WRPR XXXA001, WRPR XXXA002 Borderlands: Writing Between Places, Identities, and Disciplines (Writing Center-Supported)
I. Halstead
Fall 2025 M/W 10:00am-11:25am and Fall 2025 M/W 1:00pm-2:25pm
What does it mean to be in-between? This course explores the concept of “borderlands” – not just as geographical spaces, but as sites of cultural, linguistic, and intellectual negotiation. Through reading, discussion, and writing, students investigate how writers and thinkers navigate multiple identities and disciplines, and in turn, develop their own academic voices. We begin by considering texts that explore the connection between language and identity. Students write personal essays reflecting on their own experiences with language – whether through translation, code-switching, or linguistic hybridity – while practicing narrative structure and revision. Next, we examine how writers use formal strategies to construct and reflect cultural hybridity. Reading stories, poems and short novels that challenge disciplinary, generic and cultural conventions, students write a short, analytical essay discussing what happens when boundaries are crossed. In the final unit, students draw from a selection of sources to conduct a research project on a chosen ”borderland” – a topic that explores the complexities of cultural, linguistic, or disciplinary in-betweenness. Students learn how to construct well-supported arguments, integrate secondary sources, and refine their work through revision. Readings may include works by James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Ocean Vuong and Gloria Anzaldúa.
This is a Writing Center-supported seminar, meaning that students will receive individualized support from the instructor and will work closely with experienced Writing Center tutors assigned to the course.
WRPR XXXA001, WRPR XXXA002 Narrating Ourselves: The Power of Storytelling (Writing Center-Supported)
E. Al-Drous
Fall 2025
This course explores the rhetorical and cognitive dimensions of storytelling, asking how narratives shape personal identity, cultural memory, and public discourse. We will analyze a range of genres and forms, including memoirs, autoethnographies, digital storytelling projects, and oral histories, to examine how individuals and communities construct meaning through writing. Readings may include works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, and Shahram Khosravi, among others. Students will develop their academic writing skills through analytical essays, personal narratives, and reflective writing, using their own lived experiences as a starting point for rhetorical inquiry. By collaborating with Writing Center tutors, students will engage in guided writing conferences and feedback sessions to enhance their ability to revise and refine their writing.
This is a Writing Center-supported seminar, meaning that students will receive individualized support from the instructor and will work closely with experienced Writing Center tutors assigned to the course.
WRPR XXXA001, WRPR XXXA002 Trending: Desire and Viral Aesthetic Culture
B. Swann
Fall 2025 T/H 10:00am-11:25am and Fall 2025 T/Th 11:30pm-12:55pm
Dark Academia. Coquette. Demure. What can the seemingly inexhaustible obsession with viral social media trends tell us about human desire, identity, and the need to be known? A quarter into the 21st century, we rely on the internet for everything from purchasing groceries to booking flights. But what happens when we look to the internet to increase or decrease our social value? Literary critic Sianne Ngai argues that our understanding of aesthetics has changed with the “performance-driven, information-saturated and networked, hypercommodified world of late capitalism.” Is there a danger in allowing ourselves to be influenced? Is it even a choice that we make consciously? Lakshmi Bose and Rebecca Gordon describe the politics of representation as “a slippery concept, difficult to pin down and attach to a specific meaning.” This course unpacks their view that the politics of representation refer to a “contested space between the subject, the representation of the subject, and self-representation.” We’ll examine a variety of aesthetic categories from cute to quirky to intimidating while asking questions like, Who are we in this contested space based on how we interact with aesthetic trends? We’ll also consider how a politics of representation intersects with ideas about identity, mimicry, and conformity in gender and sexuality studies. Assignments will include an interview with an influencer and a creative-critical project that examines an aesthetic trend.
