One Poem At A Time on September 24th!

Hello First Years!

The Barnard English Department will be hosting an upcoming event called One Poem At A Time on Thursday, September 24th from 12PM-1PM in Sulzberger Parlor. Please see the flyer down below if you are interested!

Best,

The First Year Team

Last day to add a class and meet with your pre-major adviser by September 18th!

Dear First Years,

Hooray! You’ve almost made it through the first two weeks of classes! We hope all is going well.  

This is a friendly reminder that you must meet with your pre-major adviser by this Friday, September 18th. This is also the last day to add a class. Keep in mind as well that Tuesday, October 13th is the last day to drop a class. You must be enrolled in a minimum of 12 credits. 

First Year students are not permitted to enroll in more than 19 credits. Please heed the notifications from the Registrar to drop a class if you are over-enrolled. If you have questions about this policy, please email Dean Siegel directly at esiegel@barnard.edu or visit her during walk-in hours on all days (except Tuesdays) from 3:30-4:30 PM, in 105 Milbank Hall or over Zoom. 

Finally, our friends in the Creative Writing Department have reached out to let us know there is still time to enroll in a Barnard creative writing class. Check out this blog post to learn how!

Best,

The First Year Team

There is Still Time to Enroll in a Barnard Creative Writing Class!

Hello First Years! 

See below for information from Professor Ken Chen, the Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard, about enrolling in a creative writing class!

Dear students, 

We have a few fiction, poetry, and fiction writing workshops that still have spaces if you want to apply and enroll before the shopping period ends this Friday. It's an opportunity for you to nurture your imagination and meet other young writers in a creatively stimulating, supportive space. Our fabulous instructors include:

• Kate Zambreno, author of the autofiction cult classic Heroines, who The New Yorker described as being "among a cohort of female writers who explore abjection"
• Farnoosh Fathi, a playful, surrealist poet whose last book was called "the Tower of Babel of our generation" and whose class invokes Zen Buddhist practices, Oulipo games, and in-jokes; 
• Zaina Arafat, whose novel was Roxane Gay's favorite book of the year and whose new book explores the "complexities and heartache of Palestinian diasporic life."
• Patricia Spear Jones, a recent Poet Laureate of New York, whose poems are "homecomings" for the "rhythms and caresses... from Memphis and Manhattan."
• Nellie Herman, whose writing investigates narrative medicine and whose novel about Van Gogh sent "a shaft of light into that darkness" (NY Times);
• Breezy Janae, whose poems about family violence, mental health, and black history have won awards from the NEA and Cave Canem;
• Nina Sharma, a New Yorker humor writer and stand-up comic whose essay collection explores "Afro-Asian intimacy in all its beauty and complexity" (Wash. Post).

No previous English classes needed. Course descriptions and how to apply below!

Warmly,

KC

HOW TO APPLY TO CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS

Take a look at the list below and email the professor to ask if you can attend. Make sure to attach a writing sample (4-6 pgs. for a fiction/nonfiction workshop, 3-4 pages for a poetry workshop). Waitlist the class on Vergil. If the professor approves your application and there's space, you will be added to the workshop.

ENGL BC3105.2 Fiction & Personal Narrative - Zaina Arafat

Th 11:00am - 12:50pm 101A BARNARD HALL

"Plot is the bone you throw the dog while you rob the house." I once heard this quote at a writing retreat, and it stuck with me. Really, it's a way of saying that while plot is important, and an aspect of writing we will certainly study here, some of the best pieces of writing are driven by character. In this course, we will read and excavate short stories and essays that explore identity on the page, helping us to create narrators and characters that reflect how the various facets of our personas and characters overlap, intersect, and often contradict themselves. Through close analysis of both published works and our own writing, we will excavate the craft and other elements of short stories and essays, including plot/sequence of events, place/setting, pacing, voice, point of view, structure, time/distance, and theme, all with the goal of generating and improving our own work. We will read the work of authors who explore identity on the basis of ethnicity, cultural heritage, gender, sexual orientation, race, and interests, including Jumpha Lahiri, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Jenny Zhang, Alice Walker, Carmen Maria Machado, Jamel Brinkley, Junot Diaz, and others.

