Summer UW Course Descriptions

Registration Transaction Forms (RTFs)

Please note that all Summer UW1020 sections are capped at 15 students and that this cap cannot be exceeded for any reason. UW instructors cannot sign RTF forms to add students to a section. The only way to add a section of UW1020 is through the GWeb system. If a section is full, you should either check GWeb frequently for open seats, select a different section, or plan to take UW the following semester.

Summer 2024

Session I

UW 1020 Courses:

Carter, Katharine - Critical Responses: Writing the Implications about Racism and System Inequity

From federal and state laws to school and workforce rules and codes of conduct, systems have historically placed barriers to people’s freedoms and access to opportunities on the basis of race.

Additionally, these institutionalized drivers of inequity are often embedded into society’s culture, where they are far more subtle but equally as unjust. Scholars have used critical responses to identify and address instances of these occurrences.

In this course students will learn the tenets of critical race theory, highlight examples of institutionalized racism in a wide variety of readings, and demonstrate applications of systemic inequity to real-life occurrences. Students will be tasked with reading a variety of sources, including legislative proposals, existing laws, opinion pieces, social media posts, historical texts, and media coverage of current events. Through each assigned reading, learners will explore the various ways that inequity is related to its messaging.

Students will use critical analysis to provide written responses to the readings that will communicate how the content of readings can have an impact on disadvantaged groups. The responses will examine the broader issues of systemic oppression and implicit bias beyond the primary message of the reading.

Presser, Pamela - Cultures and Communities: {Service} Learning and Literacy

What is good writing?

Are some genres more equal than others?

What do our ideas about writing enable or restrict?

Can writing help improve your state of mind, or impact on the world?

Questions like these, which we will discuss in this class, are part of a long standing conversation about the nature of education. In this course, you will be encouraged to explore your own research interests and will also have the opportunity to work with the Smithsonian Institution or a community non-profit. {This work will be virtual and could be asynchronous.} 

Upper-Level UW Courses:

Gamber, Cayo - Introduction to Women/Gender/Sexuality Studies - UW2020

Note: This course will satisfy a WID requirement. This is a distance learning course. This class is cross-listed with WGSS 2120W.

Designed to give students with diverse backgrounds and disciplines a basic understanding of the debates and perspectives discussed in the field of WGSS as well as the larger theoretical scope of feminism, the course asks: What is feminism? What role do gender, sexuality, and intersectionality play in terms of understanding the varieties of human experience? How are issues of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality constructed and defined? In order to answer those questions, we will interrogate our responses/relationships to various texts – including academic arguments, personal narratives, advertisements, films, YouTube videos, celebrities, consumer goods – as they are inflected by our evolving understanding of feminism and social justice.

Pollack, Rachel - Discovering the Romans - UW2020

Note: This course will satisfy a WID requirement. This class is cross-listed with CAH 3105W.

This course examines our enduring relationship with the ancient Roman world from the early Renaissance to present day. The renewed interest in antiquity in the sixteenth century precipitated by Michelangelo and his contemporaries, set the stage for modern archaeology and our appreciation for Greco-Roman sculpture in western art. The Roman Forum, The Colosseum, The Pantheon, Nero’s Golden Palace, The Baths of Caracalla, Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, are among the most iconic monuments that have stood the test of time and resonate in western architecture to this day. Even the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid-eighteenth century, further fanned the flames of our fascination for the Roman world. Archaeological discoveries in the present day are continually opening our minds to new aspects of the Roman Empire, from the northern reaches of England to North Africa and Syria. How do we see ourselves in relation to the ancient Romans? In what way have modern-day archaeological finds brought us closer to understanding this ancient civilization? How have artists and architects across time appropriated the legacy of Rome into their works? In other words, what have the Romans done for us?

Troutman, Phillip – Race, GW, and DC History - UW2020

Note: This course will satisfy a WID requirement. This class is cross-listed with HIST 3301W.

In this course, you will craft public history interpretation of major events in GW’s history that intersect the racial history of the District of Columbia. In the 1830s, African American abolitionists Leonard and Octavia Grimes operated a school and Underground Railroad station on the northeast corner of 22nd and H Streets NW (now a small park across from Gelman Library), yet Leonard Grimes was ordained a Baptist minister by the president of Columbian College, who was an enslaver. In 1847, pro-slavery students rioted upon discovering that their peer Henry Arnold had helped Abram, an enslaved worker at the college, try to gain his freedom in DC courts. A century later, in 1946, student WWII veterans led the fight to drop the exclusion of African Americans from GW, while president Cloyd Heck Marvin publicly defended segregation until 1954. GW’s 1959 campus plan called for its expansion across Foggy Bottom, some of which was majority African American, changing the face of the neighborhood through the 1960s and 1970s. You’ll work in teams on one of these topics and choose one of two options for public history interpretation: a temporary museum-style exhibit in the form of large posters installed in Gelman or elsewhere, or an exhibit of documents and artifacts in Gelman’s Memorabilia Room. As a WID course, you will engage in the writing of history for the public and take your work through a process of drafting, revision, and peer review.

