about this course

Prof. Rodas pictureWelcome to ENG 111, an introductory course in college research and writing with Prof. Julia Miele Rodas. In this course, you will be working on skills you’ll need for almost all your other college courses: how to express yourself clearly, how to organize your writing, how to support your ideas with reliable information, and how to use language persuasively.

This ENG 111 course is part of a Learning Community connected to HIS 20 with Prof. Katherine Culkin. This semester, we’ll all be working together exploring how we “reckon” with some of the most difficult problems of American history: how we remember, who gets remembered, and how we build (& take down) memorials of all kinds to help shape community memory. Even though we’ll be dealing with facts and actual historical occurrences, we’ll also investigate how opinion and storytelling influence the way we understand the past.

While the HIS 20 portion of the Learning Community follows an historical timeline, our writing class explores history thematically, and is divided into four units:

  1. Memorials in Everyday Life invites students to think about history in terms of personal stories and about how individual experiences impact and help shape history. Above all, it asks how monuments can be deeply personal. Essay due Sept. 25.
  2. Reckoning with Race & Violence looks at persistent systems of racial bias and violence and asks writers to think about the relationship between different racist episodes in U.S. history. In particular, we will question if there is a relationship between contemporary racist acts and historical instances of racism. Midterm Oct. 16.
  3. The Research Project asks students to pick up a theme or idea explored in one of the first two units and supervises and supports students in an in-depth independent research and writing project. Project due Nov. 27.
  4. The Final Exam is a timed in-class essay based on a reading assigned by the English Department. There will be ample in-class time for review and practice. The final exam schedule will be available near the end of the term.