Zaina Arafat (zarafat@barnard.edu) is a queer Arab-American writer. She is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of 2020. Her essay collection, Our Arab, is forthcoming from Little, Brown. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Granta, The Believer, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub and NPR. She was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. She holds an M.F.A. from Iowa and an M.A. from Columbia University. She teaches writing at Barnard College, The School of the New York Times and LIU Post, and has also taught at the University of Iowa, the International Writing Program, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, and Sackett Street Writers', as well as abroad in Jordan, Egypt and Eritrea, as part of a U.S. State Department/International Writing Program delegation.

ENGLBC3107 Introduction to Fiction Writing - Kate Zambreno

Tu 9:00am - 10:50am 403 BARNARD HALL

This class is an introduction to writing fiction, with a focus on shorter works. The initial weeks will focus on writing exercises and also deep reading of published short stories and other hybrid texts, in order to attempt to understand the space we enter when we enter writing, what does it mean to move through it, how is it moving. Later, student work will become the main text as the focus shifts into workshop. Stories likely on the syllabus include Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Bhanu Kapil's The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," Renee Gladman's Calamities, Han Kang's "The Fruit of My Women," Jen George's "The Babysitter at Rest," Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” Jenny Zhang's "We Love You, Crispina," and the flash of Lydia Davis and Anne Carson.

Kate Zambreno (kzambren@barnard.edu) is the author of ten books, most recently The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, from Riverhead, and Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar, from Columbia University Press. Animal Stories, reports on zoos and Kafka, is forthcoming from Transit's Undelivered Lectures series. They are at work on a series on precarity, interiors, and community. They are a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.

ENGL BC3110.02 Introduction to Poetry Writing - Farnoosh Fathi

Fr 12:10pm - 2:00pm 407 BARNARD HALL

The Beginner’s Mind. “In the beginner’s mind, possibilities are many, in the expert’s mind, there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

In this introductory poetry writing workshop, we will cultivate an ardently playful approach to writing, one committed to honoring “beginner’s mind.” Embarrassment, error and amateurism will be embraced as values and fertile grounds (rather than obstructions) for writing.

Together we will explore poetry writing as the pursuit and expression of a liberatory language–the language of our highest attention and freedom–shared between reader and writer.

In addition to workshops, we will alternate between classes centered on formal and thematic studies with others focused on contemplative practices and the writing process. Formal and revisionary explorations will be guided by the experiments of Bernadette Mayer, Inger Christensen, Dadaists and the Oulipo; by generative varieties of translation as practiced by Mónica de la Torre and Sawako Nagasaku–homophonic and self-translation; the role of inside jokes and an innocent attention to our environment, inspired by Gertrude Stein and Wadih Saadeh.

Drawing on teachings by Corita Kent, art exercises by Kim Beom and Zen Buddhist rituals we will learn contemplative practices that help us create, combine and consider our attention in order to see how receptive, open, beginner’s mind effort, rather than forced determination toward a particular outcome, underpins our deepest work in writing.

Farnoosh Fathi (ffathi@barnard.edu) is the author of the poetry collections Great Guns (read an excerpt from Great Guns here) and Granny Cloud (2024), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (2018), and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in BOMB, Guernica, Boston Review, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She lives and teaches in New York. 

ENGL BC3115 Story Writing - Nellie Hermann

Tu 11:00am - 12:50pm 403 BARNARD HALL

Story Writing I is an advanced workshop in prose writing, with emphasis on the short story. Some experience in the writing of fiction is required. Students will share at least two pieces of their own work with the class over the course of the semester. In addition, each week we will read and analyze a variety of published short stories with an eye for craft and writerly decisions that might be applied to our own work. Exercises and in-depth workshop letters will push students to think more deeply about their own choices and the many layers that make up their work. Conference hours to be arranged.