WRPR XXXB001, WRPR XXXB002 Taste and the American Imaginary
B. Swann
Spring 2026
How does the food that we eat tell a larger story about who we are and how we got here? This course provides a broad introduction to cultural identity through the lens of food studies. Foodways are defined as the beliefs and behaviors that have to do with the production, distribution, and consumption of food. While this course takes a special interest in foodways local to Philadelphia—for instance, the Italian Market in South Philadelphia and Chinatown in Center City—we will also zoom out to consider how food operates as a global site of community and cultural exchange. We’ll draw inspiration from a variety of sources in literary studies, film and TV studies, visual studies, and culinary culture. Texts will include Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H-Mart, Jessica Harris’s High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (we’ll view select episodes of the Netflix series inspired by this book), Thich Nhat Hanh’s How to Eat, and Oakland-based chef Samin Nosrat’s award-winning cookbook Salt Fat Heat Acid. Along the way, we will ask questions like, What can foodways tell us about how meaning and identity are cultivated and preserved through social relations? How have ideas about food and culture changed over time? And how might these changes point to broader patterns that tell us about how foodways brush up against long-held ideas about race, gender, and ethnicity in America?
WRPR 118A001 Portraits of Disability and Difference
K. Lindgren
Fall 2025 T/Th 2:30pm-3:55pm
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes: “staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange.” In this seminar we will explore visual and literary portraits and self-portraits of bodies marked by difference, bodies that often elicit stares, as well as bodies and minds with non-visible differences. We will ask: What kinds of stories are told about these bodies? How do memoirs and self-portraits by people with disabilities draw on and challenge traditions of life writing and portraiture? How does this work enlarge cultural and aesthetic views of embodiment, disability, and difference? How do portraits of disability engage differences of gender, race, and class? The course includes a unit on deafness, Deaf culture, and Deaf schools. Students in this course will receive preference for enrollment in American Sign Language 1, but you are not required to enroll in ASL. (Taking the sequence ASL 1 and 2 fulfills the language requirement). Through close readings of essays, memoirs, novels, paintings, and photographs, students will hone their descriptive and interpretive skills and develop their ability to craft clear and persuasive arguments. [Counts towards the minors in Visual Studies and in Health Studies]
WRPR 120A001 Evolutionary Arguments from Eugenics to CRISPR
C. Schilling
Fall 2025 T/Th 2:30pm-3:55pm
From the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century to the present, scientists, scholars, citizens, politicians, ethicists, disability activists, and others have argued about the ethics and consequences of policies and technologies for preventing certain inherited traits and enhancing others in the human population. Ever since Darwin’s theory of natural selection, we’ve been asking how selection could rely less on chance and more on deliberate human choices to create what some have considered “better” human beings. Eugenicists assumed that better societies would follow. After looking at landmark moments in the history of state-sponsored early eugenics, we’ll ask whether recent “personal” reproductive genetic technologies—from diagnosing pre-implantation embryos to CRISPR—revive the assumptions and ethical questions raised during the early eugenic programs. We’ll ask how these technologies affect relations between parents and children, social pressures to create certain kinds of children, social and civic relations, equity and opportunity, human freedom, and our responsibility to future generations. To answer those and the questions you’ll think of, we’ll track a range of favorable and skeptical evolutionary arguments in ethics, the law, social movements, and popular culture. Sources will include print and online sources, photos, and films (including GATTACA). What’s most at stake in our inquiry is who we include in the human community. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies]
WRPR 130A001, WRPR 130A002 B-Sides + Blues Visions: Reviewing Black Popular Culture for Social Transformation
C. Rogers
Fall 2025 T/Th 11:30am-12:55pm and Fall 2025 T/Th 2:30pm-3:55pm
In a classic essay interrogating cultural organizing in the 21st Century, journalist Jeff Chang (2010) establishes:
“Culture is the space in our national consciousness filled by music, books, sports, movies, theater, visual arts, and media. It is the realm of ideas, images, and stories -- the narrative in which we are immersed every day. It is where people make sense of the world, where ideas are introduced, values are inculcated, and emotions are attached to concrete change. Cultural change is often the dress rehearsal for political change. Or put in another way, political change is the final manifestation of cultural shifts that have already occurred.”
