Survey of British Literature (In Development)
On this website, my students will publish infographics that trace themes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. They will also publish “Poetry Word Analyses,” essays in which they explore the power of a single word in a poem through its various denotations and connotations. Finally, my students will design an online poetry project comprised of dramatic readings of and essays about British poetry. This website may be accessed here: https://surveyofbritishliterature.wordpress.com/.
Postcolonial Voices: “Can the Subaltern [Woman] Speak?” (In Development)
In this honors course, my students are studying postcolonial women’s writing through the lens of Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” a treatise in which she meditates on the conditions of those on the margins of society. On this website, my students will produce reviews of our poetry and prose, original spoken word poems, and a “Giving Voice Project.” In this latter project, they will record dramatic readings of our texts while close-reading their chosen passages. Finally, after my students team-teach a critical reading from our course, they will publish their notes and PowerPoint slides. Follow the link to access our course website: https://postcolonialvoices.wordpress.com/.
Global Modernisms in a Digital Age
This website is comprised of two digital assignments: reviews and infographics. In the first, my students contributed multimodal digital reviews of our course readings. Adopting the style of popular media reviews published in The Guardian, they offered snappy surveys and evaluations of our texts. Later in the semester, the students worked in teams to design original infographics that offered new ways of evaluating our course materials. Altogether, these publications utilized digital tools to expand our understanding of global modernisms—this movement’s navigation of issues related to race, gender, national identity, and more; https://globalmodernismsinadigitalage.wordpress.com/.
Postcolonial Literature and Theory
This website features two digital student projects. First, the students present multimodal digital reviews of postcolonial texts. Drawing from a variety of written, visual, and electronic resources, they survey and evaluate our course readings. Second, the students published collaboratively-designed podcasts. Utilizing postcolonial literary and theoretical texts, each team explored a research question of its choice and offered a response through the podcast’s more conversational, informal form. In both assignments, the students harnessed digital tools to grapple with how and to what effect, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin describe, “the empire writes back”—ways that writers took to the page to navigate the tensions of living in a place “changed utterly” (in the words of W.B. Yeats). This website may be accessed here: https://postcolonialliteratureandtheory.wordpress.com/.
The Censorship Files: A Study of Texts, Images, and Information
As a class, my students created a digital archive of instances of censorship from around the globe. They composed multimodal editorials that combined histories, personal interviews, images, legal documents, and more on various banned artifacts/events. These editorials were published on our class website, thecensorshipfiles.wordpress.com.
Modernism and the Machine
Grouped in teams, my students designed podcasts that explore the relationship between modernism and new technologies at the turn of the 20th century. These podcasts study the range of roles that technological innovations played not only in literature, art, and film, but also in science and culture at large. Our course website, https://modernismandthemachine.wordpress.com/, hosts these podcasts alongside abstracts of their contents.
The “Troubles” of Partition: Ireland/Northern Ireland and India/Pakistan
The “Troubles” of Partition is a digital art exhibition designed by my undergraduate students. It features a range of collaboratively-created artwork that studies themes related to Ireland’s and India’s tumultuous partitions. This artwork is paired with original “Artist Statements,” essays that explore how each artwork conveys a particular vantage point of partition. Drawing from fictive, non-fictive, and academic sources, these artist statements offer insights both into the artists’ motivations and into the history and visual representation of partition itself. Our course website may be accessed at: https://thetroublesofpartition.wordpress.com/.