Nellie Hermann (nhermann@barnard.edu) has published two novels, The Cure for Grief (Scribner, 2008) and The Season of Migration (FSG, 2015), a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her non-fiction has appeared in an anthology about siblings, Freud’s Blind Spot (Free Press: 2010), as well as in Academic Medicine. Over the last ten years she has taught fiction and narrative medicine to undergraduates, medical students, graduate students, and clinicians of all sorts, and has given conference addresses in Iowa, California, Seoul, Korea, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2016 NEA Literature fellowship and a 2017-18 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.

ENGL BC3134 Creative Non-fiction - Nina Sharma

Tu 5:40pm - 7:30pm 403 BARNARD HALL

In this section of creative nonfiction, we will focus on the essay. We will consider the essay in the original and most capacious sense of the term – coming from French, essai, meaning “attempt.” We will read and discuss the work of a diverse variety of essayists, identifying in their work key writerly moves that we may adapt as we attempt to write into our own lives. Phillip Lopate writes that the essay “sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue— a friendship.” Throughout our drafting and revision, we will explore how the relationship a writer crafts with the audience is informed by the relationship the writer has to language. We will write and revise with the hope of fostering an enduring relationship with the page.

Nina Sharma's (nsharma@barnard.edu) essays have been featured in journals such as Electric Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Longreads, and The Margins. Nina’s satire has been featured in The New Yorker and Flexx Mag. She is a co-founder of Not Your Biwi, an all-South Asian women's improv group. Nina is formerly the Programs Director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and with Quincy Scott Jones she co-created Blackshop, a column that thinks about allyship between BIPOC people. Her debut collection of personal essays, The Way You Make Me Feel: Interracial Love in Black and Brown was published by Penguin Press in 2024.

ENGL BC3110.01 Introduction to Poetry Writing - Brionne (Breezy) Janae

Tu 6:10pm - 8:00pm 406 BARNARD HALL

In this Introduction to Poetry workshop we’ll work on finding our voices while exploring the building blocks of poetry: language, the line and line break, musicality, form and function, timing, narrative and lyric elements, as well as experiments with translation. Together we’ll generate and workshop 6 poems each. And observe how what we learn manifests in our own writing and that of guiding poets such as Toi Derricotte, Ada Limón, Dianne Seuss, Shane McCrae, Vievee Francis, Cathy Linh Che and others.

Brionne (Breezy) Janae (bthompso@barnard.edu) is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the recipient of the 2016 St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook and Vermont Studio Center Alumni and proud Cave Canem Fellow. Their poetry and prose have been published by the Academy of American Poets, the American Poetry Review, the Sun Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Bitch Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Sixth Finch, Plume, Bayou Magazine, The Nashville Review, Waxwing, and Redivider among others. They are the author of Because You Were Mine (2023), Blessed Are the Peacemakers (which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize), and After Jubilee.

ENGL BC3118.01 Advanced Poetry Writing - Patricia Spears Jones

Th 11:00am - 12:50pm 403 BARNARD HALL

Muriel Rukeyser remarked that “American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict.” Indeed, culture worldwide is in conflict. This course will explore “the necessity of poetry” from a phrase by Adrienne Rich. It is organized to ensure the development of new work and further study of poetic practice for committed student writers. We will examine mostly contemporary poetry using specific poetry collections from poets as varied as John Keene, Rosa Alcalá, Megan Fernandes, Harryette Mullen, Ilya Kaminsky and Emily Lee Luan as well as ancestors: Rich, June Jordan, Gertrude Stein. In the classroom, student poems and ideas about poetics are shared, questioned, and critiqued. These selected readings explore different strands of poetics that will inform the in-class and assigned prompts allowing student writers to expand their interrogation of the genre and its many forms. You will read, listen, write, and make your own voice seen and heard.

