Month: July 2017

What is the “American dream,” exactly? Is it owning your own home? Having a decent job? Choosing your own destiny? Providing a better life for your children? Ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed? Or is the American dream merely the nostalgic residue of an Empire in decline?

"To talk of New Media in the early 21st century seems odd: exhausted and exhausting. Either it seems tinged with that hopelessly naïve utopianism and dystopianism that dominated the end of the 20th century . . . or it just seems hopeless. New media is everywhere and everything; it changes more quickly than we can think. What more can we possibly say about it?” --Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, *New Media/Old Media* (2016)

Technical Editing is perhaps the most practical course I teach on a regular basis at IU Kokomo. Week by week, students learn how to edit technical documents, from proofreading for errors at the surface level to ensuring that documents contain appropriate content, organization, and visuals for their various readers.

ENG-L 202 introduces undergraduates from a variety of majors to the major theoretical movements, thinkers, and concepts of 20th and early-21st century critical and literary theory, with a special focus on how concepts like authorship and originality, textuality/reading, and even identity circulate throughout the diverse tools and practices of literary interpretation.

The Summer Bridge Program is a one-week orientation course designed to help students successfully transition from high school or the workforce to the challenging environment of the 21st-century university.

The contemporary adage that we exist in a fast-moving, increasingly connected (and “connectable”) world is a commonplace of mainstream media. But what precisely are we referring to when we discuss the massive changes wrought by the internet, mobile devices, networks, and by digital culture generally?

Few figures in American cinema can claim the longevity, the ubiquity, and the significance as can the zombie. Zombies can now run, play chess, and even fall in love, but from where did this shuffling undead creature come and what precisely does its popularity mean in contemporary culture?

In the fall of 2013, I was presented with the exciting opportunity to teach the first course I’ve ever taught in what is (essentially) my sub-area of specialty: the history, theory, and practice of writing instruction in the United States.