Are you looking for a challenging yet fun course for next semester? Are you interested in satisfying the Gen Ed Second Semester Composition requirement?
Below are the Expo 1213/1223 courses being offered in spring 2025. Please contact each instructor directly for questions about their course material or topic.
Lecturer: Catherine Mintler
Ever since — and even before — January 1, 2021, when The Great Gatsby entered the public domain, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel has influenced literary, performative, and visual arts, resulting in adaptations, imitations, spin-offs, mashups, and original work by contemporary novelists, filmmakers, musicians, and Gatsby fandom. In this course, we will focus on the adaptive re/imagining the original novel in contemporary film, plays and musicals, popular music, fandom, and novels.
While we will consider the following questions, students will be encouraged to pursue their own lines of inquiry: How do adaptations engage with and reimagine the original novel? Why does the name Gatsby remain a symbolic touchstone in popular culture? Why and how have the story and its characters been reimagined for diverse audiences? Why might the original novel’s sub-focuses (I.e. race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and war trauma) become central focuses in adaptations? What do different themes, plot-lines, genres, and points of view help us realize about American culture in the 1920s and the 2020s?
In addition to The Great Gatsby, we will examine recently published retellings of the original Gatsby story in Beautiful Little Fools, The Chosen and the Beautiful, and The Great Gatsby and the Zombies.
Lecturer: Anna Treviño
In her spoken word poem “Broken English,” Jamila Lyiscott, a “tri-tongued orator;” celebrates the three ways she speaks English. She states,
“Today, a baffled lady observed the shell where my soul dwells and announced that I'm ‘articulate’ . . . So when my Professor comes on the block and says, ‘Hello’ I stop him and say ‘Noooo . . . You’re being inarticulate . . . the proper way is to say ‘what’s good.’”
Like Lyiscott does in her poem, in this course we will engage notions of Standardized American English, broken English, and what is considered appropriate academic language. In this course we will also explore the relationship between identity identities (race/ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, and so on), language, and power, and contemplate what it means to be “articulate” through primary and secondary sources, both academic and non-academic, and film while developing critical reading, thinking, researching, and writing skills.
Lecturer: Michelle Boyd Waters
Have you wondered how influencers use rhetorical tools to captivate audiences and build their personal brands? This course explores the persuasive techniques used by influencers in contemporary media, like Charli D’Amelio, Emma Chamberlain, Khaby Lame, and others across a multitude of industries and interests.
You’ll learn to analyze and evaluate the rhetorical strategies employed by influencers across various platforms, examining the impact of these techniques on audience engagement and perception. Through a combination of readings, discussions, and writing assignments, you will develop a critical understanding of how influencers shape public opinion and cultural trends. You will consider the following questions, as well as pursue your own lines of inquiry: What is an influencer, and how has the concept evolved historically? What rhetorical strategies do influencers use to persuade and engage their audiences? What are the storytelling techniques that influencers use to connect with their audiences? What are the ethical implications of influencer culture?
By studying the evolution of influencer rhetoric and the art of persuasion, students will sharpen their own communication skills and develop a deeper understanding of the power of online communication.
Lecturer: V. Nicholas LoLordo
Technology has been continually reinventing the human practice of writing since Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. Now, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence, specifically LLMs (large language models), technology exists that threatens to replace us as writers. From Gutenberg to GPT, a span of almost 600 years—what next?
In this experimental class, we will explore a set of linked questions. What are the tensions between AI as tool and AI as product? What’s the relationship between creativity and productivity? What can exploring key historical episodes teach us about the longer-term relationship between technology and selfhood? And, finally….has the age of writing come to an end? Or will technology liberate human writers to decide what sort of things we might want to write ourselves?
Our exploration will involve classroom conversation and a variety of written forms. We’ll write blog posts, creative exercises, and analytical pieces, working multimodally on our final projects; we’ll read & listen to texts ranging from journalistic narratives to philosophical debates to historical analyses to poems.
Lecturer: Anna Treviño
In 2017 Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” (featuring Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber) became massively popular across the USA, hitting number 1 in the Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for sixteen weeks. In 2020 Jennifer Lopez and Shakira graced us with the Super Bowl LIV halftime show performance, performing songs in both English and Spanish and a combination of the two. In this class, we will explore Latine artists' rising influence in the American music scene and we will consider what it takes to be a music superstar in an increasingly boundaryless world full of global consumption.
With the help of magazines, TV interviews, films, and academic articles, we will deconstruct and celebrate the genre of Latine music and explore the 90’s crossover phenomena with artists such as Selena Quintanilla and question its politics. As a result, we will also explore concepts such as race/ethnicity, colorism, cultural appropriation, linguistic privilege and prejudice, colonialism, sexism and other related topics. With the complexity of those concepts in mind, ultimately, we will seek an answer to whether or not Latine music artists can be considered global superstars. And if so, at what costs?
