titles in research articles changes across time and discipline

Ban the Box: U.S. Cities, Counties, and States Adopt Fair Hiring Policies

Introduction.

Nationwide, 37 states and over 150 cities and counties have adopted what is widely known as “ban the box” so that employers consider a job candidate’s qualifications first—without the stigma of a conviction or arrest record. Borne out of the work of All of Us or None , these policies provide applicants a fair chance at employment by removing conviction and arrest history questions from job applications and delaying background checks until later in the hiring process.

This resource guide documents the numerous states and localities that have taken steps to remove barriers to employment for qualified workers with records. A chart summarizing all state and local policies across the nation appears at the end of this guide.

The federal government embraced ‘ban the box’ for federal agencies and contractors.

Support for fair-chance policies has gained momentum in recent years, with policies adopted at not only the state and local levels, but also by the federal government:

• In November 2015, President Obama endorsed ban-the-box by directing federal agencies to delay inquiries into job applicants’ records until later in the hiring process.
• In December 2019, the “Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act of 2019” became law as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. Effective December 2021, the law will prohibit most federal agencies and contractors from requesting information on a job applicant’s arrest and conviction record until after conditionally offering the job to the applicant. For more information, see NELP’s press release and FAQ fact sheet .

37 states, the District of Columbia, and over 150 cities and counties have adopted a ban-the-box (‘fair chance’) policy.

Representing nearly every region of the country, a total of 37 states have adopted statewide laws or policies applicable to public-sector employment—Arizona (2017), California (2017, 2013, 2010), Colorado (2019, 2012), Connecticut (2016, 2010), Delaware (2014), Georgia (2015), Hawai’i (1998), Illinois (2014, 2013), Indiana (2017), Kansas (2018), Kentucky (2017), Louisiana (2016), Maine (2021), Maryland (2020, 2013), Massachusetts (2010), Michigan (2018), Minnesota (2013, 2009), Missouri (2016), Nebraska (2014), Nevada (2017), New Hampshire (2020), New Jersey (2014), New Mexico (2010, 2019), New York (2015), North Carolina (2020), North Dakota (2019), Ohio (2015), Oklahoma (2016), Oregon (2015), Pennsylvania (2017), Rhode Island (2013), Tennessee (2016), Utah (2017), Vermont (2016, 2015), Virginia (2020, 2015), Washington (2018), and Wisconsin (2016).

Extending fair chance policies beyond government employment to the private sector is a crucial step toward ensuring that people with records have a fair chance at employment in the majority of jobs. Numerous states and localities have taken further action by banning the box for government contractors and private employers.

15 states and 22 cities and counties extend their fair-chance laws to private employment.

• Fifteen states have mandated the removal of conviction history questions from job applications for private employers—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
• The District of Columbia and 37 cities and counties extend their fair-chance hiring policies to government contractors (as will the federal government in 2021 ).
• Twenty-two of those localities also extend their local fair-chance hiring laws to the private employers within their jurisdictions—Austin, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Columbia (MO), DeSoto (TX), the District of Columbia, Kansas City (MO), Los Angeles, Montgomery County (MD), New York City, Philadelphia, Portland (OR), Prince George’s County (MD), Rochester, San Francisco, Seattle, Spokane (WA), St. Louis, Suffolk County (NY),  Waterloo (IA), and Westchester County (NY).

Four-fifths of the U.S. population lives in a jurisdiction that has banned the box.

More jurisdictions are also adopting policies that do more than “ban the box” by removing the conviction history question from job applications. Many incorporate the best practices set forth in the 2012 U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance on the use of arrest and conviction records in employment decisions. Others adopt innovative strategies such as targeted hiring . Robust fair-chance hiring laws delay records-related inquiries until after a conditional offer of employment and ensure a fairer decision-making process by requiring employers to consider the job-relatedness of a conviction, time passed, and mitigating circumstances or rehabilitation evidence.

Tallying up the population of the states and localities that have adopted a fair-chance law or policy, over 267 million people in the United States—more than four-fifths of the U.S. population—live in a jurisdiction with some form of ban-the-box or fair-chance policy.

Fair-chance policies benefit everyone, not just people with records, because they’re good for families, local communities, and the overall economy. At an event in Oakland for employers to discuss reentry issues, one business owner spoke to the personal benefit of hiring people with records. “I’ve seen how a job makes all the difference,” says Derreck B. Johnson, founder and president of Home of Chicken and Waffles in Oakland. “When I give someone a chance, and he becomes my best employee, I know that I’m doing right by my community.”

Are you looking to support a state or local effort to enact or strengthen a fair-chance policy? Check out NELP’s Fair Chance – Ban the Box Toolkit , which provides a step-by-step guide for advocates desiring to launch a ban-the-box campaign. Embedded in the toolkit is a range of resources to help draft a law, build your network, support your outreach, and develop your media plan. Here are just a few of those NELP resources:

• A one-page factsheet explains the basics of the policy.
• A Best Practices and Model Policies guide provides model laws.
• The Research Summary is a compilation of supportive studies and statistics.

Please visit NELP’s “fair chance licensing” webpage for information on the related topic of unfair occupational licensing restrictions that can bar people with records from entire professions before they submit a single job application.

For additional information, contact senior staff attorney Beth Avery at [email protected]

• Workers with Records

About the Authors

• Criminal Records & Employment

• Criminal Records & Employment,
• Workplace Equity

Related Resources

Workers doing time must be protected by job safety laws.

Minimum Protection, Maximum Vulnerability: Labor Standards in Court-Ordered Community Service

Policy & Data Brief

Research Supports Fair Chance Policies

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Note that these courses are for the 2024-2025 academic year . To view courses and descriptions for 2023-2024, please see here .

Note on graduate course numbers and levels: Please note that each course carries, along with the ENGL which identifies it as an English Department course, a three digit number, the first digit of which describes the general level of the course, as follows: 500-level - MA students and U3 undergraduates (usually Honours BAs) 600-level - MA and PhD students only 700-level - MA and PhD students only

Note on maximum and minimum enrolments for graduate seminars: Graduate courses are limited to a maximum enrollment of 12 (for 6/700-level courses) or 15 students (for 500-level courses). 500-level courses with an enrollment of fewer than 7 students, and 600- or 700-level courses with an enrollment of fewer than 4 students, will not be offered except in special circumstances. Note on registration in graduate courses: Courses are open to students in Department of English programs.  Students from outside the Department may enroll if space permits and if they have appropriate preparation for the course. In this case, students must seek the permission of the instructor and the Graduate Program Director to register. 500-level courses are restricted to an enrollment of 15 students and are open to Master's and advanced undergraduate students. B.A. students must receive permission from the instructor before registering for a 500-level course.    As a general rule, M.A. students are permitted to take two courses at the 500-level and Ph.D. students may only exceptionally register for 500-level courses after receiving permission from the Graduate Program Director . But PhD students should certainly not overlook 500-level courses when making their course selections, particularly if the subject matter of a particular course makes a good fit for a PhD student’s research interests. Similarly, an M.A. student who has a good justification for taking a third 500-level seminar should contact the Graduate Program Director to be given permission to register for it. Please click on the “full course description” link below any of the following course titles to find a detailed description of the course goals, the reading list, and the method of evaluation.