Patricia Spears Jones (pjones@barnard.edu) is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, anthologist, and recipient of 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize. She is the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems, three full-length collections, and five chapbooks. Her poems have been published in Plume, The New Yorker, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her essays, memoir, and interviews have been published in The Black Scholar, Bomb,  www.tribes.org, Pangyrus, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Rumpus and The Writers Chronicle, among others. She curated programs at The Poetry Project of St. Marks Church and created WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn. She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis H. Rubin Writer in Residence. She received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts; New York Foundation for the Arts; Foundation of Contemporary Art; a Robert Rauschenberg Residency and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, Yaddo, and the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France via the BAU Institute. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. In May 2025, she received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hartwick College.

We encourage you to give it a shot!

Best,

The First Year Team

Introduction to African Studies: Past, Present and Future (AFRS 2004) available for Fall 2026!

Hello First Years!

Please see the information down below for a lecture class being offered this semester from the Africana Studies Department! There are lots of seats still available, so if you are a First Year or transfer student and are looking for a course, feel free to register for this course if you are interested!

Best,

The First Year Team

-----

FALL 2026

Class times: Milbank 325 Monday & Wednesday 10:10 – 11:25 

Office Hours: Monday 2 – 3:30  https://calendar.app.google/8bzgvPW2W3n5xPZa7

Abosede George (she, her) ageorge@barnard.edu

 

Course Description:

This class explores the idea of Africa, past, present, and speculative future, across a range of fields of knowledge production. Topics covered will include histories of African Studies in the U.S. and beyond, histories and legacies of colonialism on the continent, social movements, pan-Africanism, globalization, and Afro-futurism.  We will engage with academic, artistic, and popular artifacts to understand how they work and the work that they do for ideas of Africa. Our weekly texts will foreground the work of African knowledge producers. This is a discussion intensive lecture course where we will explore questions of method, context, bias, and effect in our conversations. In this class, we engage with each other in a spirit of collaboration and contention; we speak from grounded and not abstracted positions; we embrace multiple truths and the possibility of unresolved contradictions; we maintain an intersectional understanding of our identities and our standpoints; we assume accountability for our own thoughts and actions.

 Each year, Intro to African Studies is a little different.  This year I have replaced the final exam with a research project on FESTAC ’77 (Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture) which took place across Nigeria, almost exactly 50 years ago.  In anticipation of the golden anniversary, and in collaboration with artists and scholars around the world, our class will be learning about FESTAC and researching the past and present of key questions, agendas, figures, and ambitions that animated this historic gathering. We will be researching and workshopping collectively while advancing our individual academic or artistic projects.

Tools:

Canvas will be used for Syllabus, Announcements, Class Readings, Grading.

Assignments:

- Map Quiz: 5%

- Participation 10%                                                                                                               

- Opening Presentations: Each of you is responsible for one opening presentations of +/- 10 minutes. Your presentations must close with 3 – 5 discussion questions for the class to take up.  For your presentations, do NOT simply read your discussion questions out loud.  Instead, consider the following: What background information might enrich class discussions of the readings?  For example, what historical, political, and social contexts should we be aware of before we begin discussion?  What are some of the primary themes/topics/points of contention in this week’s readings?  How would you analyze this week’s readings in relation to previous weeks? What’s the bigger question?      10%

- Class symposium: For this assignment, each student will be assigned the role of presenter, discussant, or audience member. Each role bears distinct requirements. See below.  10%

- Reading Responses posted on Courseworks by 10.m. before the start of the relevant class session.         15%

In no more than 500 words your reading response should state:

Topic / Description / What is this work about?  What are the interventions or apparent goals of the work?  What is the method for creating the work? Where relevant, what is the research method the author employs?  What is the conclusion / argument of the work in short? What is your response to, critique of, question for, or thought about, the work? How do you see it being in conversation with other works in the course?