His words spoke to the critical and historical role of cultural production (especially hip-hop) for leveraging grassroots movements for progressive social change. In this writing seminar, we will investigate the relationship between cultural production arising from Black communities and its resonance within their visions/actions for social transformation. Through three acts, we will consider: (1) the multiplicity of the role of popular culture in our lives beyond its value as a commodity; (2) a survey of historical 20th Century examples upon which popular music arising from Black communities served to amplify visions of social transformation; and (3) review and speculate upon the possibilities of contemporary popular culture artifacts to inspire present-day mobilizing for progressive social change. Course readings will include anchor texts combined with supplemental articles, essays, and multimedia artifacts. Assignments will involve essays that build on formative personal experiences with popular culture toward articulating historical arguments for the social afterlife of a popular culture artifact. The final assignment concludes with seminar participants establishing a contemporary argument for the utility of a self-selected popular culture artifact to support a current mobilization for justice-oriented outcomes. [Counts towards the concentration in African and Africana Studies].
WRPR 133A001 The American West in Fact and Fiction
E. Lapsansky
Fall 2025 T/Th 11:30am-12:55pm
An examination of the imagery of the American West. Using visual and verbal images, this course explores such diverse aspects of the West as cowboys, cartography, water rights, race and social class, technology, religion, prostitution, and landscape painting.
WRPR 135A001 Health and the Humanities
J. Libow
Fall 2025 M/W 11:30am-12:55pm
Over the last few decades, “medical humanities” and “health humanities” initiatives have been established at health professional schools across the country. In these programs, students study art, literature, history, and philosophy in the hopes that these endeavors will help them become better healthcare providers. But what exactly are “the humanities”? How do they differ from and relate to “the arts” or “humanity” itself? And how does a humanistic education benefit both healthcare providers and their patients? In this writing seminar, we will explore how humanistic inquiry contributes to knowledge about health and healthcare by turning to four foundational humanities concepts: observation, narrative, history, and ethics. Throughout the semester, we will focus in particular on how we might leverage tools from the humanities to promote health equity and create more just systems of care.
WRPR 138B001, WRPR 138B002 Race and Gender in American Horror Film and Fiction
C. McNair
Spring 2026 T/Th 11:30am-12:55pm and Spring 2026 T/Th 1:00pm-2:25pm
Not offered 2025-2026
WRPR 139A001, WRPR 139A002 Does Representation Matter?
C. McNair
Fall 2025 T/Th 11:30am-12:55pm and Fall 2025 T/Th 1:00pm-2:25pm
Not offered 2025-2026
WRPR 150A001 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Writing the Weather, Reading the Climate
D. Allor
Fall 2025 T/Th 10:00am-11:25am
How does literature help us understand the relationship between humans and our changing ecosystems? This course will explore literary depictions of how people understand their environments through representations of the weather and the climate in several periods and genres of literature. How do writers depict the weather—as an act of a higher power, as the result of more-or-less predictable meteorological processes, as influenced by humans through anthropogenic climate change, or not as “real” weather at all but as a literary trope that echoes the feelings and moods of the characters? Is the weather something that can be predicted, controlled, and managed, or something frightening, dangerous, and wild? How do representations of the weather communicate larger concerns about human agency, the human relationship with nature, the stress and uncertainty of living in unpredictable environments, and the responsibilities of living in the Anthropocene? We will approach these questions through texts including Homer’s Odyssey, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, among others. This course will involve reading carefully, thinking critically, and writing and revising short analytic essays. In addition to reading about the effects of the weather on humans, we will also pay attention to our own embodied writing practices and how they are inflected by the environments where we write. [Counts towards the major in English.]