ENGL 503 - 18th Century

The villain-hero.

Professor David Hensley​ Winter 2025 Time: TBA

Full course description

Prerequisites: limited to Honours and MA students (see note below)

Description: This course will contextualize the villain-hero of eighteenth-century English literature in a European tradition of philosophical, religious, and political problems, social criticism, and artistic commentary from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Against the background of representations of the desire for knowledge and power in Elizabethan drama, the anthropology of Caroline political theory, Satanic revolt in Milton, and libertine devilry in Rochester and Restoration plays, we will examine the villain-hero as a figure of persistently fascinating evil power – a power subversively critical as well as characteristically satiric, obscene, and cruel in its skepticism, debauchery, and criminality. The readings will focus especially on two examples of this figure, Faust and Don Juan, whose development we will consider from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Texts: Books ( tentative, to be confirmed in January 2025) will be available at The Word Bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640.

• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Norton, Hackett, or Cambridge recommended)
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Hackett, Oxford, or Penguin recommended)
• La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections (Oxford recommended; or Penguin)
• John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, Selected Poems (Oxford) or Selected Works (Penguin)
• William Wycherley, The Country Wife
• William Congreve, The Way of the World
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Part One (Oxford or Norton)
• Pierre Choderos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Oxford or Penguin)
• Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life (Penguin)
• Lord Byron, Don Juan (Penguin)
• Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (Penguin recommended)

Films: Usually, one film will be shown each week. Viewing the films is a requirement of the course, and attendance at the screenings is an expected form of participation. Most screening sessions will last about two hours in a supplementary period following the seminar; some films will be longer. (The following list of films is provisional.)

• Jan Svankmejer, Don Juan (1970) and Faust (1994)
• Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (Greenwich Theatre, London; Stage on Screen, 2010)
• F. W. Murnau, Faust (1926)
• Hector Berlioz, La Damnation de Faust (dir. Sylvain Cambreling, 1999; and others)
• Charles Gounod, Faust (dir. Antonio Pappano, 2010)
• Alexandr Sokurov, Faust (2011)
• Wycherley, The Country Wife (1992); and Congreve, The Way of the World (1997)
• Stephen Frears, Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
• Mozart, Don Giovanni (dir. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 1996; and others)
• Rupert Edwards, The Real Don Giovanni (1996)
• Benoit Jacquot, Sade (1999)
• Frederico Fellini, Fellini’s Casanova (1976)
• Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin (dir. Daniel Barenboim, 2007; and others)

Evaluation: A substantial amount of careful reading, a class presentation, and a close analysis of texts both in seminar discussion and in a final 20-page paper will constitute the work of the course. Weighting: paper (60%), presentation (20%), general participation (20%). Regular attendance is mandatory.

Format: seminar

Note on enrollment: Permission of the instructor is required. Enrollment is limited to 15 MA and advanced undergraduate students. Honours students in their final year have priority. MA and Honours students may register for this course but must confirm their registration with the instructor. All others must consult the instructor before registering. Students who are interested in taking this seminar but cannot register in Minerva should contact the instructor. (Please bear in mind that electronic registration does not constitute the instructor’s permission.)

ENGL 505 - 20th Century

Listen to this: sound, voice, music, noise.

Professor Allan Hepburn Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description: This course concerns sound in different media, mostly fiction, but also sound sculpture, sound diaries, sound-tracks, sound poetry, choruses and refrains, drama, opera, instrumental music, and song. A premise of this course is that literary texts create soundworlds and soundscapes. In some cases, they appeal to music, noise, dialogue, accents, and silences to communicate meaning. In other cases, they use sound effects—rhyme, for example—to widen the acoustic range of the text. What would it mean to interpret literary texts for their sonic dimensions? Is it possible to listen to a novel or a poem rather than read it? Does literature give access to the past, the future, or alternative realities when it appeals to sound? For some writers, literature operates like a recording technology, akin to a gramophone, cassette player, or MP3 file. These recording techniques allow sound to be transmitted to readers in diverse locations in ways that resemble the transmission of literary texts. In order to think about enhanced listening as a critical resource, we will consider acousmatic and non-acousmatic sounds, sounds as clues, sound and affect, sound and ideas, sound editing. We will also discuss prosody, telephony, sound theft, privacy, eavesdropping, eroticism, and racialized voices as acoustic properties within texts. Secondary readings will involve short theoretical pieces by R. Murray Schafer, Michel Chion, Jacques Attali, Walter Murch, and others. Listening exercises will supplement primary texts.

Texts (tentative):

• Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
• Mavis Gallant, “The Concert Party”
• Margeurite Yourcenar, Alexis
• Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues
• Jean Cocteau, The Human Voice
• Robert Chesley, Jerker
• Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
• Toni Morrison, Jazz
• Russell Smith, Noise
• selected poems by Auden, Bishop, Hughes, Dryden, Ondaatje, Bök, and others
• The Conversation
• Janet Cardiff, “Paradise Institute”

Evaluation: attendance and participation (20%); recitation of a poem (10%); short paper (30%); long paper (50%)

Format: Seminar.

ENGL 512 - Contemp Studies in Lit&Culture / EAST 515 - Seminar: Beyond Orientalism

Literary cultures of east and south asia.

Professor Sandeep Banerjee  (English) Professor Gal Gvili (East Asian Studies) Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description: How do literary and cultural texts speak to the experience of modernity in South and East Asia? We seek to illuminate this question by investigating common and diverging literary portrayals of such modern concerns as the making of national languages, the experience of colonialism, and the early formation of feminism, within emerging modern genres and forms such as realism, the short poem, the epic, and the novel. Our goal is to place the specificities of Asian forms of literary modernity and aesthetics in conversation with global theories and scholarship.

Texts : (provisional)

• Epic: The Slaying of Meghnad by M.M. Dutt (selections); Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu (selections)
• Poems by Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Sukanta Bhattacharya, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Bing Xin, and Xu Zhimo;
• Short stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Sadat Hasan Manto, Rasheed Jahan, Mao Dun, Lu Xun, Xu Dishan;
• Novels by Bankim Chatterji, Attia Hossain, Jhumpa Lahiri, Wu Zhuoliu, Ba Jin, Nieh Hualing, and Xiao Hong

This is an indicative list; course texts will be finalized closer to the start of the course.

Evaluation:  Response papers; paper proposal; final essay.

Format:  Seminar.

ENGL 528 - Canadian Literature

Food voices in canadian literature.

Professor Nathalie Cooke Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description: Why do authors feed their characters? Yes, it can make fiction seem more realistic, poetry more evocative. But there are other reasons deserving our attention.