Lecturer: Timothy Bradford
Paris, The City of Light, has long attracted crowds of American writers and artists hungry for artistic and other freedoms, inspiration, and camaraderie, as well as cheap food and lodging. This course will examine specific push and pull factors related to individual writers and artists, their experiences with the bourgeois and bohemian poles of the city, and the influence of Parisian society and culture on their work and identities. Mark Twain, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Sidney Bechet, Eugene Bullard, Josephine Baker, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Man Ray, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, and Dorothea Tanning are some of the figures we will engage with through their work, and primary and secondary sources, including art monographs, maps, and films, will be used to further explore the terrain and formulate great questions while developing our analytical reading, researching, and writing skills.
Lecturer: Eric Bosse
How do multiple systems of power and privilege intersect to create and maintain social inequities? This course examines the complex dynamics of systemic oppression and marginalization in contemporary American society, with particular attention to how various aspects of identity—including race, class, gender, sexuality, ability status, and other factors—shape lived experiences and access to resources. While honing academic expository writing skills, students will develop a thorough understanding of intersectionality as both a theoretical framework and a practical tool for analyzing social issues. Through careful examination of laws, policies, and institutional practices, we'll explore how systemic inequality is produced and maintained in the United States, while also considering how these systems might be effectively challenged and transformed.
This course integrates perspectives from critical race theory, feminist theory, disability studies, environmental justice, and climate science to understand how multiple forms of inequality can compound and reinforce each other—particularly in the context of accelerating climate change. Drawing on academic research, policy documents, activist writings, and case studies of successful social movements, we'll examine both the challenges we face and promising pathways forward. Through reading, writing, and discussion, students will develop their critical analysis skills while practicing various modes of academic and persuasive writing. Special attention will be paid to examples of effective collective action and policy intervention that demonstrate the possibility of creating a more equitable and sustainable world.
Lecturer: Eric Bosse
How does gender shape our lives? How does it intersect with race, class, ability, sexuality, education, and other axes of identity? How does our society define, interpret, manipulate, and regulate gender? What are the impacts of such gender-exclusive organizations as sports teams or fraternities and sororities? Gender confers privilege and power on some and subjects others to subtle and not-so-subtle acts of oppression. This multidisciplinary writing course explores gender roles, feminism, privilege, oppression, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, misogyny, gender-based violence, and the complexities of allyship across intersectional identities.
This course explores the complex and nuanced dimensions of gender and intersectional identity through texts drawn from gender studies, queer studies, philosophy, sociology, psychology, journalism, legislation, public policy, literature, social justice advocacy, and popular culture. Through reading, writing, and discussion, we will develop our understanding of the contemporary landscape of gender as well as various modes and strategies for academic and more broadly persuasive forms of writing.
Lecturer: Timothy Bradford
Spirituals, work songs, blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and hip-hop: African Americans have created some of the most vibrant and influential musical genres in the world. How did a relatively small group of people, who started in such difficult circumstances, use music to survive, innovate, and even thrive in a country that was, and in ways remains, indifferent if not hostile? How did these music forms become so influential and popular? And what can we learn about African American and American history and culture by examining these music forms? With these questions in mind, we’ll explore this music and related literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century with an emphasis on their roles in survival, identity, pride, leadership, and innovation. Excerpts from Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, Kevin Young’s The Grey Album, and Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, various documentaries, and our own Spotify playlists will serve as the main texts for the course and as inspiration for asking great questions that we will attempt to answer while developing our analytical reading, researching, and writing skills.
Lecturer: Eric Bosse
How do individuals and groups speak truth to power, and what makes their voices effective? This course examines the complex dynamics of social justice advocacy through the work of civil rights leaders, activists, and change-makers across different movements and eras. Students will explore crucial contemporary issues including intersectional identity, representation in higher education, systemic inequity, and the evolution of social movements. We’ll analyze how different forms of protest and dissent impact institutional stakeholders, examining the roles of allies, the power of collective action, and the ways that overlapping systems of oppression affect both individuals and communities. Special attention will be paid to how social justice movements navigate institutional structures and how activists work to create meaningful change within established systems.
This course draws on texts from civil rights history, social movement theory, critical race theory, feminist thought, political philosophy, contemporary journalism, and activist narratives. Through reading, writing, and discussion, we will develop our understanding of effective advocacy while practicing various modes of academic and persuasive writing. Students will move beyond initial responses to complex social issues, learning to craft well-researched, nuanced arguments that engage meaningfully with multiple perspectives and stakeholders.