Session II

UW 1020 Courses:

Bolgiano, Anney – Queering the Essay

Very few things in our world adhere to borders, categorization, and labels – so why would we expect this from literature? In this class we will explore texts that stand at the intersection of theory, criticism, poetry, visual arts, and memoir, creating portfolios of original works in hybrid forms as well as a research project. Students with an interest in photography, zines, collage, visual arts, and poetry may find this class is a unique opportunity for those inclinations to serve as “ways in” to theory, research, argument, and criticism. Students who do not consider themselves artistic will also be at home in this class. While the reading list is quite varied, all the genre fluid works assigned in this class engage with scholarship and primary sources. Some will also give us the opportunity to ask How do queer authors use queer forms to depict queer lives? We will read innovative works from writers such as Calvin Walds, Claudia Rankine, Layli Long Soldier, Maggie Nelson, Trisha Low, Sarah J. Sloat, Zadie Smith, Aisha Sabatini-Sloan, and others. This is not a creative writing class. Students will indeed gain competency in traditional academic forms and conventions – I contend, however, that the critical/creative connection makes us stronger, more agile, and more resourceful writers.

Come join us this summer. We’re queering the essay. Be ready to laugh, to cry, to open up the assigned reading and ask “what even is this?”

Daqqa, Hanan - “Not Another Home Movie”: How Do You Research When the Subject is Yourself?

Be prepared to change what you know about writing, and maybe even what you know about yourself. This course will give you the opportunity to make an impact powerfully and artfully through the telling of that family story, hidden in the attic. Give it the attention it needs, so it can connect you to yourself. As we connect, we gain control.

Telling your story, you will be wearing three hats: the journalist, the researcher, and the filmmaker.

As a journalist, you will learn how to take risks and dig deeper into yourself in order to tell a captivating and impactful story, and you will conduct an important interview.

As a researcher, you will learn how to formulate your own research question and how to let your question drive the journey. Your question focus will be on how to tell your story on film.

Finally, as a filmmaker, you will learn how to use framing, camera movements and sound to tell a story. Your film will be screened during the last week of class. A keepsake for generations to come.

Quave, Kylie - (Un)knowing the Human Past

Humans are curious about what happened before our lifetimes and seek answers from the sciences, faith, and experience. In the past few centuries, academic disciplines developed to explain the past, present, and future of humanity. Archaeologists reconstruct past behaviors using material culture, historians weave narratives from archival evidence, art historians interpret the past through objects of beauty and creativity. These fields collaborate with the natural sciences to further enhance what can be known about the past, like when a sculpture is found to be painted in a rainbow under microscopy.

Richter, Jacob - Writing Democracy: Professional Writing’s Utility for Democracy and Social Justice

Democracy is fragile. Polls that survey voters from across the political spectrum consistently show that many voters view democracy in the United States as being under threat. Discourse surrounding race-based gerrymandering, voter suppression, voting machines, mail-in ballots, and election misinformation is here to stay, with public communication of these topics being perhaps more important than ever. Topics related to elections and democracy might seem like odd fits for a writing course that engages professional writing genres, but as students in this course will learn, professional writing represents a valuable opportunity for civic communication related to Democracy.

In this “Writing Democracy: Professional Writing’s Utility for Democracy and Social Justice”-themed UW 1020 course, students will connect professional writing genres such as white papers, visual reports, and grant proposals with social justice topics related to democracy including race-based gerrymandering, voting machine discourse, and election misinformation. Topics related to democracy and elections—both past and future— provide compelling civic opportunities for writers to communicate complex information about voting machines, to educate the public about how gerrymandering impacts the political process, and to leverage visual communication to help citizens understand how social media platforms both enable and constrain political activities.

This course centers professional writing as an opportunity for educating audiences, for pursuing social justice related to voting rights, and for designing innovative rhetorical actions for civic impact. Students will connect professional writing genres with democratic rhetorical actions by completing projects such as the “Advocacy White Paper,” which examines election misinformation and voting machine discourse by working to educate and then persuade the public in a professional writing genre. Across the duration of this course, students will write, research, revise, and design in professional writing genres that enact communication of complex information related to the evolving discourse surrounding democracy in the United States.

Upper-Level UW Courses:

Gamber, Cayo - Introduction to Women/Gender/Sexuality Studies - UW2020

Note: This course will satisfy a WID requirement. This is a distance learning course. This class is cross-listed with WGSS 2120W.

Designed to give students with diverse backgrounds and disciplines a basic understanding of the debates and perspectives discussed in the field of WGSS as well as the larger theoretical scope of feminism, the course asks: What is feminism? What role do gender, sexuality, and intersectionality play in terms of understanding the varieties of human experience? How are issues of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality constructed and defined? In order to answer those questions, we will interrogate our responses/relationships to various texts – including academic arguments, personal narratives, advertisements, films, YouTube videos, celebrities, consumer goods – as they are inflected by our evolving understanding of feminism and social justice.

Kristensen, Randi Gray - Caribbean Women in Fiction and Film - UW2020

Note: This course will satisfy a WID requirement. This class is cross-listed with ENGL 3730W and WGSS 3170W.

This course serves as an introduction to the creativity and concerns of Caribbean women who live at the nexus of the post-colonial and the gendered, and who use multiple genres -- film, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and more -- to express their realities. These realities are often obscured for non-Caribbean audiences by stereotype and Eurocentrism. In this class, we will develop our critical understanding of Caribbean women's cultural work by reading and watching women-created texts from throughout the region, across borders, languages, and eras. Writing projects include a research proposal/literature review, and a mini-conference of digital genres -- slide shows, Prezis, TED talks, performances, etc. --presenting research on a work authored by a Caribbean woman.