ENGL 372: Nineteenth-Century Literature of the Americas and the British Empire

372 [HUM] 19th Century Literature of the British Empire and the Americas. 3 credit hours. Literary and cultural texts in English from 1800 to 1900 focusing on global British literature and literatures of the Americas. My investment in the course. I am concerned about our country’s inability to work against climate change, the mass incarceration of African Americans, and widespread sexual assault. Each of these problems have a long history in British and American literature. By exploring that history, my hope is that we gain perspective on issues that concern all of us today

ENGL 521: Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction

Darko Suvin claims that science fiction is fundamentally concerned with “cognitive estrangement,” or the presence of some element in the story that transforms how its readers understand their world. In fact, much of the developments in science, economics, and politics in the nineteenth century were also concerned with the new worlds revealed by an increasingly industrialized society. Charles Darwin shocked the world by postulating that natural selection determined the habits of human beings, not any divine plan. Voyages to other parts of the planet were revealing new frontiers and new spaces for capitalism and colonialism to exploit. Machines and unskilled labor were replacing artisans with mechanized and standardized commodities. And the hopes and fears inspired by these new worlds reappeared as dreams and nightmares in speculative fiction: Darwin’s theories became the strange human-like animal hybrids of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, while imperialism inspired the “lost race” novels of H. Rider Haggard and made possible the utopian dreams of William Morris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This course will show how science fiction articulated the hopes and fears Victorians associated with the future. Such anxieties are a symptom of our inability to imagine the future (or the past) in its alterity. Against liberal promises of perpetual progress in which the notion of eventual inclusion tells the oppressed to stave off revolution and reassure the ruling class, science fiction enacts dramas surrounding the true danger and possibility of a future that is entirely unpredictable. In addition to the authors mentioned above, this course will show how women and authors of color used science fiction to challenge the oppressions of their day and imagine futures that asserted their freedom and power

DTC 101: Introduction to Digital Technology and Culture

Catalog Description 101 [ARTS] Introduction to Digital Technology & Culture 3 Inquiry into digital media, including origins, theories, forms, applications, and impact with a focus on authoring and critiquing multimodal texts. Course Description This course is an introduction to digital technology and culture that integrates interdisciplinary knowledge from literary studies, rhetoric and composition, art and design, business, and sociology to prepare students for the technical and cultural challenges of the 21st century. While this class is committed to introducing students to the history and culture of digital technology, it will also provide students with hands-on experiences with digital tools and delve into questions about what makes something digital and how we conceptualize our lives beyond the digital

DTC 392: Video Games Theory and History

History and theory of video games with a focus on cultural impact. DTC 392 explores the cultural and historical impact of video games. We will learn about these issues by engaging in a semester-long project where we will prototype a video game. Video games are not just entertainment: they can be art, a form of political resistance, even a way to persuade other people. You'll share your prototype with your fellow students, question one another's assumptions, and read scholarship in video game studies

DTC 375: Languages, Text, and Technology

DTC 375 is an introduction to the historical relationships between technology, communication, and forms of writing or material inscription. The course gives students an appreciation of the technological history of media, including hands-on encounters with the components and signals that create various technological effects: from sound to graphics to tactile effects. While DTC 375 primarily explores such phenomena by referencing how they impact human senses and culture, it also investigates how media signals are not reducible to our experiences of them

The Vegetation of the Paleozoic Plateau, Northeastern Iowa

The present vegetation of the Paleozoic Plateau region of Iowa is a fragmented representation of the original complex of oak-hickory forest mixed with more mesophytic forest, open oak savanna and hill prairie. Because of the topographic variation and the relatively cool, moist environment of the region, the forests are the best developed of those in Iowa, and show the greatest variation, including two types of alluvial forests (Salix thickets and alluvial hardwood forest), and several kinds of upland forests (Tilia, Acer, Quercus borealis, Q, alba and Pinus forests). These types represent points along a more-or-less continuous topographic gradient. Many of the native oak savannas have been eliminated, but oak-juniper glades may be found on cliff faces and steep ridges. The remaining hill prairies are rich in species characteristic of the dry prairies farther to the west. Cold, north-facing slopes ( algific slopes ) are the setting for a unique community containing a large number of rare and disjunct species. Outcrops of sandstones and limestone have characteristic microcommunities, often distinguished by their bryophyte or pteridophyte flora. There is a dearth of quantitative vegetation data from the region, and there are numerous research questions about the communities and their plant species that need answers. Preservation and conservation of plant communities and plant species are extremely important and should be addressed by a landscape approach to inventory and management

DTC 356: Information Structures

DTC 356 explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political roles of information and data. Beginning with library classification systems and Wikipedia, the course then turns to the role of metadata in organizing collections and our lives before ending with a consideration of text-mining and topic modeling. The conclusion considers these techniques in the context of cyberwarfare and the recent election

DTC 375: Languages, Text, and Technology (Revised for Fall 2017)

“But these perceptions had to be fabricated first.” --Friedrich Kittler, Grammophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) DTC 375 is an introduction to the historical relationships between technology, communication, and forms of writing. The course gives students an appreciation of the technological history of media, including hands-on encounters with the components, programs, and signals that create various technological effects: from sound to graphics to characters to tactile effects. Divided into the three units exploring the history of media that most directly impacted the development of the computer (sound, vision, and text), DTC 375 explores how these media transformed our senses and our techniques of interacting with the world

Jerusalem and “the Jew:” Biopolitics Between Blake and Spinoza

Critics exploring the relationship between Romantic poetry and Judaism have noted several places within William Blake’s poetry that seem to display philo-Semetic tendencies. This essay argues that Blake’s relationship with Jewish thought is much more complicated. It utilizes Spinoza’s understanding of the affect to rethink the contexts of Blake’s remarks about Judaism and “the Jew.” For Spinoza, the problem of the affect is a problem of reading and understanding what one is reading. This is particularly difficult, since the affects only confusedly make up what is called “the body”—whether this is a corporeal, political, or epistemological body. He applies this affectual problem of reading to his study of Biblical texts in the Theological Political Treatise, noting that Jewish law, in particular the Decalogue, only applies to the time and place of its production. Despite this, there are attempts to make a coherent message out of the Decalogue that can be transmitted outside of its spatio-temporal context. Blake has similar comments to make about the textual production of the Bible. According to Blake, the Bible is not a coherent document, and is rather made to be coherent by political bodies wishing to make a single, docile Christian identity. This paper uses these comments by Blake and Spinoza in a close reading of what is seemingly the most obvious example of Blake’s philo-semetic ideas: his address “To the Jews” in Jerusalem. I argue that whatever comments Blake makes about Jewish identity cannot be read outside of the complicated biopolitical contexts emerging from the address. Readers must fashion a disciplinary body for Blake that has philo-semetic beliefs and believe that this body pre-exists the time and space of its textual production in order to make conclusions about Blake’s relationship to Judaism. This process is precisely what Blake critiques in the essay