire, Ofelia García, and Anne Haas Dyson.
ENG. 195: DIGITAL LITERARY STUDIES (74967)
DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND PEDAGOGY
W. 5:00 – 7:00 PM HYBRID: SYNCHRONOUS ONLINE
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Email: travisj@stjohns.edu
This synchronous/hybrid online course investigates how digital technologies affect the
way we read, study, teach, and understand literature. It introduces students to important
debates in the digital humanities, and it prepares students to use digital tools and
techniques in their own teaching. Exploring such topics as the digitization of printed
texts, editions, and archives, and the analysis of texts using machine algorithms, we will
examine the ways in which digital humanities poses significant challenges to familiar
assumptions in literary study, from how and what we read to the meaning of authorship,
collaboration, and accessibility. Through this course, students also may be university
certified in digital pedagogy. The course meets primarily synchronously online, with
occasional in person events or meetings. Accommodations will be made for students who
cannot attend in person meetings; fully online attendance will not be an impediment to
full participation in the class. Please email Dr. Travis, travisj@stjohns.edu for more
information.
ENG. 660: AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES (75531)
FABULATIONS AND SPECULATIVE FICTIONS
R. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Email: fanuzzir@stjohns.edu
African-American literature, critical theory, and creativity open us to a transformative,
challenging possibility: that we are free to make our own place and our own time through
our experience and aspiration. Inspired by the term “critical fabulations” coined by
Saidiya Hartmann and the speculative visions of N.K. Jemison, Octavia Butler, Toni
Morrison, and Ruth Gilmore, this course draws on cultural and performance studies as
well as Black critical theory to read back and discover this freedom in wide range of
archives and contexts. Areas of focus include queer reframings of identity; Afro-futurism
and speculative fiction; conceptual and personal “re-memories” of enslavement; and reanimating “abolition.”
ENG. 885: TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES (75316)
BLACK WOMEN’S RHETORIC
M. 2:50 – 4:50 PM
Dr. LaToya Sawyer
Email: sawyerl@stjohns.edu
This seminar will go beyond ethos, logos, pathos and other common understandings of
rhetorical theory derived from Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions to explore the theories
and practices of Black women’s use of the productive arts of persuasion. The course will
consider the intersections of race, gender, and geography among other social categories to
understand the specificity of rhetorical production of women of African descent in the
U.S. and its socio-political and economic implications for Black women and the larger
society. Through foundational and emergent print, digital, and audio-visual texts, we will
analyze and theorize Black women’s underrecognized rhetorical resources, labor, and
agency as well as the larger political project of Black women’s rhetoric which is to be
and be free within the contexts of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
This seminar is well-suited for those at any level of knowledge of rhetorical theory.
Course texts will include Traces of a Stream, Misogynoir Transformed, Eloquent Rage,
and Digital Black Feminism.
ENG. 975: DISSERTATION WORKSHOP (75318)
T. 5:00 – 7:00 PM ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Amy King
Email: kinga@stjohns.edu
The Dissertation Workshop assists ABD (“All but Dissertation”) doctoral students
embarking on their dissertation. 975 is a faculty-supervised peer-review workshop, one
designed to jumpstart the dissertation process and provide a structured and supportive
community for newly independent writer-scholars. This Pass/Fail course will emphasize
prospectus approval, writing process, revision techniques, and strategies for completion,
all of which will be flexible to recognize and adapt to various fields of specialization. 975
exists to guide ABD doctoral students through the early stages of project formation,
inviting students to ask questions such as: what texts or subjects do I care most about?
What research question most urgently needs answering? How will my dissertation
express my professional identity? How will my ideas make an original contribution to a
scholarly community? What is the thing I most want to say? The concrete goals for the
workshop include a completed (and ideally approved) prospectus, and some work
completed towards a chapter. Students who enter with an approved prospectus will aim to
complete a chapter draft by December. The class meets weekly in an online synchronous
format for a two-hour workshop that will include discussion of the writing and research
process, in-class writing and brainstorming, and weekly small peer-review groups.
ENG. 105: Comprehensive Portfolio/Masters (71346)
Course designation for MA students in their last semester of coursework if they choose
the Portfolio option rather than the M.A. thesis.
ENG. 105: Comprehensive Portfolio/Doctoral (71347)
ENG. 105Q: Doctoral Qualifying Exam (71348)
Preparation for and oral examination in three scholarly fields of the doctoral student’s
devising, in consultation with three faculty mentors/examiners.
ENG. 105T: Master’s Thesis Defense (71951)
Placeholder designation for students who have written the M.A. thesis in the previous
semester and who are in their last semester of coursework. Please only register for this
class if you have already registered for ENG 900 in the previous semester and have
completed or are intending to complete the thesis as your capstone project for the MA.
Students who are pursuing the Portfolio as their capstone project should register instead
for ENG 105.
ENG. 900: Master’s Research (70292)
M.A. thesis; capstone project of the M.A. student’s devising, written in consultation with
a mentor and several faculty readers.
ENG. 901: Readings and Research (72005)
Independent readings and research supervised by, and in conversation with, a faculty
mentor.
ENG. 906: English Internship (72173)
ENG. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (70048)
Designation for M.A. students pausing studies for personal reasons not medical in nature;
a zero-credit course, available for no more than two consecutive semesters.
ENG. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (PhD) (70047)
Designation for Ph.D. students pausing studies for personal reasons not medical in nature;
a zero-credit course, available for no more than two consecutive semesters.
ENG. 975: Doctoral Research (1 credit) (75473)
This is the one-credit version of Eng. 975, only to be taken after the student has
completed one semester of the three-credit version of Eng. 975.
Doctoral research colloquium or independent doctoral research supervised by doctoral
committee.