Skip to the main content of this page.

miami university
Department of English
rotating images of books

Contact Us

356 Bachelor Hall
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056
tel:513.529.5221
fax: 513.529.1392
english@muohio.edu

This page last updated
October 5, 2009

Courses

Graduate Seminars: 2009–2010

Download Graduate Seminar Descriptions

get adobe reader

Jump to

Graduate seminars are open to both masters and doctoral students, and topics are offered on a rotating cycle.

For graduate students interested in course offerings in the humanities in other departments, visit this link.

Summer I (2009)

ENG 710 I | Summer Institute | Traveling Discourses: Rhetorical Crossings through Time and Space | (4)

MTWR | 9:30–12:30 | 5/18-6/4 | Kate Ronald and Susan Morgan

This course will explore a few of the ways discourses come to be recast and reinterpreted as they transfer from one rhetorical frame to another. We have designed the seminar and conference to provide a space to address some of the larger questions that underpin our profession but are not the explicit focus of our regularly scheduled courses. The institute will be interdisciplinary in abandoning the boundaries between two of the disciplines in English Studies, literature and composition/rhetoric. We will consider two general issues:

The seminar will take up, through specific examples, three major ways in which discourses travel, and we will spend a week on each. The first will consider rhetoric and the history of rhetoric, the second will look at literature and literary history, and the third will turn to discourses that move from place to place and transnationalism. We will be concerned throughout with relations between scholarship and pedagogy. Guest speakers include Susan Jarratt, Frances Dolan, Scott Shershow, and Rita Raley. We will read some of their work along with the work of other writers. Requirements include readings, class presentations, short responses, and a concluding conference style paper.

Back to the top of the page

Summer IV

ENG 731 | The Theory and Practice of College Composition | (4)

MTWRF | 9-12:30 |  Jim Porter, Bre Garrett, and Aurora Matzke

This course meets from August 3 - August 19, and is required of all first-year Graduate Assistant instructors and Teaching Associates. This seminar introduces the histories, theories, and practices of composition studies to prepare graduate student instructors for teaching English 111 and 112 and to help them construct their version of Miami’s standard syllabi. Topics are approached from both the perspective of current theoretical debate and practical classroom application and include composing processes (invention, drafting, and revising), classroom dynamics, collaborative writing, peer response groups, argument and the rhetorical tradition, ways of responding to student writing, assessment and grading, creating assignments, and style and grammar.

Back to the top of the page

Semester I (Fall 2009)

ENG 602 | Technical and Scientific Writing | (2)

T | 12:30-3:10 (Part II Sprint Course with ENG 695) | Michele Simmons

This course introduces rhetorical theory for technical communicators and is designed in part to help you: understand foundational concepts of rhetoric; see the important connections among rhetoric, technical communication, science, technology, and public policy; gain a greater knowledge of how rhetorical strategies can be applied to, and affect, communication situations; and analyze discourse in your field or specialty area in order to better understand their argument’s persuasion, context, and implications.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 603 | Theories and Their Histories | (4)

W | 1-3:40 | Brit Harwood

This course aims to introduce graduate students to some of the major protocols for literary criticism at the present time. For the sake of argument, we shall take the present moment as a consequence of the disruption of New Criticism (American formalism) by deconstruction. Further, we shall take it as dominated by Michel Foucault and the kinds of criticism he has generated, particularly feminism in what may be its most important kind and postcolonialism. The problematic of the course will be to decide on a location for Foucault between his great antecedents, structuralism on the one hand and the two great hermeneutics of suspicion on the other, Marxist and Freudian/Lacanian. Among the authors probably considered will be Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Judith Butler.

