Courses
This course examines three broad types of writing students will encounter at and beyond Hopkins: narrative writing, analytical writing, and technical writing. Each has its own implications within the walls of JHU, from research papers to creative projects, but each will extend to the opportunities students pursue outside of academia. Above all, this course demystifies the idea that some writers just “have it” by decoding the processes that lead to great writing and building students’ confidence in written expression to carry forward into their studies and professional pursuits.
Writing Intensive
Reintroduction to Writing, JHU’s first-year writing course, steps beyond the writing skills necessary to get to college: our shared project is to help you learn how to write for the rest of your life. We approach writing as an adaptable process of inquiry and action, as deeply informed by reading, and as reflective, embodied, and always emerging practice. In this course, we will rethink writing in ways that will help you throughout college, your professional career, personal life, and civic responsibilities in a democracy. Toward that end, this course teaches you to become an agile, curious, creative, and resilient writer. You will read and write academic texts; rhetorically analyze a wide variety of sources, including for the conventions of diverse genres; and write across genres, developing skill and precision in your writing, as well as fluency across contexts, audiences, and media.Classes are capped at 15 students and often involve discussion, workshops, and conferences. Our courses engage with many topics and disciplines; consider carefully which course will most interest you. Reintroduction to Writing is intended for first-year students, though it is available to others by special permission.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Academic Writing engages writers in writing assignments like those they are likely to encounter throughout their university education. The course invites students to read and summarize academic essays, and then apply this style of writing in essay form. Subjects include the moves of academic writing, engaging with scholarly arguments, and building one’s own arguments, as well as the styles and formats of academic writing. Classes are small, and they are organized around at least three major academic writing assignments. Each course guides students’ practice through pre-writing, drafting, and revising, and includes discussions, workshops, and tutorials with the instructor. In addition to its central focus on the elements of academic argument, each course teaches students to write with academic integrity and document sources correctly. This course is open to all students.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Telling stories is one of the first and most important ways that human beings aim to make sense of the world and our experience of it. Narrative informs fiction and nonfiction alike, and is central to the writing of history, anthropology, crime reports and laboratory reports, sports stories, and political documentaries. What happened? The answer may be imagined or factual, but it will almost certainly be narrative. This course focuses on narrative, a nonfiction mode that answers the question of “what happened” in a variety of contexts and aims to make sense not only of what happened, but how and why. Students summarize and analyze narrative essays and write narrative essays of their own. They learn the power of narrative to inform and persuade as they test that power in their own writing. The course is open to all students.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In a 2012 interview with the New York Times, American critic M.H. Abrams was asked, “Why study literature?” Abrams answered, because “it enables you to live the lives of other people.” But how does a master of short stories open a window to his or her characters’ thoughts and feelings? How does the writer, as Abrams suggests, draw us into other lives? In this class, students will explore these questions through their own writings across different modes and styles. Writing projects will range from evaluating another critic’s interpretation of how a story brings its characters to life to writing your own autobiographical narrative. Our readings will feature the work of some of the masters of contemporary American short stories including Nate Brown, Danielle Evans, Joyce Carol Oates, Gish Jen, Richard Ford, Denis Johnson, Jennifer Egan, ZZ Packer, James Salter, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, David Foster Wallace, and Lydia Davis
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this interdisciplinary course focused on academic research and argument, everyone in the class will be surviving the zombie apocalypse together: What does your chosen academic discipline bring to our survival? How can this field of study contribute to innovation or ultimately building a new world? What kinds of collegial practices (aka teamwork) are necessary? Although the zombie apocalypse is our collective topic for discussion and an animating metaphor for the course, students will not conduct research about zombies. Rather, we will use the tropes of zombie apocalypse to pose research questions about real-life disasters, whether natural or man-made. For example, a political science major may research military responses to disaster (survival), or a dance major may investigate how dance performance is used to process collective trauma in post-genocide societies (the new world). Conducting individual research, students will write in academic research genres, from proposal to research paper to poster presentation. All students comfortable with gory zombies who are at the sophomore level and above are welcome.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
TBA
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
What is Baltimore—and to whom? As a student at Hopkins, how do you see yourself in relationship to the City of Baltimore? How have others seen, written about, and shared their version of Baltimore with others? In this course students will engage with how writers, artists, and scholars describe and produce knowledge about Baltimore’s past and present. Through reading and writing about Baltimore, students will study and practice different genres and modes of inquiry. In the first part of this class, students will learn through field studies, in-class discussions, and library research. Examining the specific contexts of our course texts and objects, students will experiment with cultural and historical analysis and practice research skills to produce their own writing about Baltimore. In the second part of the course, students will translate what they have learned into a collaborative digital map project, in which they introduce (or reintroduce) classmates outside of the course to a view or narrative of the Baltimore neighborhoods nearest to campus.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Prestige publications like the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the Economist are known for producing fine writing across a host of genres. The investigative journalism from these magazines itself makes news, and the range of topics covered is broad: politics and world affairs, history, celebrity profiles, economics, culture, and the arts. But who is the audience for this kind of writing? Is it the public at large, and if so, how might we describe that public? Does this kind of writing find itself under challenge, swamped by the proliferation of writing for niche audiences we see in the digital age? What would be lost in that case? This seminar explores these questions by reading some of the best writing offered by these publications, analyzing it, and debating its contemporary relevance. Our own writing projects will include a genre analysis of an article selected from one of these sources, an academic argument that enters a debate about what constitutes the public sphere today, and finally, a piece of public writing in which you select the topic, define your audience, and work with your peers to produce a class portfolio of high-quality work we can share with the Hopkins community.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Advanced Academic Writing is designed for experienced student writers who want to engage more deeply with academic research and to write in related academic genres. The course will focus on asking research questions, conducting original research, evaluating and synthesizing diverse sources, reading critically, and developing arguments that deliver an original argument. Students will work with a research librarian at the Eisenhower Library, with whom they will learn to navigate traditional databases as well as new media sources. The course culminates with a substantial, polished research paper that draws upon the cumulative skills of the semester. This course is open to all students.
