Welcome to Our Class

As its name implies, Introduction to English Studies is a foundational course that will help provide you with many of the tools you'll need as you pursue a major (or minor) in English here at the University of Cincinnati — and thankfully, many of you are taking this class as sophomores (or juniors) rather than waiting until your last year.

While this is an important class, it's one with a bit of an identity crisis: it's not a theory course, or a composition course, or a lit course, though it touches upon all of those areas. As a result, each professor who teaches it puts their own personal spin upon it depending on what they see as the necessary skills they'd like their students to carry with them.

Since 2010, I've been co-editor of Jacket2, an online journal of poetry and poetics journal that carries on and builds upon the groundbreaking work of Jacket Magazine (1997–2010), one of the world's first online venues for serious poetic discourse. In that role I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking with my colleagues about the evolving role of criticism in the 21st century as we move from a print-centric culture into a bustling 24/7 world of online discourse. That brave new world that you, as budding scholars, find yourself in is very different than the one I knew when I was in your shoes a generation ago, and it's vital to understand how to make your way through it, regardless of whether you plan to be an English professor, a high school English teacher, or to enter into any number of other fields.

Our semester will break down into three segments, each serving as a foundation for the next and building towards your final essay. We'll start by taking a brief look at the English language and the history of English scholarship, then explore other sorts of analytic literacies and disciplines that will broaden our sense of where the field is going in the 21st century. Next, we'll apply those skills to a trio of groundbreaking and much-lauded recent books by female authors — Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, and Lauren Redniss — that incorporate a hybrid approach to both structure and subject. Finally, you'll try to work in this same sort of mode, workshopping two short pieces that will fold into a larger final essay.

I first taught this course in the fall of 2015, and thanks to both wonderful feedback from my students and intensive evaluation alongside several peers who also taught 3000 that year, I've made some changes that I think will be very beneficial. We'll have a lot more time to sort out the details of our shared work as the semester progresses, but for now, welcome to the class! I hope you're as excited as I am for what we have in store.