In addition to an intrepid commitment to facing the challenges presented by reading the great theorists now fundamental to contemporary discourse in the human sciences, course requirements will include frequent presentations and response papers, as well as a brief (10-12 page) concluding essay in intellectual genealogy.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 650 | Graduate Fiction Workshop | (4)

T | 4-6:40 | Tim Melley

Our goals in the graduate fiction workshop include pursuing your creative interests; refining your writing through the analysis of your work, the work of your peers, and the work of published authors; challenging and expanding your ideas concerning what makes a story a story; and developing and refining your aesthetic. Participation in the workshop requires a commitment to substantial reading and writing and a genuine desire to help others improve their fiction.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 651 | Graduate Poetry Workshop | (4)

T | 4-6:40 | Keith Tuma

The focus of the workshop will be student sole-authored and collaborative work, together with exercises exploring the possibilities of a documentary poetics and discussion of readings in canonical and recent poetry, and in contemporary poetics. Reading list available in late May.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 680 | African American Literature 1880-1940 | (4)

T | 1-3:40 | Stefanie Dunning

This course will explore literature from the pos--bellum period, beginning with Francis Harper’s Iola Leroy, continuing to the Harlem Renaissance and ending in 1946 (a bit late for our course) with Ann Petry’s The Street. We’ll explore questions of American identity in African American culture, sexuality, color, class, and gender relations. Among the other texts we’ll read include Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Passing, and The Blacker the Berry. This class will examine a variety of issues related to post-slavery identity formation in the African American community, as well as survey African American literature of the period.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 690 | Twentieth Century American Poetry | (4)

R | 1-3:40 | David Schloss

The seminar will be an overview of 20th century American poetry, focusing on the poetics, aesthetics and historical contexts of various significant and influential practitioners, such as: Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Auden, Roethke, Bishop, Lowell, Wilbur, Ammons, Ashbery, Plath. We will look at the poetry and critical work by and about such authors to gain a perspective on the attributes, intentions, and thus, successes and/or failures of their poetic projects. These recognitions may help illuminate some useful sense of the conceptual characteristics of American culture over this past century, as well. Text: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (plus, outside readings).

Back to the top of the page

ENG 692 | Introduction to Technical and Scientific Communication | (4)

R | 1-3:50 | Jean Lutz

This is a writing course that simultaneously explores theoretical perspectives and communication genres in technical and scientific communication. The theoretical focus will be on developing in-depth knowledge of issues in the scholarship of the field. The writing focus will be on practicing and developing expertise in careful reading and interpretation, in gathering and synthesizing information, in presenting a thesis and backing it up with well documented evidence, and in conducting yourself as a responsible professional and team participant in an organizational environment.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 693 | Technical and Scientific Editing | (2)

T | 2-4:00 | Jean Lutz

The goal of this course is to develop your ability to edit technical and scientific communications, including developing an understanding of editing and its role in publication, document development, and use; practicing and performing a wide range of editing tasks on a variety of documents; developing productive editing attitudes and habits that will enable you to work effectively with authors; and mastering basic conventions of English grammar, punctuation, and copyediting.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 695 | Linguistics for Technical and Scientific Communicators | (2)

R | 1:10-4 | (Part I Sprint Course with ENG 696) | Katherine Durack

Introduction to the study of linguistics and language as applied to professional writing, including the study of syntax and writing style and language use in the professions.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 696 | Managing Technical/Scientific Communication Departments | (2)

R | 1:10-4 | (Part II Sprint Course with ENG 695) | Katherine Durack

Introduction to responsibilities of people who manage technical and scientific communication systems, including in-house communication departments, independent companies, organization-wide information policies, and professional journals and similar publications.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 698.A | Teaching Workshop for College Composition | (2)

W | 10-10:50 | James Porter, Bre Garrett, Aurora Matzke

Required workshop for first-year Graduate Assistants and Teaching Associates teaching ENG 111.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 698.B | Teaching Introduction to Technical (ENG 313) and Business (ENG 315) Writing | (2)

W | 1-2:40 | Jean Lutz and Michele Simmons

A weekly seminar required of all MTSC teaching assistants, this class is designed to provide you with solid support and preparation for—and reflection on—the teaching you will do during the spring and next fall. In learning to teach English 313, Technical Writing, and English 315, Business Writing, you will discuss assigned readings, engage in practice grading sessions and classroom demonstrations, keep and share a teaching journal and annotated syllabus, and contribute to materials on good teaching practices.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 732 | Histories of Composition | (4)