In this course we will explore how listening to stories told in Canadian literature’s “food voices” offers readers compelling ways of investigating the shifting boundaries of gender, socio-economic class, community, and culture over time in Canadian society. Class discussions will tackle thorny questions in relation to specific texts and within the analytical frameworks of literary food studies. Readings will include well-known works by Canada’s most lauded writers (e.g. Margaret Atwood, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Eden Robinson, and Gabrielle Roy) to explore a range of food voices and how literary texts create meaning through inclusion of non-verbal narratives involving food selection, service, and consumption. We will also discover ways in which sharing food, or the longing for food, is a major theme and vehicle for metaphor in other works by Canadian writers (among them, George Eliott Clarke, Marilyn Dumont, Hiromi Goto, Rabindranath Maharaj, Drew Hayden Taylor, Fred Wah). We will question how food voices support or undermine the dominant trajectory of textual meaning creation. How do food choices serve to define an individual or community in relation to others? What narrative emerges from the food choices made in the text? What do food scenes tell us about gender roles and expectations, the process of migration and cultural adaptation? In what way do food scenes serve to structure the work, signposting notions of time and alternative ways of timekeeping?

Where literary analysis differs from folkloristic or sociological study is the close attention it pays to the form in which food voices speak in literary texts. Consequently the class will pay close attention to literary form, to how authors’ choices of mode, genre, and rhetorical device animate food voices and shape stories they can tell. Secondary readings theorizing the food voice (Lucy Long) and writing the meal (Sandra Gilbert, Diane McGee, and Anna Shapiro) will contextualize our investigations. However, students should be aware that there has been very little written about food scenes in Canadian literature specifically, despite an extraordinary abundance and variety of primary material. Existing bibliographies and studies of food in literature (e.g., Sandra Gilbert 2014, Nicola Humble 2020, Norman Kiell 1995) consistently overlook Canada’s contributions – with the notable exception of Margaret Atwood’s writing. And the few Canadian compilations of food narratives are now very dated: The Canlit Foodbook (1987) and the anthology Kitchen Talk (1992). At one level, then, this course and work developed through it aims to be an important critical intervention.

Texts : A library of online materials will be made available through the McGill Library and MyCourses, consisting of podcasts, radio episodes, commentaries, short stories and poems:

• Rohinton Mistry, “Squatter”
• Alice Munro, “Half a Grapefruit”
• Margaret Atwood, “Age of Lead”
• Madeleine Thien, “Simple Recipes”
• Selection from George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls (1990)
• Dead Dog Café Radio Hour episodes

Full-length texts:

• Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (1969)
• Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)
• Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (1996)
• Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach (2000)
• Tomson Highway, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout (2005)
• Michelle Good, Five Little Indians (2020)
• Suzette Mayr, Sleeping Car Porter (2022)

Format: Seminar and discussion.

Evaluation:

• seminar presentation (20%)
• Reading Journal: food metaphor analysis paragraphs, individual entries due throughout the term (40%)
• final research paper (30%)
• active participation, to include sharing with the class insights developed in reading journal entries (10%)

ENGL 533 - Literary Movements

Restoration poetry and culture.

Professor Maggie Kilgour Winter 2025 Time: TBA

Description: In 1649, the English people cut off the head of a king named Charles and established a new revolutionary government. In 1660, that revolution came full circle when they put the crown on the head of another king named Charles and went back to a monarchy, celebrating the “Restoration” of England’s old and true order. However, the revolutionaries had themselves claimed that they were restoring the ancient liberties of the English people which had been undermined by the innovations of the king. Similarly, the Protestant Reformation had been imagined as the return to the original spirit of the Gospels, uncontaminated by Popish institutions. In the seventeenth century everyone seemed mad with nostalgia for some purer, free time they longed to get back to.

In this seminar we will look at a range of literatures written between 1660, the year of the “Restoration,” and 1688, the year of the “Glorious” or “Bloodless Revolution.” We will consider how writers tried to make sense of the trauma of a civil war which had torn apart families and resulted in deaths of more than two hundred thousand people. It is easy to imagine the attraction of looking back from this mess to some fictitious time of ideal peace, and such nostalgia is still embedded in English mythology today. The Restoration order was deeply precarious, shaken by the outbreak of the plague, the great fire of London, war with Holland, unresolved religious and class conflicts, as well as a dissolute and heirless monarch. However, while full of yearning for a mythic past (it’s no coincidence that this is the time of Paradise Lost ), this unstable time released an outbreak of astonishing creativity. It produced revolutionary works of political science (itself emerging as a field), natural science, religious faith, drama, poetry, and prose, and had room for writings as diverse as the raunchy poetry of Rochester and the tight couplets of Dryden, the seminal works of political theory of Hobbes and Locke, the sci-fi of Cavendish, and the intense religious experiences of Bunyan, Traherne, and Hutchison. The government was reimagined, the first scientific society established, and the nation became a global empire conquering through trade, above all a growing slave-driven sugar business. Women performed on stage and began to write in significant numbers. Underneath the myth of return to the past, England was transformed.

Texts: (tentative)

• Rochester, selected (but not censored!) poems
• John Dryden, selected poetry and plays
• Andrew Marvell, selected poetry
• Samuel Butler, selections from Hudibras
• Selections from Locke and Hobbes
• Abraham Cowley, “Ode to the Royal Society”; De Plantis 5-6 (translated Nahum Tate, Aphra Behn)
• Thomas Spratt, selections from History of the Royal Society
• William Davenant (with William Shakespeare), Macbeth
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko ; The Rover
• Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
• Lucy Hutchison, selections from Order and Disorder
• John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
• Thomas Traherne, selections from the poetry and Centuries of Meditation
• Milton, Samson Agonistes
• Samuel Pepys, selection from the Diary (just for fun)

Evaluation: book review (10%); short (15 minute) presentation (20%); research/interpretive paper (50%); active participation (20%)

Format: seminar discussions; presentations

ENGL 540 - Literary Theory 1

Theories of the archive.

Professor Camille Owens Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description : What is an archive? And what is the place of “the archive” in literary studies? Or in literature? In this seminar, we will approach these questions in theory and method. We will trace the historical and institutional formation of archives, examining the power dynamics they reproduce and the issues of provenance that trouble them. We will investigate methods for the keeping and transmission of knowledge that have existed outside of traditional archives, and the possibilities and perils of impermanency. And we will examine where archives appear in, inform, or form contemporary literary works. Throughout our readings, we will ask the question: what are the formal boundaries of an/the archive? What can, and cannot, be housed in an archive? Readings will include works by: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Brent Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, Ann Cvetkovich, Mishuana Goeman, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Arlette Farge, Carolyn Steedman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Robin Coste Lewis, Ocean Vuong, Valeria Luiselli, Namwali Serpell, and Jesmyn Ward.

Selected Texts :

• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995)
• Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” (2008)
• Michel Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” (1977)
• Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995)
• Robin Coste Lewis, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022)
• Namwali Serpell, The Furrows (2021)
• Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019)

Evaluation : seminar presentation (15%), short essay (30%), research paper (40%), active participation in every class meeting (15%)

Format : Seminar

ENGL 545 - Topics in Literature & Society

Write, protest, resist: women’s work in the revolutionary age.

Professor Carmen Mathes Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description: When Percy Shelley wrote, “Let a great Assembly be / Of the fearless and the free” he was responding to an 1819 massacre of peaceful protesters. The crowd included many women, some carrying banners and flags, some carrying children, and all hoping for change. At stake was expanding voting rights. Not to include women, mind you, but to allow their working-class brothers, husbands, and fathers to have a voice in parliament. In the aftermath of the violence, perpetrated by what we might now call a volunteer police force, Shelley envisions each woman as akin to moral compass who will “point” to the perpetrators to turn them away in shame.

