This class is a Comparative Literature Laboratory. We will work together to build our resources and make them available to a broad audience. This will be the after-life of the seminar.

The effects of COVID19 have changed the world. George Floyd’s death has reminded us that America can no longer function within the racial status quo. In academia, we must transform our institutions both philosophically and structurally.

In this class, we will address current issues by reading discourses produced by different social media platforms. We will rethink our engagement with Ph.D. program requirements so that graduate students have the time, resources, and relationships to complete different pieces of training (African Studies, Museum Studies, Librarian Studies, Translation Studies etc.) Humanities Ph.D. students are well prepared to thrive in any number of positions, but how can this be made clear to students and faculty and to the world beyond? Ultimately, this seminar will make our programs more dynamic and bring the strengths of the critical thinking developed through humanities training into the world beyond academia.

We will work with discourse analysis as a reading strategy. It is important to note that this seminar is focused on developing your analytical and critical skills. It is also focused on parsing out different discursive threads within your own research and presenting them in ways that are not limited to the end of semester academic paper format. Therefore, we will experiment with a number of presentation styles where the participants in the seminar will showcase their research.

We will also invite guest speakers throughout the course of the semester. We will engage critically with their work and put it in dialogue with some of our own ongoing discussions. This will be an ongoing series of presentations where you will talk about your work through a medium that you feel can bring out the strength of your analysis to the fullest degree. Some options for presentation (but not limited to these) your research are:

• Short film/video
• Poetry
• Short story
• Podcast
• Poster Series
• Photography project
• Museum Installation
• Translation project

Intended Audience:

This course is open to Humanities PhD students.