Prerequisite(s): AS.060.113 OR AS.060.114 OR AS.004.100
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Vaccines are a public health intervention that produce a common good, yet are enacted on individual bodies. Health professionals and policymakers seeking to promote vaccination must weigh competing values, such as autonomy and justice, as they consider how to respond to individuals who refuse vaccines for themselves or their children. Further complicating this aim, people’s attitudes toward vaccination are shaped by divergent ideas about the meaning of health and social responsibility, as well as by their trust in scientific institutions and knowledge. In other words, scientific evidence alone cannot resolve vaccine controversies; navigating science and values together is vital to achieving just policy in a democratic society. In this course, students will analyze academic essays that address why vaccine hesitancy persists, and what we should do about it. Students will learn to recognize common elements of academic arguments, and apply them to construct their own arguments about the social and ethical dimensions of vaccination.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A one credit course orienting potential writing center tutors to the history, theory, and practice of tutoring writing. This course is for undergraduates who have applied to work as Writing Center tutors. Permission required.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
What do the practices of academic research and writing look like in the humanities? This course invites you to develop an individual, discipline-specific research project in a collaborative workshop environment structured around the practical and theoretical commitments of research writing in the humanities. Our interdisciplinary lab model will allow us time and space to pursue in-depth inquiry in your field of interest, from extending a seminar paper to generating a research proposal. Over the semester, we will explore and practice every step of developing a long-term research project prior to publication: tracking scholarly conversations, navigating research archives, developing research questions, cultivating critical methodologies, and presenting in-process work. We will visit archives and museums, hear from a variety of scholar-practitioners, and participate in interdisciplinary events around campus. Our course will culminate in a public conference, in collaboration with The Academic Conference course, where you can present aspects of your research or the research process. All students at the sophomore level and above are welcome.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
TBA
Writing Intensive
An important and exciting platform for academic writing is the academic conference, and in this writing class, we will explore and practice all that goes into putting one together. As a class, we will collaboratively conceptualize, plan, publicize, and host a conference around a broad theme with wide appeal in the humanities. We will analyze and write in genres such as the call for papers, the abstract, the conference schedule, the presentation, and commentary. We will collectively make decisions about aspects of the conference such as themes, keynote speakers, conference format and venue, and invitees. The conference will be held near the end of the semester, where each student in the class will present a paper, and perform other tasks associated with hosting a conference. We will be joined by students from the Humanities Research Writing Lab course, who will present some of their work. After the conference, we will spend class time reflecting on the process and potentially curating a selection of papers to be published as conference proceedings on a public-facing website. This course offers students an opportunity for experiential learning and professional development in the academy, with an emphasis on humanistic disciplines. All students at the sophomore level and above are welcome.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This graduate seminar, offered by the University Writing Program, asks big questions about writing – what is it, how does it work, and how can I teach it? – and invites participants to apply their answers in a workshop environment focused on designing assignments, building course syllabi, and crafting thoughtful, inclusive pedagogical approaches. Originally created for those training to teach in the University Writing Program, a purpose it still serves, this seminar is also open to graduate students in any discipline looking to integrate writing instruction into their teaching portfolio.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
How is writing for a PhD different from writing as an undergraduate? How do scholars communicate their research and ideas to others in their field? This course focuses on these questions with an eye to helping graduate students write in some of the genres most commonly engaged in by scholars, including abstracts, proposals, conference papers, and articles. Over the course of the semester, students will develop a research idea of their choice (whether new or something already being worked on) through some or all of these multiple modes of academic writing and presentation. We will read, analyze, and write in these genres. The course will also take up in various ways how to read scholarly work, join discussions in the seminar format, and make conference presentations. Graduate student writers of all levels of writing strength, experience, and confidence are most welcome in this course.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive