Below you’ll find syllabuses for courses I’ve taught at Northwestern University. Many of the courses have changed during the quarter, so please understand that the below are samples and should not be used for course purposes.
100 and 200 Level Courses
Afrofuturism
In the first year writing seminar, students learn to craft arguments, evaluate evidence, and collaborate on academic and professional writing projects.
Writing Mass Incarceration
Drawing on traditions of critical race theory, black feminist theory, and models of abolitionist and restorative justice, students will examine black memoir and fiction that centers the issue of mass incarceration to understand its history, development, and future.
American Literary Traditions, 1920-Present
In this introductory course in American Literature, students examine key intellectual and stylistic developments in twentieth century American letters.
300 Level Courses
Black Insecurity
In this seminar in English and African American Studies, students examine the relationship between security infrastructures and anti-blackness.
Black Feminist Worldmaking
In this seminar in English and African American Studies, students analyze key debates in Black feminist theory, and craft their own interventions into social issues related to Black feminist critique.
Contagious Narratives
In this course, we will investigate how authors imagine the lifeworlds of those in the grip of contagious outbreak.
Graduate Courses
Black Speculative Fiction and the Black Radical Imagination
In this graduate course, students will engage the archive of contemporary black speculative fiction, including works by Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead, and N.K. Jemisin, to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to examine what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about black worlds. The course argues that speculative writing—narrative fiction and theoretical writing—gesture to other social and political modes of thinking about and being in the world. Our study will concern texts written in the contemporary, but students will be invited to consider how contemporary manifestations of the speculative and radical necessarily speak across time and space into both past and future manifestations/imaginaries of black experiences, embodiments, and identities.