During the Romantic era in Britain, women’s roles in the political life of their community and country, at home and abroad, were debated, characterized and caricatured, and as often as not ignored. Shelley’s “great Assembly” reflects the historical reality of women’s participation and raises larger questions about what women were understood to be able to contribute, and what they did contribute, to social and political movements in the “revolutionary age” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This is a course about politics and gender in (mostly) British poetry and nonfiction prose. We will read works by a variety of Romantic-era authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, Olympe de Gouges, Charlotte Smith. Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Anne Yearsley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Germaine de Staël, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Liddiard, and others. We will explore women’s responses to the revolution in France and the Napoleonic wars; questions of migration and dispossession; fights over labour reform; efforts to improve women’s educations; and activities of abolitionists seeking to end the transatlantic slave trade. Along the way, we will explore historical and contemporary feminism(s) and feminist literary criticism.

• The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Poetry, edited by Joseph Black et al., Broadview, 2016, ISBN 9781554811311

Evaluation: participation (10%); book review (15%); proposal (15%); scholarly literature review (20%); final research essay (40%)

ENGL 566 - Special Studies in Drama 1

The trans eighteenth century.

Professor Fiona Ritchie Winter 2025 Time TBA

Description: This course will examine examples of cross-dressing in the long eighteenth century with the goal of exploring how the period understood sex and gender. Taking as its starting point the shift in representation that occurred in the English theatre from 1660 onwards when women began to play Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines (roles that were originally written for boy actors), we will consider actresses who made their name in breeches parts and travesty roles (such as Margaret Woffington and Dorothy Jordan) and examples of men dressing as women in performance (such as David Garrick as Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife and the roles that Samuel Foote wrote for himself). The autobiography of Charlotte Charke, a performer who dressed as a man inside and outside the theatre, will take us beyond the stage and into society. Other examples of real-life cross-dressers will include Hannah Snell (a female soldier), pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Reade, Mary Hamilton (who allegedly duped another woman into marriage by posing as a man), and the Chevalier d’Éon (who infiltrated the court of the Empress of Russia as a woman). Snell and d’Éon return us to the theatre as both performed in stage shows that showcased the unique ways in which they chose to express their gender identity.

Our discussion will be informed by scholarship on cross-dressing (Marjorie Garber, Laurence Senelick, Ula Lukszo Klein) and transgender eighteenth-century studies (Julia Ftacek, Jen Manion). We will consider cross-dressing as a way of expressing gender and/or sexuality, an opportunity for objectification and eroticisation, a practice that generated fears of deception, and a means of liberation. Throughout the course we will interrogate whether contemporary ideas of gender as spectrum rather than binary are in fact new.

Texts (provisional) :

Primary texts may include:

• Shakespeare’s cross-dressing plays (e.g., Twelfth Night ) and adaptations of them
• Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)
• George Farquhar, The Constant Couple (1700) and The Recruiting Officer (1706)
• Henry Fielding, The Female Husband (1746)
• The Female Soldier; Or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750)
• A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke (1755)
• David Garrick, The Male Coquette (1757)

Other readings may include:

• Contextual primary source material (such as performance reviews, actor biographies, pamphlets, newspaper commentary)
• Historical fiction/drama
• Critical essays on primary sources
• Theoretical readings

Evaluation (tentative) : participation (20%) ; research presentation (20%) ; conference abstract and annotated bibliography (10%) ; paper (50%)

Format: Seminars based on group discussion (hence thorough preparation and consistent participation will be crucial)

ENGL 585 - Cultural Studies: Film

Image/sound/text.

Professor Ara Osterweil Fall 2024 Time: TBA. Class Meetings: once weekly, for three hours. Mandatory Weekly Screening: once weekly, for three hours.

Prerequisites: You must be a graduate student OR an undergraduate Honours student to register for this course; in all other cases, you need special permission from the instructor to register.

Expected Student Preparation: Please note that it is both a critical studies seminar AND a creative workshop. Some fluency in critical theory, cultural studies and/or art history is expected. Background in visual art, performance, poetry, dance, or music is encouraged but not required.

Description: This hybrid seminar/workshop is designed to: (1) teach students to respond critically and creatively to experimental art and literature; (2) enable students to create experimental forms of writing and visual media that respond to the texts we study.

Calling all creative misfits who long to engage in forms of critical thinking that expand beyond the traditional scholarly essay! By focusing on multi-media artworks that interrogate and undermine conventional forms of representation through their contrapuntal use of image, sound, and text, we shall explore how meaning in contemporary art is often generated across multiple registers. Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to important examples of experimental film and video, poetry, Conceptual art, body art, photography, and installation art from the 1960s to the present. In addition to writing critically about these works, students will be asked to experiment with some of the artistic strategies we study to create their own self-directed artistic, literary, critical, or curatorial projects. In other words, students will not only be expected to discuss, think, and write about the works we study, but to design and execute creative projects that respond meaningfully to them. Occasionally, local and/or international artists will be invited to class to give special seminars and workshops. On other occasions, the class will meet outside of our normal meeting time and place to participate in screenings, exhibitions, and performances.

Films and artworks:

• Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, US, 1963)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, US, 1963)
• Wavelength (Michael Snow, US, 1967)
• T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. (Paul Sharits, US, 1968)
• Fly (Yoko Ono, US, 1971)
• ( nostalgia ) (Hollis Frampton, US, 1971)
• Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas, US, 1972)
• Kitch’s Last Meal (Carolee Schneemann, US, 1973-1976)
• News from Home (Chantal Akerman, US/ Belgium, 1977)
• Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, France, 1983)
• The Blind. At Home (Sophie Calle, France, 1986)
• Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, US, 1989)
• Blue (Derek Jarman, UK, 1993)
• From Here I Saw What Happened and Cried (Carrie Mae Weems, 1995-1996)
• Les Goddesses (Moyra Davey, US, 2011)
• Love is the Message, The Message is Death (Arthur Jafa, US, 2016)
• Bird Calls (David Baumflek, Canada, 2018)
• Altiplano (Malena Szlam, Canada, 2018)
• earthearthearth (Daichi Saito, Canada, 2021)
• Quiet as its Kept ( Ja Tovia Gary, United States, 2023)
• Selected films by Sky Hopinka, including Lore (2019), When You’re Lost in the Rain (2018) and I’ll Remember You as You Were Not as What You’ll Become (2016)
• Feral Domestic (Sheilah & Dani Restack, 2022)

Texts: (provisional)

• Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs
• Terrance Hayes, American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
• Fred Moten, All That Beauty
• Yoko Ono, Grapefruit
• Ara Osterweil, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film
• Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming

Format: seminar, workshop, student “crit,” and mandatory weekly screening

Evaluation: short form writing; experimental slideshow (text + image); video portrait; final essay, video, manuscript, or installation

ENGL 607 - Middle English Literature

Piers plowman: visions for a just society .