WRPR 150A002 Approaches to Literary Analysis: Rewrite to Refuse: Adaptations to Counternarratives
B. Bastie
Fall 2025 T/Th 10:00am-11:25am
This course will read across texts widely considered canonical in the Western literary tradition as well as important adaptations that reframe, resituate, and resist their dominant narratives. Rather than moving chronologically, this course will constellate works that converse and correspond with one another. For example, we might read Virgil's in conjunction with Gwendolyn Brooks' The Anniad and Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette or William Shakespeare's The Tempest with Aimé Cesaire's A Tempest and Kamau Brathwaite's Caliban. By reading these reformulations, we will grapple with what it means to retell and recontextualize stories from alternative, often marginalized perspectives. How do the histories of colonialism, sexism, and racism permeate Western literatures? And in turn, how do counternarratives challenge and refuse this hegemony? In addition to engaging with different literary genres, students can expect to read historical, theoretical, and critical texts that will introduce analytic frameworks and key terms to help develop skills to closely read and incisively write about literature. [Counts towards the major in English.]
WRPR 150A003 Approaches to Literary Analysis: The World at Stake: Courage and Authority in Literary History
J. Kopin
Fall 2025 T/Th 10:00am-11:25am
This course deals with questions of authority and its antagonist, courage, across a variety of works in and out of the canon of literary history. Through plays, poetry, novels, essays, and other works, it asks how we might understand the development and maintenance of legitimate power in our political and social worlds, under what conditions authority might become illegitimate, and what role courage can play in overturning or undermining such a regime. Beginning with Euripides’ play The Bacchae and moving through Shakespeare's King Lear, the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, short works by Herman Melville, and the “ambiguous utopia” of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, the course will consider a variety of spaces of authority—the state, the family, the military, the workplace—how those spheres interact or counteract one another and what resistance in those spaces looked like for various people at various times. Accordingly, it will allow us to ask questions of both authority and courage: how do people define themselves by what they are (and are not) allowed to do? Is authority necessary for a civil society? How do authority and courage define and provoke each other? How can historically contextualized acts of courage help us to understand historical processes? At what point does courage become, itself, authoritarian? [Counts towards the major in English.]
WRPR 150B001 Approaches to Literary Analysis: TBA
TBA
Spring 2026
WRPR 150B002 Approaches to Literary Analysis: TBA
TBA
Spring 2026
WRPR 150B003 Approaches to Literary Analysis: TBA
TBA
Spring 2026
WRPR 151A001, WRPR 151B001 Through the Looking Glass: Ancient Sexuality and Modern Queer Politics
R. Warwick
Fall 2025 T/Th 2:30pm-3:55pm and Spring 2026 T/Th 2:30pm-3:55pm
In this course, we will examine the influence of Greco-Roman antiquity on the way that we talk about sex and sexuality today, with a particular view to how queer people have used the Classics to define their own identities. In reviewing the building blocks of queer theory and queer historiography alongside the primary source texts from the ancient world that inspired them, we will ask a series of questions: What is at stake when we see ourselves in the past? What does it mean to identify an ancient person as queer? In forming these histories, which elements are emphasized, and which are left out? [Counts towards the minor in Classical Culture and the concentration in Gender & Sexuality Studies]
WRPR 155B001 Origin Stories: Asian American Memoirs of Migration, Displacement, and Diaspora
T. Tensuan
Spring 2026 Tu/Th 11:30am-12:55pm
What can we learn about the constitution of “Asian American” as a social formation and political formulation from memoirs that explore the interrelations between individual memories, familial histories, cultural investments, and international dynamics? To explore this question, we will be reading essays, poems, graphic narratives, and an “autobiofictionalography” by Asian American writers including: The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston’s “memoir of a girlhood among ghosts”; Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo’s graphic memoir of her family’s forced relocation following President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 during WWII; Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, an illustrated memoir of the Bui family’s passage from war-ravaged Vietnam to the United States; Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!; Neema Avashia’s Another Appalachia: Coming up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place which offers reflections on her family’s move to West Virginia in the context of histories of settler colonialism; and Franny Choi’s lyric collection The World Keeps Ending, the World Keeps Going On. This course fulfills Haverford’s writing seminar requirement and offers an introduction to Asian American Studies.