M | 1-3:40 | Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson

This course is organized around four movements: recent debates in the field, contending histories, documentary and archival studies, and questions about the future of the discipline. We will read Lisa Ede’s recent book, Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location. Then, we’ll move backward to contending histories of composition, reading two or three histories—by Joe Harris, Jim Berlin, Robert Conners, Sharon Crowley, Susan Miller (some in excerpted form). We’ll critically reflect on how these histories have been shaped for particular purposes and discuss what debates they enact. Next, we’ll look at some primary research on 19th and 20th century composition books and documents. We’ll end the course by examining more recent trends and predictions for the future of the field. Course work will include two projects, from among choices in category A and B: A) an analysis of a historical composition textbook, or compiling and presenting an annotated bibliography. B) writing a 10 to 12 page conference paper, or a book review of a recent book in composition history or theory. I ask that you choose projects that are useful to your own goals.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 740 | Rhetoric of Song | (4)

T | 12-2:40 | Cathy Wagner

This seminar will address the tools songs use to influence belief and desire in an audience. We’ll discuss songs with music and songs that only gesture at the musical, and try to define differences between the way a song functions in the literary and nonliterary realms. How do the formal aspects of song—refrain, for example—function as rhetorical appeals? How do different types of songs serve and challenge cultural narratives and practices? We will listen to a lot of folk songs, almost all American, among them the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music and the Goodbye Babylon compilation. We’ll also read traditional Scottish and English ballads. We will read texts that embed songs in prose (Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; Alice Notley’s In the Pines) or assert themselves as songs (Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol; McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Café). We will read from various texts that assert or critique connections between rhetoric and form: Kenneth Burke’s Philosophy of Literary Form; Jeffrey Walker on rhetoric and poetics; Sharon Kirsch on Gertrude Stein and rhetorical grammar; and Plato on the dangers of music and poetry. Responsibilities will include two long papers, the second paper being an extended inquiry into a particular song-form or historical instance of the influence of song; for those inclined, the second paper may take the form of a creative song-series accompanied by a rhetorical analysis.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 750 | Performance Theory/Performativity | (4)

W | 1-3:40 | Katie Johnson

In recent years, growing attention has been given to the performative quality of language, culture, and human activity in fields as diverse as literary studies, anthropology, theatre studies, philosophy, and disability studies. Much of this work has culminated in the field of performance studies, where scholars examine the performative nature of texts in culture, texts as culture, and culture as texts. From the performative utterance of language to the performance of sex and gender, we will scrutinize how performance is articulated across the disciplines. We will be exploring the social dramas that our culture enacts, asking what cultural work these “stagings” perform.

We will look at the use of theatre metaphors in anthropology, (expressed most succinctly by Victor Turner’s notion of the theatricality of everyday life or Richard Schechner’s study of ethnographic performances); at theories of the performative in language (J.L. Austin, and Jacques Derrida); at theories of gender, sex, and drag performance (Judith Butler, and Peggy Phelan); at technological performativity and cyborg theory (Donna Harraway, Philip Auslander, and cosmetic surgery/performance artist Orlan); at the performance of “race”, ethnicity, and nation (E. Patrick Johnson, Jose Esteban Muños and Joseph Roach); and at manifestations of cultural performances (Peggy Phelan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jean Baudrillard). In addition, we will look at writers and performers whose works feature the performative, many of whom blur the line between “performance” and “real life”, such as performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Carmelita Tropicana, and playwright Anna Deavere Smith.

Back to the top of the page

Spring 2010

ENG 605 | Issues in the Profession | (2)

W | 11–11:50 | Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson

A weekly forum on issues of the profession, including the fields of literature, composition, and rhetoric, and creative writing. The focus will be on English as an academic profession, but non-academic applications of graduate study will be considered as well. This is a credit/no-credit course, with topics for discussion to be generated by both faculty and students.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 610.B | Mapping New Critical Terrains: U.S. Empire, American Asia, and Asian America | (4)

R | 4–6:40 | Yu-Fang Cho

Using literary and interdisciplinary scholarship on U.S.-Asia encounters as a point of departure, this course introduces students to some exciting new paradigms that have emerged in recent scholarship on the cultures of the U.S. empire, particularly analyses of cultural production in transnational, intersectional, and comparative contexts of racialization.  In addition to reading theoretical scholarly texts, we will examine the possibilities and challenges of these new paradigms by reading them alongside cultural texts that address similar epistemological crises.  (Reading list available in Graduate Office, 356G).

