Below you can find descriptions for the classes I have taught along with copies of my course syllabi. Feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions about these classes or if you would like to adopt elements of them in your own teaching. I am happy to share assignments, resources, and other materials.
2021-2022
“It matters what thoughts think thoughts”
English 5079: Issues in Literary and Cultural Studies, Florida State University (Spring, graduate course)
This course takes as its point of departure Donna Haraway’s assertion in Staying with the Trouble that “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.” Admitting that “It matters” is to recognize the enormous privilege and possibilities of the work we do and the fields and conversations in which we are entering as scholars and teachers. As an introduction to contemporary practice in literary and cultural studies, this class invites us to engage with the history of ideas and the politics of knowledge production. We will ask questions such as: How do we define theory and what are the stakes of theoretical scholarship? How might engaging with different schools of thought and theoretical frameworks allow us to read literature more closely while also attuning us to the broader implications of interpretive acts? Addressing questions like these will help us elaborate how theory nuances our understanding of the structures of power, social hierarchies, norms, and narratives that organize what constitutes cherished notions of identity, belonging, home, and the human.
We will examine both foundational and contemporary theoretical texts from a range of discourses, including biopolitics, Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, ecocriticism, indigenous cosmologies, postcolonial theory, and more. In order to facilitate our discussion of these dense concepts and debates, we will analyze the theoretical selections alongside short literary readings and strive to make connections between the works we engage and contemporary social and political phenomena. This course is, above all, an invitation to deeply contemplate the thickness of the multiple presents we inhabit, to participate in rigorous social, material, and cultural critique, because it matters to the project of realizing more livable, joyful, and equitable worlds.
Science Fictional Worlds and the Worlding of Science Fiction
Literature 3313: Science Fiction, Florida State University (Spring)
Mutants, robots, zombies, and other super- or non-human beings abound in popular literature and media today. These extraordinary figures and the fantastical, often dystopian worlds they inhabit have become rather ordinary components of our shared cultural landscape. Recognizing the resonance of science fiction (SF) in our contemporary moment, this course explores the historical, cultural, and critical genealogies of this genre. We will discuss how SF unsettles normative conceptions of time, space, and embodiment and, in doing so, prompts readers to grapple with questions about changing conceptions of the “human,” alternative configurations of race, gender, and sexuality, the contradictions of technology, and the possibilities of social justice in the present. In addition to analyzing the construction of science fictional worlds in literature and popular culture, we will therefore explore the worlding of science fiction, that is, the multiple identities through which it inhabits and shapes our world—as a genre, a subculture, a marketing tag, a set of reading protocols, as the opposite of realism, as a type of realism, and as a growing presence in our everyday realities. In this course, we will engage a range of cultural texts, including short stories, novels, film, and comics that capture the many different forms SF assumes and the breadth of the timespaces, dimensions, and worlds it opens up.
2020-2021
Contagious Bodies, Toxic Biopolitics: Narrating Race, Illness, and Disability
English 5296: Studies in Multi-Ethnic Literature, Florida State University (Fall, graduate course)
This course explores the intersections between literary studies, ethnic studies, and disability studies. In an attempt to move beyond medicalized definitions of illness and disability, we will examine how these categories are socially and discursively constructed, that is, embedded within existing structures of power and shaped by historical and ongoing material inequalities. Analyzing narratives like Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Rachel Heng’s Suicide Club, Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, alongside the work of prominent scholars such as Alison Kafer, Jasbir Puar, Sami Schalk, Rosmarie Garland-Thomson, and others, we will investigate how illness/disability comes to be racialized and how certain bodies are not just sick but figured as sickening (impure, polluted, carriers of contagious diseases, and so on). In this course, we will address a range of topics, including the U.S. medical-industrial complex, discourses of ablenationalism, the gendered and sexual politics of illness/disability, and environmental racism. We will, moreover, probe how literary and aesthetic imaginaries can help us think beyond the abled/disabled binary towards richer and fuller conceptions of embodiment and how woundedness can serve as a basis for imagining alternative forms of agency, collectivity, and solidarity.
Download the syllabus.