We will center on the following questions: What role do cultural productions play in constituting individual and collective identities, in framing specific world views and in fostering possibilities for reflection, contestation, and/or change? What is at stake in acts of reading, interpretation, analysis, and creative imagination? How do we understand our own critical and material situation in these histories; what roles or responsibilities do we have as critical and creative agents?
WRPR 182A001 The American Family in Historical Perspective
E. Lapsansky
Fall 2025 T/Th 10:00am-11:25am
"The American family in historical perspective" will invite us to take a look at a variety of family structures, behaviors, values, and stresses, as times, peoples, regions, and issues interface with our notions and realities of “family.” Including [but not limited to] Native American, Mexican, African American; Protestant, Jewish, Mormon and Catholic, North, South and West, over time, we will explore not only demographics, comparative rituals of birth, marriage, illness, disability; expectations of family/community "loyalty" vs. "individuation." While pursuing such critical concerns as immigration, migration, labor, and economy, we will also look at such topics as recreation and dietary norms, family-crisis management; "privilege" and lack thereof; and notions of education [e.g., who should get it, what kind, and to what end?]. [Counts towards the minor in Health Studies.]
WRPR XXXA001, WRPR XXXA002 Artificial Intelligence and Culture
J. Draney
Fall 2025 M/W 11:30am-12:55pm and Fall 2025 M/W 1:00pm-2:25pm
Close your eyes and think of AI. What do you see? Maybe an army of world-destroying robots, an evil supercomputer, or a hyper-intelligent personal assistant anticipating your every need? Or does your mind go to the software that helps you compose e-mails, proofread your drafts, and debug code? This course will examine how our cultural imagination of superintelligent computers shapes—and is shaped by—the emerging technologies we call “artificial intelligence,” from chatbots to predictive algorithms. We will ask whether AI represents a quantum leap in technological development, or if it’s simply another bureaucratic tool, destined for the office. To investigate these questions, we will analyze narrative fiction, nonfiction essays, and films that depict AI in various forms. Using this material as a springboard, students will then develop their own critical perspectives through writing, considering how literature, art, and marketing influence our understanding of this technology. Assignments will include a film criticism essay, a close reading paper, a research review, and a longform analytical essay.
WRPR XXX001, WRPR XXX002 Technologies of Intimacy: Data and Everyday Life
J. Draney
Spring 2026 M/W 11:30am-12:55pm and Spring 2026 M/W 1:00pm-2:25pm
Does it ever feel like TikTok knows you better than you know yourself? Today, digital platforms have an uncanny ability to connect with and influence our innermost states of mind; computers finish our sentences for us and anticipate the fluctuations in our moods. But long before Instagram’s “For You” page, print-based media like novels and poems gave readers the intimate sense of “feeling seen.” This course will examine the continuities between literature and algorithmic media as technologies of intimacy. As we learn how to write and think like scholars, we will explore the idea of intimacy—what it is, how it’s experienced, and how it’s crafted through language, media, and design. How does writing create a sense of personal connection? What does it mean to feel addressed, known, and understood by a technology, whether digital or analog? As a writing-intensive course, our main goal will be to practice and improve your writing by responding to these questions in thoughtful, creative, and analytical ways. You’ll write personal reflections, critical reviews, and research-based projects that help you connect big ideas about media, identity, and emotion to your own experiences.