Professor Michael Van Dussen Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description: William Langland’s protean allegory Piers Plowman , written and revised over the last quarter of the fourteenth century, would come to inspire protesting labourers in 1381 and any number of religious reformists who found the plowman “Piers” to be a fitting mouthpiece for their critiques of institutional ills throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This embryonic allegorical poem begins in a “fair field full of folk” but quickly explodes into a challenging examination of the causes of injustice, societal division, and a quest to learn—through a process of intense questioning—how best to live in an imperfect world. In the process, Langland explores the workings of the English legal and educational systems; the corrupt exercise of authority; ethical treatment of the poor and the disabled; the workings of the mind, the soul, and the natural world; and virtually every branch and level of medieval society. Though the poem does envision the betterment of society, utopian fantasy is fleeting, quickly undermined in an enormously complex and troubling series of visions that refuse to “arrive” at a static or prescriptive program for living. Its protagonists witness and experience suffering and injustice, even as they imagine alternatives. The series of dreams and waking moments that make up Piers Plowman thus present visions “for,” but not necessarily “of,” a just society, all the while drawing on sophisticated traditions of theological, political, philosophical, and scientific learning.

Topics to be explored in this seminar include, but are not limited to, the just treatment of the poor; labour conditions; excess and material possessions; authority and corruption; education and literacy; law and justice; tyranny and revolt; debt and salvation; sin and mercy; the individual in society; and the faculties of the soul. Students in this seminar will read Piers Plowman and a series of poems in the “Plowman Tradition” in the original Middle English. No prior experience with the language is necessary or assumed; portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English.

Texts (provisional):

• William Langland, Piers Plowman (emphasis on the B-Text, with passages to compare from the A, C, and Z versions)
• Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede
• The Ploughman’s Tale
• The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto Christe
• Mum and the Sothsegger
• Jack Upland , Friar Daw’s Reply , and Upland’s Rejoinder

Evaluation: Short papers (25%); long paper (50%); presentation (10%); participation (15%).

Maximum enrollment: 12 students

ENGL 661 - Seminar of Special Studies

Digital humanities.

Professor Richard So Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description: This course provides hands-on training in the use of computers and statistical methods to analyze literature – an approach also known as “literary text mining.” In the past ten years, computational methods to study culture, particularly literary texts, have increasingly moved out of the margins. We’ve seen the publication of a string of important articles in major literary studies journals, and the release of several new monographs. At the same time, we’ve seen an increase in the number of academic positions advertised in the “digital humanities” and “cultural analytics” in English and literature departments. As research in this sub-field expands and improves, the digital humanities and cultural analytics will continue to grow, making larger and more significant interventions into the discipline. This course means to prepare graduate students in English and literature to perform applied research in the digital humanities. In this seminar, students will learn how to write computer code in Python – a standard computing language used in data science – and the rudiments of statistical methods useful for a data-driven analysis of literary texts. By the end of the course, students will be able to perform simple to intermediate computational and statistical analysis on literary corpora, such as collocations analysis, most distinctive words analysis, and topic modeling. Most of the core “shallow” methods for text analysis, like simple counting, as well as several “deeper” methods, like vector semantics, will be introduced in a live context. We will leverage the availability of a number of free online corpora – for example, a large collection of English-language novels from 1800 to 1923 – to build case studies. At the same time, the second half of the class will introduce excellent recent examples of digital humanist and cultural analytics research from scholars such as Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, Lauren Klein, Michael Gavin, and several others. The purpose of this is two-fold: first, to allow students to be aware of the “cutting edge” in this field – the most interesting work that is currently happening – and have an opportunity to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, and second, to allow them to replicate existing examples of DH work from the ground-up. With the instructor’s help, we will often reproduce these arguments to see how they work. Students will thus acquire a useful template to develop their own ideas. There are no prerequisites for this class. All that is required is a healthy dose of curiosity and open-mindedness. The course is aimed at literature students who do not think of themselves as “good at math,” or even imagine themselves as averse to “science.” The class will be challenging to students with no background in quantitative research insofar as it will train them in habits of thought somewhat alien to the humanities, such as mathematical logic and algorithmic thinking. However, the course will entirely be taught through a humanistic lens, meaning that the instructor will introduce all methods and concepts through literary-studies examples and the logic of familiar approaches like close reading. In other words, the course is not a seminar in “computer science”; it is a seminar in humanistic research that ideally will become useful as part of the student’s literary studies toolkit.

• Andrew Piper, Enumerations
• Sarah Allison, Reductive Reading
• Daniel Shore, Cyberformalism
• Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons
• Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction
• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
• Other texts to be provided on myCourses

Evaluation (provisional) : weekly problem sets (50%); final project (25%); attendance and participation (25%).

Maximum Enrollment: 12 students.

ENGL 662 - Seminar of Special Studies

Modernist reading/reading modernism.

Professor Miranda Hickman Winter 2025 Time: TBA

Description: From the dense allusiveness of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s multi-perspectival free indirect discourse, E.E. Cummings’ typographical antics and Joycean mischief to Gertrude Stein’s experimental “Steinese,” modernist poetry and prose challenged received ways of “how to read”—the phrase is Ezra Pound’s. As Laura Riding and Robert Graves observed in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), one of the earliest studies of modernism as a cultural phenomenon, the modernists often occasioned anxiety in the “plain reader,” obliging readers to reimagine their ordinary procedures and acculturate themselves to new ones better adapted to modernist rhythms and idioms. Poet Mina Loy quipped that “one had to go into training” to “get” such work as Stein’s; through both the difficulty of their signaling and often elaborate framing through notes, allusion, or schemata, modernist texts teach us how to read.

Bringing early twentieth-century reception of such modernist work together with current work in attentional studies and debates addressing how our culture reads now (e.g. Lucy Alford, Katherine Hayles, John Guillory, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, Rita Felski), this course addressing early twentieth-century experimental work considers how modernist texts demand and repay various modes of “close” reading; what might emerge from engaging them through modes of “distant” and “surface” reading; and how what Shklovsky called the “roughened” language of modernist texts obliges us to enter unfamiliar attentional modes, as well as heightening self-awareness of reading processes. Leading from such work, we also consider how modernist texts feature acts of reading and attention toward their work of observation, critique, and cultural intervention.

• Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
• T.S. Eliot, early poems and The Waste Land
• H.D., HERmione, Asphodel
• James Joyce, excerpts from Ulysses
• Mina Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker ; Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose
• Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
• Ezra Pound, Cathay and The Cantos
• Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
• Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
• Melvin Tolson, Rendezvous with America
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, The Waves

Evaluation: brief essay (25%), weekly responses (10%), oral presentation (20%), final essay (35%), seminar participation (10%)

ENGL 670 - Topics in Cultural Studies

Contemporary theories and practices of embodiment.

Professor Alanna Thain Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description: Twenty-first-century cultural theory is marked by a corporeal turn, reconsidering questions of embodiment, sensation, affect, and materiality in relation to questions of cultural production, identity, and social and political concerns. This class will read broadly across key theories and perspectives on the body of the last decade, including consideration of authors whose work is seen as foundational to these approaches. In parallel we will explore media, performance, and somatics to explore these questions through exceptional and everyday practices. Key areas of inquiry include feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, with a particular emphasis on women-of-colour feminisms, queer theory, and trans studies; affect theory; critical race theory; Indigenous studies; questions of the nonhuman; disability studies; and theories of immaterial and affective labour. Students will develop a semester-long exploration of a practice of embodiment in dialogue with these works.