Between the Yellow Peril and Able-Bodied Asian: Reading Race, Illness, and (Dis)ability in Asian American Literature
American Literature 4680: Studies in Ethnic Literature, Florida State University (Fall)
Asian Americans have been historically portrayed as the “Yellow Peril” and “Model Minority.” The former paints Asian immigrants as unassimilable aliens that threaten to pollute the U.S. nation and body politic, ostensibly stealing jobs and spreading contagious diseases, whereas the latter upholds Asian Americans as models of capitalist efficiency, bodily health, and productivity. This course invites students to critically attend to the racialized discourses attached to Asian American bodies that animate depictions of the yellow peril and the model minority myth. In this course, we will engage a wide range of texts and mediums, including fiction, poetry, graphic novels, memoir, and critical theory. Analyzing works like Ling Ma’s Severance, John Okada’s No-No Boy, and Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham’s Level Up, we will examine the historical and material conditions that structure racial injury, that is, how sickness gets inflicted on to Asian bodies and how Asian bodies themselves come to be constructed as sickening. In addition, we will grapple with how discourses that promulgate the health and resilience of the model minority subject can also have potentially damaging, deleterious effects on Asian American individuals and their communities. We will, moreover, probe how attending to literary and aesthetic productions by Asian American authors, artists, and activists allows us to move beyond the binary of the yellow peril and model minority, towards a richer and fuller understanding of how questions of health and wellness, illness and disability inflect Asian American experiences, culture, and history in the United States.
Download the syllabus.
2019-2020
Planetary Futures, Posthuman Imaginaries
English 5933: Topics in English, Florida State University (Fall, graduate course)
What is the role of the imagination and aesthetics in an age of ecological predicaments? How can we respond creatively–as scholars, teachers, artists, and activists–to the environmental devastation human activities have caused? This course grapples with the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the material realities of living on a damaged planet, in the ruins of coloniality, racial capitalism, and anthropogenic climate change. Through our engagement with cultural and aesthetic productions, from Karen Tei Yamashita’s environmentally-inflected magical realist fiction and Joy Harjo’s poetry to the speculative imaginaries of Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin, we will explore how issues of race, difference, space, community, and humanity are re-envisioned within conditions of ecological crisis. To deepen and contextualize our discussions, we will draw on the scholarship of critics such as Mel Chen, Ursula Heise, Rob Nixon, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Anna Tsing, and others who emphasize the need to develop alternative imaginaries and practices for inhabiting the planet, building cross-species alliances, and thinking posthuman futures.
Download the syllabus.
Bodies and Borders
American Literature 3682: Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Florida State University (Spring)
This course invites reflection on the relationship between bodies and borders as a timely topic of concern within a political climate marked by intensifying debates over citizenship, belonging, immigration, and the meaning of America. We will take up the border as a critical frame and opening from which to grapple with questions of identity, difference, embodiment, home, and community. Borders have always been vexed sites; they are rich areas for contact, exchange, and intimacy as well as places of extreme violence were divisions are erected and defended. To develop a nuanced understanding of the challenges and possibilities, pleasures and dangers, of confronting and crossing borders, and living in the borderlands, we will survey a range of literary and cultural productions and theoretical scholarship. We will attend to how authors write about the roots they came from and they routes they have traveled, and engage interdisciplinary scholarship on border studies, critical race theory, settler colonialism, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and more. Over the course of the semester, students will produce a portfolio of their own creative and critical writing that charts the evolution of their understanding of both literal and figurative borders, responses to textual representations of border crossings, and interventions in debates about immigration, historiography, and individual and national identity formation.
Download the syllabus.
Doors to Elsewhere: Understanding Theory and Criticism
English 3014: Understanding Theory, Florida State University (Fall)
This course serves as an introduction to contemporary literary and cultural theory. We will take as our point of departure Avery Gordon’s assertion that “We need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there.” This invitation to deeply contemplate the worlds we inhabit, to participate in rigorous social, material, and cultural critique of existing conditions of injustice to enable the perception of more equitable worlds, will animate our approach to the theoretical and literary readings we engage in this class. We will explore how theory allows us to read literature more closely while also attuning us to the broader stakes and politics involved in the act of interpretation. We will discuss how theory deepens our understanding of the structures of power, social hierarchies, norms and narratives that organize our conceptions of what constitutes identity, belonging, home, and the human.
Over the course of the semester, we will spend time carefully unpacking the central arguments and ideas of theoretical texts from a range of scholarly discourses, including critical race studies, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, ecocriticism, affect studies, and biopolitics. In order to facilitate our discussion of these challenging vocabularies, concepts, and debates, we will analyze the theoretical selections alongside short literary readings and strive to make connections between the works we engage and contemporary social and political phenomena.
Download the syllabus.
Foundations and Futures of Asian America
American Literature 3673: Asian American Literature, Florida State University (Fall)
This class is an introduction to Asian American literature and theory. Over the course of the semester, we will chart the historical, cultural, and political formation of Asian America, from the making of the transcontinental railroad and the social movements of the Civil Rights Era to the haunting legacies of World War II and the contemporary flows of globalization. Engaging a wide range of work, including that of David Henry Hwang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Julie Otsuka, Manjula Padmanabhan, Solmaz Sharif, and Gene Luen Yang, among others, we will discuss how Asian American authors, artists, and activists have continually sought to redefine Asian America as a construct that is both real and imagined, material and aspirational. As such, in addition to analyzing the social and historical contexts that inform the production of Asian American literature and culture, we will also push ourselves to reflect on and articulate the stakes attached to this work. From a study of foundational texts, theories, and histories, we will aim, in short, to elaborate what potential futures for Asian America might look like, feel, and mean for us today.