Back to the top of the page

ENG 620 |  Authorship and Agency in Early Modern Women’s Writings, 1500-1680 | (4)

M | 1–3:40 | Katharine Gillespie

While college administrators everywhere bemoan the death of academic publishing, the market in scholarly editions of newly-discovered texts by early modern women writers booms in popular and university presses alike, not to mention in growing numbers of on-line collections. Likewise, the production of scholarly monographs dedicated to the study of these texts is barely underway. As Betty Travitsky and Patrick Cullen write in their introduction to Ashgate Press’s burgeoning reprint series, “the study of early modern women has become one of the most important — indeed perhaps the most important — means for the rewriting of early modern history.” In this course, we will take stock of the wide variety of genres produced by a diverse array of women writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England as well as the historical contexts from which they emerged and which they helped to construct in turn. We will familiarize ourselves with the various methodologies that modern scholars have developed to assess the contributions that these works make to literary history — as well as the transformations that these texts’ unique properties might provoke in our ongoing constitution of that history. Finally, we will address some of the conflicts which have arisen as a result of these inquiries, specifically the fairly heated argument that scholars are waging over how much—if any—agency can be attributed to ‘the individual female author’ as opposed to other forces that may be said to have contributed to or enabled the making of her text.

Students who enter the course will gain a working knowledge of early modern women writers and the periods in which they wrote but they will also be introduced to secondary materials that raise broader questions about authorship, agency, and the politics of textual production. In March, the class will be visited by Dr. Mihoko Suzuki, a leading scholar in the field from the University of Miami. During class time, Dr. Suzuki will talk to us about new directions in the study of early modern women as well as, more specifically, her recent work in editing a large collection of essays on the topic for Palgrave Press. Later that afternoon, Dr. Suzuki will deliver a talk to the class as well as members of Miami’s Early Modern Studies group and other interested parties on “Women’s Legal Discourse in the English Civil War.”

Writing Assignments will consist of:

Back to the top of the page

ENG 640 | Family, Sex, and Marriage in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Literature | (4)

R | 1–3:40 | Mary Jean Corbett

For over three decades, feminist theorists have analyzed what Gayle Rubin memorably termed “the traffic in women” as, in Luce Irigaray’s words, “the law that orders our society.” Instituting exogamy, mandating heterosexuality, proscribing homosexuality, even founding the binary divisions of gender itself, this anthropological model of how nature becomes culture is currently undergoing sustained critique within feminist theory from a variety of perspectives. In this course we will explore the historical grounding of this model, its 19th-century contexts, and recent feminist and poststructuralist efforts to rethink its central components. As a way of focusing our inquiry, we will consider representations of “incest”—here defined as sex or marriage among members of “the family,” itself an historically variable construction—in fiction by Austen, Martineau, and the Brontës from the first half of the 19th century. We will also read 20th-century novels by Woolf, Byatt, and Waters that not only queer 19th-century sexual, marital, and familial practices, but also critique normative conceptions of the 19th century by discovering and/or inventing alternative readings of some entrenched paradigms.  For example, recent scholarship as well as some contemporary fiction suggests that the standard plot of heterosexual romance—in which unrelated strangers overcome a series of obstacles on their way to making a marriage and, thus, a new family—is not the only or even the dominant plot of sexual love. In fiction by the great women novelists of the period, an alternative plot focused on maintaining and supporting already existing relationships within the family—and especially those between people of the same generation (e.g., cousins, same– or cross–sex siblings)—exists alongside and in tension with the “stranger” model. As characters move (or not) from families of origin to conjugal families, we will observe the ways in which this tension is negotiated, managed, displaced, or repressed, with particular attention to how gender, sexuality, race, and class shape narrative structures as bearers of social meanings.  We will also consider the queer potentialities in some of the century’s most celebrated works, such as Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, with a particular eye to how these texts provide the ground for contemporary rethinkings of Victorian sexualities in familial contexts.

In pairs, students will lead weekly discussions of primary and secondary texts on a rotating basis, and produce one short paper on the basis of their findings. In addition, everyone will write a seminar paper of 18-20 pages; first drafts of these seminar papers will be workshopped in class several weeks before the final version is due.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 650  | Graduate Fiction Workshop | (4)

T | 4–6:40 | Eric Goodman

This graduate fiction workshop will focus on the writing and critiquing of student writing. In addition, there will be a focus on the reading and perhaps writing the first chapters of novels.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 651 |  Graduate Poetry Workshop(4)

W | 1–3:40 | cris cheek

The Graduate Poetry Workshop will examine issues relating to framing, compilation and composition of sequence, set and the live in poetry book and interdisciplinary contexts.

  1. In the overall context of contemporary poetry and its signifying on traditions we will playfully explore (philosophically, culturally and poetically) the implications of an “ordered list of objects or events,” a “collection of distinct objects” and temporal-spatial aspects of what can be understood to be live.
  2. We will read and discuss readings from the Poems for the Millennium Volume Three anthology throughout the semester and examine work(s) being made by members of the Graduate Poetry Workshop in the light of Romantic and Postromantic provocations. It is understood that workshop member work(s) will be at a different stages of completion and assume differential importance for members in their first and second years as Graduate Students.

It is strongly anticipated that production and circulation of texts will arise, become modified, redrafted and appraised as performances at the possible intersections of these two semester-long enquiries.

The Course Book and Other Teaching Materials:
Jerome Rothenberg (Editor), Jeffrey Robinson (Editor). Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry

Back to the top of the page

ENG 652 | Issues in Creative Writing | (4)

M | 4–6:40 |  Brian Roley

Our goals in the graduate creative nonfiction workshop include pursuing your creative interests; refining your writing through the analysis of your work, the work of your peers, and the work of published authors; challenging and expanding your ideas concerning what makes a creative nonfiction piece; and developing and refining your aesthetic. Participation in the workshop requires a commitment to substantial reading and writing and a genuine desire to help others improve their writing.

Back to the top of the page

ENG/WMS 660 |  Gender and Sexuality in British and Irish Modernism | (4)

T | 4:30–7:10 |  Madelyn Detloff

This course examines the articulation of discourses, norms, and counterdiscourses about gender and sexuality in British and Irish literature from the 1890s through the 1940s. We will analyze the changing roles of women and men in the early years of the 20th century, as well as a growing public and professional fascination with sexuality as evidenced in the emergence of psychoanalysis, sexology, legal discourses, and ‘high’ as well as popular cultural productions. Among the authors we will discuss are Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, D.H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Bryher, Stephen Spender, and W.B. Yeats.  

Back to the top of the page

ENG 690 | The Literature of Political Reform: Aesthetics and Democratic Engagement | (4)

T | 1–3:40 | Andrew Hebard

Looking at a number of political reform novels from the both the 19th and 20th centuries, this course queries the relationship between literary conventions and attempts to reform the state in the U.S. The course will examine the role that literature can play in political movements that often have very specific goals and ideals. It will also examine a connection between the development of realist conventions and the way that the state was increasingly being experienced as an institution of technocratic expertise that no longer had an everyday intelligibility. Much of the course will be focused historically on the Progressive Era, but we will also extend our inquiry well into the 20th century. Alongside reform novels, we will look at the writings of a number of reformers like Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt. We will also read a number of theorists writing about democratic engagement and the state, including Jacques Ranciere, Claude Lefort, Jurgen Habermas, and Wendy Brown.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 694 | Technical/Scientific Writing | (4)