Texts may include :

• Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now
• Sadiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Edna Bonhomme and Alice Spawls, eds., After Sex
• José Munoz, The Sense of Brown
• Mel Chen, Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire
• Alexander Weheliye, Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology
• Paul Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi and Orlando: My Political Biography
• Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
• Jean Ma, The Edges of Sleep
• Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
• Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor
• Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories
• Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble
• Leanne Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance
• Anna Tsing et al , The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
• Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies

Evaluation: practices project 70%; weekly responses 30%

Format: seminar and workshops

ENGL 680 - Canadian Literature

Alice munro.

Professor Robert Lecker Winter 2025 Time: TBA

Description: This course follows the career of an author who has been called “the best fiction writer now working in North America.” It starts by examining Lives of Girls and Women , Alice Munro’s first and only novel (really a collection of linked short stories) about a young female narrator coming of age in a small country town. In that work, Munro found the voice that would propel her toward international fame and a long publishing history connected with The New Yorker magazine. We will study a selection of Munro’s finest stories from a chronological perspective in order to better understand her evolving concerns and the development of her narrative techniques over five decades, culminating in her winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 as “master of the contemporary short story.” This trajectory will introduce us to a range of material about modern life, female experience, family intrigue, sexual deviance, erotic awakening. Munro’s stories are deceptively accessible, yet they are the product of deft structuring, compressed symbolism, and subtle narrative design. As W.H. New says, they “embed more than announce, reveal more than parade.” In reading Munro’s short stories we will also consider many of the features that distinguish modern short story writing. Each class will focus on a particular story, but we will also engage in a series of learning exercises designed to broaden the reading experience and to improve interpretive reading methods. We might spend a class looking at how Munro constructs a single paragraph. We might spend another class examining the revisions she made to a particular story and ask what effect those revisions have on our reading of the text. We might have a debate about the credibility of a particular narrator. Is she really who she says she is or is she faking it? The idea is to experience the stories from multiple perspectives and to entertain our reading in the process. Students are expected to read approximately four stories per week. The course will include one film screening (out of scheduled class time), based on an adaptation of one of Munro’s most celebrated stories. In this seminar-style course, weekly contributions to class discussion are essential.

• Lives of Girls and Women
• My Best Stories

Evaluation: seminar presentation (20%); discussion questions prepared in advance (10%); short essay (20%); final essay (30%); attendance and participation in every class (20%).

Format: seminar (presentations and discussion)

ENGL 733 - Victorian Novel

Experimental realism.

Professor Tabitha Sparks Winter 2025 Time: TBA

Description: Victorian novels have long been subject to a historical lens that positions them as the precursors and latent foils to the revisionist, psychologically self-aware modernist novel. This class will examine several Victorian novels that critics have struggled to adapt to a conventional realist and historicist teleology. Rather than treat them as aberrations to the canon, we will approach their experimental design and proto-modern meanings as facets of a Victorian literary history that the dominant Romantic-Victorian-Modern-Postmodern chronology has elided. In addition to the novels, this course will engage with the critical history of the novel to think about how “realism,” broadly conceived, has diluted the narratological sophistication of the Victorian novel.

Novels: (provisional)

• Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1834)
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
• W.M. Thackeray, Lovel the Widower (1860)
• Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883)
• Margaret Harkness, A City Girl: A Realistic Story (1887)
• George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (1889)
• Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle (1903)

Critics : (list subject to grow)

• Virginia Woolf
• Georg Lukacs
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Patricia Waugh
• George Levine
• Elaine Freedgood
• Audrey Jaffe

Evaluation: class participation (20%); discussion leading (15%); short essay (25%); long essay (40%)

Format: seminar (discussion)

ENGL 770 - Studies in American Literature

Roots of the modern short story: poe, hawthorne, melville.

Professor Peter Gibian Fall Term 2024 Time: TBA

Description: This course will offer intensive study of short prose fictions and critical essays by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as these foundational authors can be seen to work in dialogue with one another. We will explore aesthetic problems and cultural preoccupations crucial to mid-nineteenth-century America, studying at the same time how these authors break the ground for the emergence of the modern short story – anticipating the fundamental developments in form and theme that would become the bases for self-conscious, experimental short fiction produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

After a quick introductory review of some key works in contemporary short story theory, along with historical studies marking distinctions among the tale, the sketch, the novella and the emerging short story, we will devote about one month to each of the three authors—closely reading several of their lesser-known stories and essays while giving special attention to classic writings exploring a variety of fictional modes, such as: “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Oval Portrait,” “The Birth-mark,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” The Scarlet Letter , “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd, Sailor .

Expected Student Preparation: Previous course work in American Literature before 1900, or in 19th-century British fiction, or permission of instructor.

Texts: (tentative; editions of collected short fiction TBA):

• Poe, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
• Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
• Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Selected Tales or Great Short Works of Herman Melville

Evaluation: (tentative): participation in seminar discussions, 20%; series of one-page textual analyses, 20%; oral presentation, 20%; final research paper, 40%

ENGL 776 - Film Studies

Film thinks itself.

Professor Ned Schantz Fall 2024 Time: TBA

Description: This course will explore film theory through and against the tradition and current practice of meta-cinema, broadly construed. It is designed to appeal to students of widely ranging film backgrounds—certainly it can provide a substantial introduction to film studies for literary specialists; for more experienced cinema students, it can perhaps defamiliarize typical viewing habits and critical moves. Our themes will be loosely divided into three clusters—Part I (visibility), Part II (time and death) and Part III (production and performance)—though expect and be prepared to seek out connections throughout the course.

Possible films include: Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924), The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933), Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder 1950), Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953), La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963), Samuel Beckett’s Film (Alan Schneider, 1965), Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Take One (William Greaves, 1968), Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973), Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, 1980), Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990), After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda 1998), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000), Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003), Caché (Haneke, 2005), Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), The Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012), Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2012), Long Day’s Journey into Night (Bi Gan, 2017)

Evaluation: viewing journals 55%, participation 30%, presentation 15%

ENGL 778 - Studies in Visual Culture

The contemporary graphic novel.

Professor Sean Carney Winter 2025 Time: TBA

Description: How do you “read” a graphic novel? Does one “read” pictures, and if so, what does this mean? This course examines the unique formal and aesthetic qualities of the contemporary adult graphic novel, with particular emphasis on visual analysis. Considerable attention will therefore be paid to close reading and to the analysis of stylistic elements that distinguish comics as a unique artistic phenomenon. The course does not provide an historical survey of comics, nor does it examine popular genres such as superhero comics. The emphasis of the course leans towards recent graphic novels by single authors and narratives oriented to the adult reader. The texts will be chosen based not only on historical impact, verifiable influence, or general popularity with readers, but also with an eye to comics that experiment and expand the boundaries of the medium. There will be four thematic groupings: revisionist narratives within the mainstream, memoirs and confessionals, new journalism, and auteur comix.