Download the syllabus.
2018-2019
Visionary Fiction: Fugitive World-Making and Ethnofuturisms
English 5296: Studies in Multi-Ethnic Literature, Florida State University (Spring, graduate course)
This course takes as its point of departure Walidah Imarisha and adrienne marie brown’s re-framing of science and speculative fiction as visionary fiction. Their assertion that the capacity to imagine better worlds is vital to projects of social justice will inform our critical engagements with literary, cultural, and theoretical texts this semester. We will explore in particular how minoritized authors and artists elaborate “Ethnofuturisms” by constructing fugitive worlds that unsettle normative conceptions of time, space, and embodiment. We will read across a range of cultural media—poetry, short stories, novels, film, and visual art—including works by Bong Joon-ho, Octavia Butler, Marjorie Liu, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ruth Ozeki, Manjula Padmanabhan, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sabrina Vourvoulias, and more. Together, we will discuss how they mobilize speculative imaginaries and revise popular science fictional tropes to critique technologies of racialization, to explore alternative embodiments and representations of the “human,” and to illuminate the possibility of other modes of collectivity and solidarity. To inform our readings of these cultural texts, we will think alongside the scholarship of theorists of science and speculative fiction, techno-orientalism, Afrofuturism and Ethnofuturisms more broadly, such as Aimee Bahng, Seo-young Chu, Samuel R. Delany, Mark Dery, Sami Schalk, and Ytasha Womack.
Download the syllabus.
Minor Universes: Race, Space, and Speculative Futures
English 4938: Advanced Seminar in English, Florida State University (Spring)
In this course, we will explore how minoritized authors and artists have turned to science and speculative fiction as a means to reflect on, critique, and imagine alternatives to existing conditions of material inequity and social injustice. We will examine how their writing and cultural productions open up “minor universes,” that is, worlds that turn on and around the minor. The texts we will engage foreground subjects, histories, and spaces that have been marginalized, neglected, or otherwise rendered invisible. Together, we will inquire how authors such as Octavia Butler, Ken Liu, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Karen Tei Yamashita, G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, reinvent our understanding of time travel, unsettle what constitutes the “human,” and challenge the white masculinist tradition of the American superhero. We will discuss, moreover, how the genre of science and speculative fiction functions for people of color, not as a means of escape or merely a form of entertainment but as a radical effort to envision the possibility of better worlds.
Download the syllabus.
What is Asian American Literature?
American Literature 3682: Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Florida State University (Fall)
This course takes as its point of departure the question set forth by its title, namely, “What is Asian American Literature?” By approaching Asian American literature not as a predetermined category but an ever-fluctuating construct, we will explore how it gains meaning within particular historical, social, and political contexts, including our contemporary moment. We will also contemplate how tracing Asian American literary and cultural productions gives meaning to concepts such as alienation, citizenship, diaspora, embodiment, and globalization. Through an engagement with a range of works by authors such as David Henry Hwang, Nora Okja Keller, Ruth Ozeki, Nina Revoyr, and Gene Luen Yang, among others, whose writing spans multiple aesthetic mediums, histories, and geographies, we will complicate our understanding of what constitutes Asian American literature, its scope and scale, objects and objectives. In short, we will work collectively to unravel the stakes embedded in articulating a category like Asian American literature and its implications for how we understand American literature and other multi-ethnic literatures.
Download the syllabus.
The Possible Worlds of Asian America
American Literature 3682H: Multi-Ethnic American Literature (Honors), Florida State University (Fall)
Who, what, when, where is Asian America? These are the questions that will animate this course. We will discuss how Asian America is and is not a real place; how it functions as a symbol, fantasy, dream and, at the same time, how it is shaped by material realities, living histories, and ever-shifting geographies. In this class, we will examine a wide range of cultural productions from authors such as Cristina García, Celeste Ng, Manjula Padmanabhan, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Charles Yu, among others, to explore the varied social, historical, and political contexts that give rise to their unique depictions of Asian America. In doing so, we will work together to broaden the scope of our understanding of Asian/American culture, politics, and aesthetics; that is, our sense of the borders and boundaries, stakes and scales of Asian America and the possible worlds this construct opens up. As such, even while we attend specifically to Asian/American literature and culture, we will also discuss how these texts prompt us to reimagine the concept of the American canon and the formation of multi-ethnic literatures more broadly.
Download the syllabus.
