Master of Liberal Studies

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The House of Stuart

MLSC 567
Semester: Summer 2021
Credit Hours: 3

Although the Stuarts were a royal dynasty in Scotland since the fourteenth century, they arrived in England after the death of Elizabeth I. Unlike the Tudors who preceded them, the Stuarts never gained a great popularity with their subjects. There were, nevertheless, as a result of friction amongst the population, great constitutional developments during their century which continue to shape the United Kingdom until this day. Course topics include the Arrival of the Stuarts, James I, Charles I and Civil War, Interregnum, Charles II, James II, Bloodless Revolt and the Progression of Democracy, and The Final Stuarts.

Dr. Newell Boyd is a semi-retired professor of history whose primary teaching field is Victorian Britain and the British Empire. He has presented papers at academic meetings and been published regularly in a variety of books and scholarly journals in the field of British history. He has recently published historical novels on the lives of John Ruskin and Joseph Chamberlain. He holds a PhD in history from Texas Tech University and has done post-doctoral research at the University of London, Birmingham University, the London School of Economics, Oxford University and the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Boyd has been a fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and is a member of England's Society of Authors and the Royal Historical Society.

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Creative Nonfiction

MLSC 617
Semester: Summer 2021
Credit Hours: 3

Creative nonfiction takes many forms, including expository writing, personal essay, narrative story-telling, literary journalism, memoir, nature and science writing, travel and food writing, historical narrative, biographical narrative, and academic and cultural criticism. This course is designed to help students read and write creative nonfiction with a focus on the voice, structure, messages, style, and technique found in contemporary creative nonfiction. The material covered applies to the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences.

The course will include critical reading and discussion of modern and contemporary essays specifically selected to demonstrate the breadth of the genre coupled with writing exercises and the respectful criticism of peer work in a workshop format. In addition, we will look at publishing creative nonfiction, including selecting the publication, understanding the process, and editing of their work. Students will turn in short essays to be read and critiqued by their peers throughout the semester and develop and turn in a portfolio as the final project for the course.

Dr. Deborah Barrett, is professor of the practice of writing and communication at Rice University, where she teaches graduate courses in academic writing and research and creative writing, and undergraduate courses in leadership communication, negotiations and consulting. She has published articles on literature, communication and leadership topics and serves on the editorial board of several scholarly journals. Her book Leadership Communication, in its fourth edition, is one of the top selling texts in professional communication programs. She has participated in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival since 2007 and has been admitted to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference four times, three for her creative nonfiction and most recently for her fiction. She is currently writing and publishing creative nonfiction essays under the name Deborah Burch-Lavis and has started a novel. Her recently published personal essay “The Last Christmas” is included in the anthology Shifts (MuseWrite Press), which is a 2015 USA Best Book Awards Finalist. Dr. Barrett holds a BA in English and speech and an MA in English from the University of Houston and a PhD in English from Rice.

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Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies

MLSC 500
Semester: Fall 2021
Credit Hours: 3

This course is designed to equip new students with the interdisciplinary environment of the Master of Liberal Studies program and learn the conventions and expectations of graduate-level reading, writing, research and critical analysis. Through historical and contemporary readings in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, students will develop an understanding and appreciation of the history and philosophy of the liberal arts and its interdisciplinary nature. Students will transition to graduate-level research and communication skills through review and practice of written, research-based academic papers and oral presentations. Students will practice the art of conversation and the seminar method by participating in class discussion and will be encouraged to develop habits of the mind that promote deep thinking, reasoning, and a rigorous approach to solving complex multidisciplinary problems creatively. Required for all new students.

Dr. Joseph Campana & Theodore Bale
Joseph Campana, Ph.D., is a poet, critic and scholar of Renaissance literature, with essays on Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Defoe, Middleton, poetry and poetics, and the history of sexuality in PMLA, Modern Philology, Shakespeare, Prose Studies and elsewhere. He is the author of ""The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity,"" (Fordham UP, 2012), and two collections of poetry, ""The Book of Faces"" (Graywolf, 2005) and ""Natural Selections"" (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Slate, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Colorado Review and many other venues. He has received the Isabel MacCaffrey Essay Prize, the MLA’s Crompton-Noll Award for LGB studies, and grants from the NEA, the HAA and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Current projects include a study of children and sovereignty in the works of Shakespeare entitled ""The Child’s Two Bodies,"" an edited collection (with Scott Maisano) entitled ""Renaissance Posthumanism"" (forthcoming, Fordham UP) and a collection of poems entitled ""The Book of Life."" He is the Alan Dugald McKillop Chair and associate professor of English at Rice University. Dr. Campana holds a PhD in English from Cornell University.

Theodore Bale obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Hartt School of Music, Theatre and Dance, where he majored in Piano, and a master’s degree from Northeastern University, where his studies focused on classical rhetoric. From 2000 to 2008 he was dance critic and columnist at the Boston Herald. His reviews and features have appeared in many newspapers in Massachusetts and Texas, and he was written extensively on dance for the Houston Chronicle, Dance International, Dance Magazine, CultureMap, and the blog Texas, a Concept on ArtsJournal. He has published “Dancing Out of the Whole Earth: Modalities of Globalization in The Rite of Spring” in Dance Chronicle and, with Joseph Campana, of “Pawning, Picking, Hoarding, Storing: Archiving America on Reality Television” in The Oddball Archive.

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Women in Southern Literature

MLSC 560
Semester: Fall 2021
Credit Hours: 3

This course will consist of reading and discussing the history of women in the south and the major writers from southern literature with a focus on women writers. The readings will include the works of the following women writers: Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, Anne Tyler, Maya Angelou, and Bobbie Ann Mason, but it will also include selections from prominent male authors, such as Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Truman Capote.

Students will conduct historical and literary analysis of the texts and learn to apply different approaches to reading and understanding literature, such as historical, sociological, and psychological, in addition to learning how narrative techniques, point of view, and character reveal the history and the major themes of the works.

Dr. Deborah Barrett, is professor of the practice of writing and communication at Rice University, where she teaches graduate courses in academic writing and research and creative writing, and undergraduate courses in leadership communication, negotiations and consulting. She has published articles on literature, communication and leadership topics and serves on the editorial board of several scholarly journals. Her book Leadership Communication, in its fourth edition, is one of the top selling texts in professional communication programs. She has participated in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival since 2007 and has been admitted to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference four times, three for her creative nonfiction and most recently for her fiction. She is currently writing and publishing creative nonfiction essays under the name Deborah Burch-Lavis and has started a novel. Her recently published personal essay “The Last Christmas” is included in the anthology Shifts (MuseWrite Press), which is a 2015 USA Best Book Awards Finalist. Dr. Barrett holds a BA in English and speech and an MA in English from the University of Houston and a PhD in English from Rice.

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