WRPR XXX001, WRPR XXX002 Talking With Teachers: Unfulfilled Promises & Unfinished Activisms for Education Justice
C. Rogers
Spring 2026 T/Th 11:30am-12:55pm and Spring 2026 T/Th 2:30pm-3:55pm
“To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible — and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people — must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.”—James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers (1963)
The landmark Supreme Court victory of Brown v. Board (1954) was popularly understood to nationally symbolize the ability of all students, especially Black students, to have access to high-quality schooling and shatter the grip of segregation in our schools and public institutions. Seventy something years after Brown, public schools across the country are still deeply segregated and unequal. As R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy offered during Brown v. Board’s 70th anniversary, “The segregation that was meant to be uprooted with the Brown decision not only persisted, but it has grown, and today, we stand at a critical juncture—the promise of education as opportunity that has existed for more than 100 years is on the verge of being no more.”
In this writing seminar, we will explore 19th, 20th, and 21st century perspectives emerging from Black community educational organizing to inform how we may each understand the purpose of education in our own lives and as a social anchor for creating thriving, equitable communities. Through three acts, we consider: (1) Black education antecedents and experiments that took place through Reconstruction up until the dawn of Brown v. Board; (2) a multidimensional exploration of Brown v. Board I (1954) and II (1955) decisions alongside the mid-century rise of the project of Black Studies; and (3) contemporary realities of U.S. public education for Black communities, including pursuing interventions needed to bring about an inclusive, equitable, and relevant education for all.
Course readings will include anchor texts for each act, combined with supplemental articles, essays, and multimedia artifacts. Assignments will involve essays that build on personal experiences in education toward defining dimensions of equity and concluding with arguments for how a proposed intervention could expand equity and inclusiveness in U.S. schools. In particular, students will be asked to write how their experiences may reflect the development of racial literacy (Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) and an equity mindset. [Counts towards the concentration in African and Africana Studies.]
WRPR XXXB001, WRPR XXXB002 Classics and Class
I. Halstead
Spring 2026 M/W 10:00am-11:25am and Spring 2026 M/W 1:00pm-2:25pm
From elite boarding schools to political speeches, from museum collections to pop culture, classical antiquity has long been a symbol of power, prestige, and tradition. This course examines the ways in which classical texts and histories have been used to uphold social hierarchies while also serving as tools of resistance and reinvention. Through reading, discussion, and writing, students will explore how class shapes access to education, cultural heritage, and the narratives we inherit about antiquity. We begin by considering the historical connection between classical education and elite privilege, examining how classical knowledge has been positioned as a marker of social status. Next, we investigate how contemporary artists and writers outside elite institutions reclaim and reinterpret classical traditions, reading works that re-engage with ancient myth in creative ways. Students consider how 20th century authors challenge traditional narratives of cultural authority and create space for new voices.
By interrogating who has historically “owned” the classics, students consider what it means to write with authority in an academic setting. Whether examining the role of classical references in contemporary political rhetoric, the presence of Greek and Latin in prison education programs, or debates over removing classical language requirements in higher education, students learn to develop research questions, evaluate sources, and construct well-supported arguments about the intersections of classics and class.
Readings may include critical essays such as Thomas Arnold’s writings on education, W.E.B. Du Bois’s reflections on Greek and Latin in The Souls of Black Folk, and 20th century novels and poems by authors such as Rita Dove, Madeleine Miller and Toni Morrison. All readings will be in English – no prior knowledge of classical languages or literature is required.
WRPR XXXB001, WRPR XXXB002 Narratives of Environmental Equity: Writing Toward Climate Justice
E. Al-Drous
Spring 2026
This seminar examines the rhetorical strategies and tools used across multimodal genres of environmental discourse, with a focus on climate change and the politics of sustainability. Students will critically analyze how language, form, and narrative shape public perceptions of climate issues through texts such as scientific essays, Indigenous ecological storytelling, environmental manifestos, podcasts, and climate fiction. Readings will engage authors including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Amitav Ghosh, and Elizabeth Kolbert. Students will produce research-driven essays, rhetorical analyses, and advocacy-oriented writing, reflecting on how academic writing can function as a form of civic engagement. This course will challenge students to develop their rhetorical dexterity, enabling them to adapt their writing for diverse audiences, from academic readers to public stakeholders.