- Midterm Exam                                                                                                             25%

- Final Paper/Project                                                                                                      25%

            Brainstorm Session

            Research Proposal Presentation

            Draft 1

            Final Draft

 

- Extra Credit                                                                                                              4 pts max

You can earn extra credit by attending an African Studies event on campus and writing a two page reflection that includes a description of the event, its highlights, and how you connect it to our class.

Attendance: You are expected to attend all classes.  More than two absences will result in a failing grade.  Excessive lateness counts as an absence, as does missing a scheduled meeting.   

Policies:

- There will be no make-up quizzes or exams. Late reading response papers will not be accepted.

-Students are responsible for material covered during class meetings. I don’t review class discussions during office hours.

 -Absences for severe health issues, interview appointments, college-related athletic obligations, and the like, are excused if substantiated by a notice from your advisor, your coach, your dean, or some written evidence of the conflict.

-Students who may need disability related accommodations are strongly encouraged to notify the professor as soon as possible, preferably within the first week of classes.  Students who need testing or classroom accommodations must be registered in advance with CARDS in 101 Altschul or with Disability Services at Columbia. 

- Students who are facing other challenges that threaten to impair their academic performance are advised to notify the professor immediately issues emerge. I may be able to help you.  Barnard students are also strongly advised to make full use of the Furman Counseling Center which can facilitate access to resources for stress, trauma, grief, coping, healing and the many real issues we are facing in our individual and collective lives.

Visit: https://barnard.edu/health-wellness/student-counseling

-AI Policies. 

1. Generative AI Tools are only allowed in this class if they perform a function that the student ordinarily cannot. For example, translating text in an unknown language to a language the students does know. Tools programmed for basic Recording, basic Researching, undergraduate Writing, Rendering Visuals, and competencies that most undergraduates should be able to master are prohibited in this class. 

2. Recognizing that it is sometimes impossible to opt-out of AI compiled research (i.e. the average Google search top results) students are encouraged to bypass these and make use of the more robust research tools your tuition has paid for, such as those accessible through CUL. In the event that you are not able to opt-out of GenAI outputs, students are responsible for confirming the accuracy of the output provided by the Gen AI tools, checking the tools for bias, and disclosing when their work may have been influenced by said involuntary tools.

3 Failure to adhere to these policies will reduce assessments of student work.

 A+ (Above 96) / A (94 -96) / A- (90-93) / B+ (87-89) / B (84-86) / B- (80-83) / C+ (77-79) / C (74-76) / C- (70-73) / D+ (67-69) / D (64-66) / D- (60-63) / F (59 and under)

 Wed 9/9          Introductions

Mon 9/14        Gilbert and Reynolds, 7 Ideas of Africa

                        Binyavanga Wainana, “How To Write About Africa”

Wed 9/16        Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Pasts and Future of African Studies in the U.S.” Rethinking Africa’s Globalization. Vol. 1 179 – 228    

Mon 9/21         Cheik Anta Diop, “Origin of the Ancient Egyptians” in Egypt Revisited, ed. Ivan Van Sertima. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989. 9-37

Wed 9/23         MAP QUIZ

Amina Mama, “Is it Ethical to Study Africa?” African Studies Review 50.1                        (2007): 1-27

Mon 9/28        Sylvia Tamale, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism (2020) Chapt 1 & Chapt 2

Wed 9/30        Centime Zeleke, “Social Science is a Battlefield” from Ethiopia in Theory

Mon 10/5         Paul Lovejoy, “The ‘Middle Passage’: The Enforced Migration of Africans across the Atlantic,” Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, ProQuest”

Edward Alpers, “The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean” in Migration and the Making of the Modern World (2007) 20 – 38

Wed 10/7        VIDEO: Ousmane Sembene, Borrom Sarret aka La Noire De aka Black Girl. Decent English subtitles found here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sptKbtXIn4o>

Mon 10/12       Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics (2018) Chapt 0, Chapt 1.

