Course Archive

Beyond Sight: Rhetoric and Race in Contemporary Times (MALS667)

• Instructor: Dr. Jessica Edwards

This course draws on approaches to rhetorical theory, critical race theory, visual culture, and new media technologies to explore relationships between words and images. Written discourse increasingly involves visual dimensions that are influenced (and sometime controlled) by writers, and this understanding is most concretely rendered in areas that depend on technology. In a real sense, technology has pushed us to see visual dimensions of meaning as falling under our influence as writers and scholars in the humanities. Visual rhetoric also places audience in the center of theories of the visual and the design process. We will be looking at images, magazine covers, pages and screens other people have designed, and figuring out why (or why not) they succeed in doing what they set out to do. Throughout the course, we will be working to answer questions like the following:

• What happens if we approach visual rhetoric only as reception (or interpretation) and not as production?
• How do we, as scholars, learn to see and come to understand ourselves as viewers?
• How are racialized subjects produced through practices of looking?
• How can writers, designers, and decision makers for businesses build responsible documents for specific and general audiences?

Outcomes for scholars in the course include:

• Identifying issues for visual rhetoric in writing studies and other disciplines
• Connecting theories of rhetoric, race, and visual culture
• Writing and producing a visual story by applying visual rhetoric and race in the service of the classroom or another community

Interpreting the Past: The Dream of Empire (MALS622)

• Instructor: Dr. Raymond Callahan

There have always been empires.  Their number far exceeds the number of democracies of any sort that have ever existed.  Why is this so?  How are empires born?  How to they grow and flourish?  Why do they die?  Most important of all: what do they do to and for those they rule and what do they leave behind when they vanish?  All these questions will be explored through history and literature. This course will be based and reading and class discussion and a course essay will be required.

Force, Conflict and Change: World War II (MALS610)

• Instructor: Dr. Steven Sidebotham

This seminar will provide an overview of the causes, course and outcome of World War II and the general impact it had on world history until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The seminar will use an extensive collection of oral interviews of World War II veterans (American, other Allied and Axis, both men and women from all theaters of the war) personally conducted by the instructor to illustrate the conflict.