R | 2–4:50 |  Michele Simmons

English 694 introduces theories and practices of technical communication. The course provides you with experience in analyzing and producing in four critical knowledge areas of technical and scientific communication: genre, project management, digital technology, and professionalization. Rather than projects that focus on a single area at a time, these issues will overlap and intersect throughout the semester. The main objective of this course is to provide you with an opportunity to improve the kinds of writing you will likely encounter in the workplace and your community.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 697 |  Information Design | (4)

T | 2–4:50 |  Huatong Sun

This course addresses the principles of effective information design, the role of the technical communicator in the design process, and the application of professional design principles and production techniques to create effective print and non-print communications. We will approach information design from a variety of perspectives (e.g., technical communication, usability and user experience, rhetoric, graphics design, industrial design, interaction design, cultural studies, etc.). Topics include design principles and design process, visual elements, desktop and online printing, and information usability. This course will serve as a foundation for future work in visual communication and design culture.

This course takes a theoretical and hands-on approach to information design. We will focus on understanding what constitutes good design and applying those principles to concrete documents and artifacts. Most of the class meetings will consist of two units, analysis and production. A service-learning online design project will be included. You will leave the class with a good understanding of two professional publishing software, InDesign and Dreamweaver.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 699.A | Teaching Workshop for College Composition | (2)

W | 10:10–11 | Jim Porter, Bre Garrett, Aurora Matzke

 

ENG 699.B | Teaching Workshop for Technical/Scientific Communication | (2)

W | 1–2:40 | Jean Lutz

 

ENG 734 | New Media and Composition Studies | (4)

T | 1–3:40 |  Jason Palmeri

In its broadest sense, the field of composition entails the study of how people make meaning—or compose—with multiple symbol systems in diverse contexts. At the current moment when writing technologies are proliferating and changing, it is timely that we explore the ways in which “new media” are transforming practices of composing. As Lisa Gitelman has argued, the term “new media” marks a cultural moment in which the meanings/norms/practices surrounding a particular technology are radically contested and in flux. In this course, we will attempt to embrace the instability of “new media”—to see new media as an inventive heuristic that can help us reimagine what it means to study and teach composition.

Along the way, we'll consider questions such as:

  1. How might we revise our understandings of writing processes, learning processes, and rhetorical practices in light of shifts in composing technologies?
  2. What is the relationship between new(er) media and old(er) media?
  3. How might we integrate such technologies as digital video, blogs, wikis, social networks, digital audio, and videogames into composition pedagogy and scholarship?
  4. How do composing technologies participate in the social construction of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and class?
  5. How does the concept of “new media” relate to other key terms such as digital writing/rhetoric, multimodal composing, and technological literacy?
  6. How can we develop digital pedagogies that enable students to critically analyze and participate in civic action?

Course requirements will include regular informal composing activities, a midterm digital project (brief video or audio essay), and a final project (print or digital) suitable for presentation at a conference. No prior technology experience is required, and I will make time to teach you any composing technologies you need to know. Although this course will place a special emphasis on composition and rhetoric scholarship (Wysocki; Selber; Selfe; Hawisher; Banks; Brooke; Yancey), we will also read a good deal of interdisciplinary work on new media (Lessig; Jenkins; Bogost; Hayles; Bolter) that should be of interest to students throughout the humanities.  Please contact the instructor (jason.palmeri@gmail.com) if you have questions.

Back to the top of the page

ENG 735 | Research Methods | (4)

R | 1–3:40 | Heidi McKee

The goals for this course are to introduce a variety of methodological and ethical approaches for conducting empirical studies of writing, writers, and writing contexts. We will focus primarily on qualitative, person-based methods, including various approaches to composing protocols, teacher-research, ethnography, case study, discourse analysis, surveys, and interviews. We will also consider methods for researching with digital technologies and in digital contexts, including online. The course will be structured so that each week we will read meta-analytical essays about a particular approach along with several studies illustrating a particular method. Throughout the course, we will also discuss issues of validity, reliability, researcher bias, researcher-participant relations, informed consent, and federal regulations governing human-participant research. Assignments will include short analyses of research reports, a review of a particular research method (covering one book-length and several article-length studies), and the designing and completion of a person-based research project.

Back to the top of the page