Watch morning presentations from “The Restitution Debate” conference at Columbia, October 2019

https://italianacademy.columbia.edu/events/restitution-debate-african-art-global-society

Wed 10/14       Ngugi Wa Thiongo, “The Language of African Literature” in Decolonising the Mind

Mon 10/19      Mkandawire, Thandika. “Running While Others Walk: Knowledge and the Challenge of Africa’s Development.” Africa Development / Afrique et Développement, vol. 36, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–36.             

Wed 10/21      MIDTERM EXAM REVIEW SESSION

Mon 10/26      MIDTERM EXAM

Wed 10/28      “Festac ’77 – Lagos Festival” Dir. Philip Gaunt, UNESCO TV Co-produced by Nigerian National Commission for UNESCO and Nigerian Television Authority, 1977. https://www.unesco.org/archives/multimedia/document-29

Enohoro, Ife. “THE SECOND WORLD BLACK AND AFRICAN FESTIVAL OF ARTS AND CULTURE: LAGOS, NIGERIA.” The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no. 1, 1977, pp. 26–33.

Monroe, Arthur. “FESTAC 77-THE SECOND WORLD BLACK AND AFRICAN FESTIVAL OF ARTS AND CULTURE: LAGOS, NIGERIA.” The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no. 1, 1977, pp. 34–37.

Wed 11/4        Qudus Onikeku,”Ghostly Moves” https://www.qudusonikeku.com/about

---, “The Epic Return of Orí Olókun: FESTAC ’77 @50, and The Problem with Restitution.” https://www.qudusonikeku.com/single-post/the-epic-return-of-or%C3%AD-ol%C3%B3kun .

Mon 11/9         Guest Lecture

Wed 11/11      Library Visit – Primary research and Brainstorm Session.  Goal: settle on a research topic/question. Notes, doodles, process materials as a whole are important, not just the final research topic / question.

Mon 11/16      Research Proposal: Find at least five primary source records / texts reflecting the past and present of your topic.  Create a one paragraph annotation for each. Separately write up to one page or draw a mind map that describes how the records/texts you will be using are going to be placed in dialogue with each other. Your research proposal consists of the one-page project description, the annotations of your primary sources, and a Project Title. 

Wed 11/18      Research proposal presentations to the class. Everyone will make a short presentation on their proposed research project.  You will describe the topic and lay out your central research questions. You may want to share a particular record/source with the class and discuss how it relates to the topic you are going to pursue.

Mon 11/23      Work at home on a 1^st draft of your paper or project.  Do not use A.I. prompts to generate or assemble it. The first draft is allowed to be a “dreck” draft. But it should contain an intro, a body, and all of your thoughts and ideas to this point even if they’re not fully developed or perfectly placed.  It is a place to lay out your ideas, a basis for discussing ideas with me, and it is meant to be developed further not perfected on the first go round. 

Mon 11/30      Submit your first draft. 

Schedule one-on-one meeting with Prof George. https://calendar.app.google/SzaRgzz6AHXozbUY6

FILM: Wanuri Kahiu, PUMZI (2009) https://vimeo.com/46891859

Wed 12/2        One on one feedback meeting with Prof George.

Mon 12/7         Nnedi Okarafor, “African Futurism Defined” https://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html

“Mother of Invention” Slate Magazine, Feb 21, 2018 https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/mother-of-invention-a-new-short-story-by-nnedi-okorafor.html

Wed 12/9         Class symposium. For this session students will be assigned one of three roles: Presenter, Discussant, Audience.  Presenters will present their research project to the class in much the same way as our weekly presentations went in the first half of the semester, this time about your own research.  Discussants will receive the presentation outline at least 48 hours ahead of time, they will listen closely to the presentation and offer remarks and questions that address common themes among the presenters, points of conflict, or other relationships that discussants may identify among the presentations.  Audience members will offer remarks and questions that emerge from hearing the presentations “cold.” Clarity of presentation, close listening, quality of remarks and questions relative to familiarity with the project, will be evaluated for this segment.

Mon 12/14      Class review session.

Submit the final draft of your research paper/project by 5p.m.