2016-2017
Modern and Post-Modern Poetry
English 3535: Modernist Poetry, English Department, Fordham University (Spring)
This course offers an intensive survey of major thematic currents and formal experiments in British, Irish, and American verse, focusing largely on the first half of the 20th century, to explore the cultural narrative of modernism. In addition to signaling a specific historical period, modernism also refers to an oftentimes contradictory set of aesthetic qualities and practices. As such, we will approach our study of modernism not as a uniform phenomenon, but rather as a multivalent and dynamic process. By engaging with modernist poetry, from the work of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, we will work together to elaborate multiple, diverse, even divergent, modernisms. Finally, although this course will concentrate primarily on the modern period, we will also examine the work of poetic precursors as well as post-modern poetry to attain a better sense of the social political and cultural transformations that instantiated the modern era as well as those that shape our contemporary moment.
Download the syllabus.
Narratives of Freedom and Captivity
English 2000: Texts and Contexts, English Department, Fordham University (Spring, 2 sections)
How do we reconcile the ways in which freedom has served as a founding ideal for the United States, a cornerstone of the American Dream, with histories of enslavement and oppression of which the nation is also guilty? In this course, we will trace how the rhetoric of freedom has been central to the development of American literature and what constitutes “American-ness” alongside the abundance of narratives of unfreedom and captivity. By examining a range of literary and cultural productions from the time of slavery in the U.S. south to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the expansion of the prison-industrial complex in the present, we will complicate our understanding of how freedom and unfreedom often represent two sides of the same coin that is “America.”
Download the syllabus.
Alien Encounters
English 2000: Texts and Contexts, English Department, Fordham University (Fall, 2 sections)
In this course we will track how the term “alien” has been attached to differently racialized bodies and groups by analyzing a range of literary texts that address issues of alienation, “otherness,” and xenophobia. We will examine how attending to the language of foreign aliens can illuminate an understanding of the historical and social contexts attached to the migration of diverse peoples to the United States. In addition, we will explore how the figure of the alien as a trope of science and speculative fiction has been a fruitful point of departure for minoritized authors to imagine new modes of belonging, community formation, and the possibility of other (better) worlds.
Download the syllabus.
Reading, Writing, Time Traveling
English 1002: Composition II, English Department, Fordham University (Fall)
Time travel is a captivating concept because it suggests the possibility of instantaneous transport, the ability to move from one dimension to another within seconds. And yet, in a way, we are always already moving through time and space, making time travel our most mundane and often slowest activity. In this course, we will consider how time travel functions as a generative metaphor for approaching the practice of reading and writing. We will discuss how literary and cultural productions transport us to other times and places, allowing us to encounter forgotten memories, other histories, and alien lifeforms. Moreover, keeping in mind that “it takes time to travel through time,” we will approach writing as a process that similarly takes time and care, practice and revision. In this sense, we will treat time travel as both a thematic and method for deepening our understanding of literature, art, and our practices of self expression.
Download the syllabus.
2015-2016
Envisioning Other Worlds
American Studies 316: Twenty-First Century Writing, American Studies Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Fall)
Mutants, robots, zombies, vampires, and other super- or non-human beings abound in popular literature and media today. These extraordinary figures and the fantastical, often dystopian worlds they inhabit have become rather ordinary components of our shared cultural landscape. They point, moreover, to the ways in which science and speculative fiction as a genre speaks to our contemporary moment. In this course we will examine a range of cultural texts, including short stories, novels, film, comics, and visual art, to explore how science and speculative fictions allow us to envision other timespaces, dimensions, and worlds. Contemplating these texts in relation to each other and the genre of science and speculative fiction will create room for discussing changing conceptions of the human, alternate representations of race, gender, and sexuality, the contradictions of technology, and the possibilities for social justice in the present.
Download the syllabus.
2013-2014
Re-figuring the Global
English 255: Global Literatures in English, English Department, Queens College, CUNY (Spring)
Download the syllabus. Also, see this post on my experiment with student facilitation and the handout I created on blogging and facilitation guidelines.
Crossing Borders, Writing Roots
English 162w: Literature and Place, English Department, Queens College, CUNY (Fall)
Download the syllabus.
The Aesthetics of Traumatic Memory
English 110: College Writing, English Department, Queens College, CUNY (Fall)
Download the syllabus.
2012-2013
Writing Across Borders
English 162w: Literature and Place, English Department, Queens College, CUNY (Spring)
Download the syllabus.
Re-Presenting Traumatic Memories
English 110: College Writing, English Department, Queens College, CUNY (Fall)
Download the syllabus.
Literatures of the Americas
English 255: Global Literatures in English, English Department, Queens College, CUNY (Fall)
Download the syllabus.
2011-2012
Literature and Memory
English 110: College Writing, English Department, Queens College, CUNY (Spring)
Download the syllabus.
Deceiving Memories: Writing and Re-Writing Public and Private Histories (Fall, 2 sections)
English 110: College Writing, English Department, Queens College, CUNY (Fall, 2 sections)
Download the syllabus.
Photo by congerdesign on Pixabay.
Frances Tran 