ENGL 555 A: Feminist Theories

Syllabus Description:

This course surveys contemporary public-facing, humanistic work in feminist studies, highlighting communication in multiple forms and modes including blogs, websites, podcasts, op-eds, monographs, and video. We attend especially to scholarship in the field that is explicitly interested in engaging beyond the academy walls, both in bringing scholarly work to non-academic publics and also in joining and building communities of thinkers that are not based in the academy. We look at public-facing platforms and public-facing initiatives such as the Op-Ed project, The Conversation, Signs’ “Ask a Feminist” series, Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons, Public Books, and NYU Press’s Avidly Reads series. The course has students practice public-facing communication: we write brief essays that we send out for publication. We have the opportunity to create videos and/or podcasts. Overall, our goal is not only to write about feminism but to produce feminist work.

Three central learning objectives frame the course: (1) to have students understand and practice a range of public-facing academic communication, experimenting with different voices; (2) to have students become familiar with central platforms and initiatives that support this work and to be able to think critically about these; (3) to have students consider how literary and cultural criticism can be and has been practiced in community.