Texts: writers and artists may include: Kate Beaton, Ebony Flowers, Thi Bui, Nick Drnaso, Ben Passmore, Sarah Glidden, Nora Krug, Adrian Tomine, Guy Delisle, David Mazzuchelli, Debbie Dreschler, James Sturm, Lynda Barry, Ivan Brunetti, Howard Cruse, Eddie Campbell, Art Spiegelman, Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Alison Bechdel, David Collier, Ben Katchor, Marjane Satrapi, Rutu Modan, Jason Lutes, Jeff Smith, Joe Sacco, Carla Speed McNeil, David B., Chris Ware, Los Bros. Hernandez, Nick Abadzis, Rick Veitch, Phoebe Gloeckner, Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, Jack Jackson, Craig Thompson, James Kochalka, Tom Gauld, Ed Piskor, Jeff Lemire, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, Gene Luen Yang, Faryl Dalrymple, Matt Kindt, Stephen Collins, Will Eisner, Alex Robinson, Scott McCloud

Format : seminar and discussion

Evaluation: seminar presentation with accompanying written component (20%); two 10-page essays (30% each); class participation (20%)

ENGL 785 - Studies in Theory

Bad Mathematics

Professor Amber Rose Johnson Winter 2025 Time: TBA

Description : This seminar explores how the language, concepts, and iconography of mathematics and physics operate in contemporary Black Studies. We will begin with Katherine McKittrick’s seminal essay, “Mathematics Black Life,” which articulates the ways in which Blackness was written into modernity, by way of colonialism and transoceanic chattel slavery, through numerical representation and quantification: weight, price, quantity, age, etc. We will rely heavily on the theoretical guidance of Sylvia Wynter, who explicates precisely how this “knowledge system that mathematizes the dysselected” came to be solidified through interlocking economic and juridical systems. Together we will consider how this “mathematization” continues to operate today through surveillance systems, digital data collection, and other capitalist strategies of documentation. Our first task is to understand how this same knowledge system produces both common understandings of our shared material world and also hierarchical social systems that justify dehumanization and violence. Contemporary Black artists, writers, and thinkers, however, are increasingly mis-using these disciplinary tools against their deadly tendencies. The second half of the course will turn our attention to contemporary Black cultural workers who differently deploy the language and symbols of mathematics and physics in their own work toward radical ends. Our theoretical guides for the second half of the course will include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Michelle M. Wright, all of whom exemplify how core assumptions in math and physics discourses have been critically analyzed and repurposed by Black feminist thinkers. Together we will query how these artists and writers are pushing, stretching, and reformulating the language and operations of math and physics in their creative work in order to redefine Blackness and humanness. We will consider how these cultural producers provide different entry points to consider concepts including space, time, measurement, (e)valuation, and entanglement. The course will draw from a range of genres including poetry, film, visual art, live performance, novels, theory, and criticism. Examples include visual artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s 2021 exhibition, “Everyone Will be Saved Through Algebra (A Casual Mathematics),” Camonghne Felix’s experimental memoir Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscaluculation, and Kevin Jerome Everson’s short film, Partial Differential Equations (2020). Students will have the option of producing either a final paper or a creative project with an accompanying critical reflection.

Texts: (Tentative)

• Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick
• Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix
• Physics of Blackness: Beyond Middle Passage Epistemology by Michelle M. Wright
• Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva
• Long Division by Kiese Laymon
• Visual and performance art by artists including Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Fields Harrington, Kevin Jerome Everson, and others
• Other essays and materials made available from MyCourses and/or McGill Library

Evaluation: seminar presentation (15%), midterm essay (25%), final paper or creative project with critical reflection (30%), active participation / weekly blog (30%)

Department and University Information

Department of english.

• Writer-in-Residence
• Land Acknowledgement

Search within the TIB website or find specialist literature and information in the TIB Portal.

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Expert system for for management of urinary incontinence in women (English)

• New search for: Gorman, R.
• ISBN: 1-56053-123-1
• Conference paper  /  Print

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The purpose of this nursing informatics and outcomes research study was to determine the effectiveness of an expert system for disseminating knowledge to ambulatory women health care consumers with urinary incontinence. Clinical knowledge from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) patient guideline for urinary incontinence and research literature for behavioral treatments provided the knowledge base for the expert system. Two experimental groups (booklet and expert system) and one control group were utilized. Study results suggest the use of an expert system as one effective communication means for disseminating clinical information in an advisory capacity to ambulalory women with urinary incontinence.

More details on this result

• Title: Expert system for for management of urinary incontinence in women
• Additional title: Ein Expertensystem zur Harninkontinenz bei Frauen
• Contributors: Gorman, R. ( author )
• Published in: Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medicinal Care, Conference of the American Medical Informatics Association, 19 ; 527-531
• Publisher: Hanley & Belfus
• New search for: Hanley & Belfus
• Place of publication: Philadelphia
• Publication date: 1995
• Size: 5 Seiten, 1 Bild, 26 Quellen
• Type of media: Conference paper
• Type of material: Print
• Language: English
• Keywords: Datenverarbeitung in der Medizin , Expertensystem , Harn , Harnorgan , Frau , Therapie (medizinisch) , Versuchsergebnis , Versuchsperson , Psychologie , Akzeptanz , menschliches Verhalten , Wirkungsgrad , Personal Computer , Buch , Methodenvergleich , Becken (Bewegungsapparat) , Muskel , Trainingsprogramm , Dokumentation , Krankenbericht , rechnerunterstützter Unterricht , Inkontinenz
• Source: Tema Archive

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Money: Take-home pay calculator - find out how much extra you're getting this month with National Insurance cut

Your take-home pay will likely be higher this month due to a National Insurance cut. Use our calculator to find out how much, enjoy our weekend reads and leave a comment below, and we'll be back with all the latest personal finance and consumer news on Monday.

Sunday 28 April 2024 11:25, UK

Weekend Money

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National insurance was cut this month, for the second time this year, from 10% to 8% on employee earnings between £12,570 and £50,270.

The change, announced by the chancellor in his March budget, impacts around 27 million payroll employees across the UK - starting this pay day.

The cut is worth almost £250 to someone earning £25,000 a year and almost £750 for those earning £50,000

Use our tool below for a rough guide to what tax changes can be expected for most people, as there are other variables not included which might affect how much tax you pay including being in receipt of the blind person's allowance or the marriage allowance. It also assumes you are not self-employed and are under pension age...

There are also national insurance cuts for the self-employed. This includes the scrapping of Class 2 contributions, as well as a reduction of the rate of Class 4 contributions from 9% to 6% for the £12,570 to £50,270 earnings bracket.

These will impact nearly two million self-employed people, according to the Treasury.

While many campaigners welcomed the national insurance announcement last month, they pointed out that the tax burden remains at record high levels for Britons - thanks in part to the threshold at which people start paying income tax being frozen, rather than rising with inflation.

By Jess Sharp , Money team

My journey into the world of manifestation (the belief that you can attract success in your life through positive affirmations and visualisation) has taken me places I never thought I'd go.

Like woods in Edenbridge, where I stood meditating under a tree in the pouring rain. I don't yet know where my journey will end (I've been hoping for an engagement ring but my boyfriend hasn't yet seen my visualisations), but it started with a conversation with Jamie Greenlaw-Meek, one of many people who say manifestation has transformed their lives.

"About a year ago, there was something happening and I thought we just need two grand to cover the expense," Jamie, a former dancer from London, told me. "The following day £2,000 landed in my account."

It sounded like a coincidence to me, too.

But Jamie was adamant. His husband calls him "the master manifester" because of his "ability to bring in money".

"It's happened on so many occasions, like four, five times," he said. "I've become very clear on what I want and the amount of money I need and literally it can be within 24 hours that I get a phone call for a job and it's almost identical to what I asked for money-wise."

When I asked the now-psychic where the £2,000 actually came from, he said it was payment for a modelling job he had been offered.

"With manifesting you don't get caught up in the how, and often it comes in ways that you don't expect," he added, explaining it could come as the result of a claim after being in a car crash.

"It's not always coming in the way that you think but money is out there for us to take in the world. It's just having the confidence to receive it and we are worthy of it."

"Even if it is a placebo effect, does it matter?" he said.

The 43-year-old also believes he manifested his husband Fiongal after being diagnosed with cancer. While going through treatment and dating "a lot" of people, he decided to take matters into his own hands, or rather his own head, and started visualising his perfect partner.

"I decided to spend a good couple of weeks getting really, really, super clear in my mind what this person looked like. Then I started creating lists asking about personality traits, and all the things that I wanted that person to be," the former dancer said.

"The day I got the all clear from cancer I randomly met my husband and when I look at the list of the things I asked for, he pretty much ticks every single box. I really, really believe that is because I got super clear on what I wanted and I put that out to the universe to bring to me."

Jim Carrey and manifestation

If you think this is a new practice, it isn't. Jim Carrey was doing it back in the 90s. He famously wrote himself a $10m cheque for "acting services rendered" and dated it years in advance. Then in 1995, he was told he was going to make the exact amount for filming Dumb and Dumber.

The idea shot up in popularity again in 2006 after Rhonda Byrne published her self-help book The Secret.

Since then, it has hit every inch of the internet and has resurfaced on TikTok with videos posted under #manifesting accumulating a huge 13 billion views.

I tried to learn manifesting - I felt like an idiot

After hearing Jamie's story and seeing the idea was popular with so many people, I thought it best to try to learn manifestation myself. I mean, who wouldn't want money landing in their account and a work promotion from the universe?

As I stood in the woods, in the pouring rain, being told to imagine roots growing from the soles of my feet, I felt like an idiot.

I was soaking wet (of course I had forgotten a coat with a hood) and while my mind kept wandering through thoughts about being cold, if I'd hit traffic on the way home and how dirty my white trainers were getting, a gentle, soothing voice kept bringing me back to what I was supposed to be thinking about.

"How we are all connected, how the trees and plants produce oxygen that we breathe, and we breathe out carbon dioxide which they need to survive"

While some people focus their manifestation practices on being grateful to the universe, Tansy Jane Dowman believes we need to get "out of our heads, into our bodies", connect with nature and find our true selves before we can practice it successfully.

My meditation in the woods was just one part of a six-hour workshop run by Tansy, which aimed to send me off with a clearer vision of what I truly desired.

Tansy charges anywhere from £25 to £580 for her courses, which range from one-on-one sessions and an online six-week programme, to forest bathing workshops and weekend-long nature retreats.

But some courses have popped up online which cost more than £1,000.

Tansy started practising manifestation in 2018 after going through a difficult period in her life. She eventually quit her job in events management and started teaching others how to do it successfully.

"The way I manifest is not to focus on material wealth or gain. I would ask my clients what an abundant life means to them in terms of feelings, experiences, connections, people and places," she explained.

"The more authentic you are, the more of a beacon you become for those things to find you."

After spending time walking in the rain and meditating under a tree, Tansy and I sat in her dining room and explored some of the happiest moments in my life and the feelings I experienced. It became clear I like feeling accomplished, needed and excited.

We also spoke about challenging times, but the conversation focused on the positives, like how I had overcome them and what I had learned.

"It's so important to bring in your values with manifestation because sometimes we can get really confused with what we want, with social media especially," she told me.

Throughout her house, Tansy has a number of "abundance boards" proudly on display - some she has made with her children, others are from her annual January tradition of setting out her desires for the year.

"I've had some really wonderful goosebump things happen to me. I did a board at the beginning of 2020... I put a picture of a microphone on it. I just thought I really like that image and I didn't immediately place any meaning onto it," she said.

"Then as the world was shutting down for lockdown, I did a press event and I met a lady who worked for Wellbeing Radio and she wondered if I would be interested in trying out as a presenter."

She explained that some people will be very specific with their desires, like selecting a photo of the exact car they want, or the perfect house, but that isn't how manifestation works. There needs to be an element of trust in the universe giving them what they attract.

As we created my abundance board, which Tansy describes as being like a "personal algorithm", she told me to select images and words from heaps of magazines that called to me intuitively.

As you can see from the picture below, mine calls for being "financially fabulous", travelling, getting engaged (coughs loudly in earshot of boyfriend) and living stress-free.

And while I'd love a big cash injection, Tansy explained to me that money is "only a stepping stone to a feeling" and, ultimately, I'm aiming to create an emotion with it.

Manifesters more likely to go bankrupt

While all the manifestation believers I spoke to said there was no downside to the practice, a researcher has been looking into whether it really does pay off.

Based in Australia, Dr Lucas Dixon (who specialises in consumer psychology) created a scale from one to seven to rank a person's strength of belief and found those who practice it are more likely to have been victims of fraud and declared bankruptcy.

He said there was a "danger" that manifesting could become harmful if taken to an extreme level.

He found those who believe in manifesting tend to think more positively and have a confident attitude when it comes to success, and while that can be helpful in business, it can also cause them to take unnecessary risks.

"They weren't more objectively successful in terms of having higher income or higher education attainment," he said.

"We also found that they are more likely to believe in get-rich-quick schemes, more likely to take higher risks... to have risky financial investments and more likely to have investments in cryptocurrency rather than traditional stock."

Using the scale he created, Dr Dixon found those who have "very strong beliefs", ranking at a seven, were 40% more likely to have gone bankrupt.

"The danger comes in a couple of different forms," he said, explaining that a "worst case scenario" could see people getting into financial difficulty by being encouraged to "just look at the positives".

"Someone might say it's not harmful because it is really just thinking positively but I think even that can be harmful because of what you might call an opportunity cost," he said.

"You're spending time, energy and money doing something that doesn't have a lot of evidence behind it. We found it does make you feel good but you don't need to pay thousands to do it."

Okay, so back to me...

I did my manifestation course about two months ago, and I have done as I was instructed - my abundance board is up in sight inside the flat, and I often have a cup of coffee in front of it.

But, so far I'm still using a credit card, the most travelling I've done has been to work and back and there is still no rock on my finger. I have been given an annual pay rise, though, and would say I am less stressed.

Perhaps believing that I'm just doing my best and there's a chance that I'll be rewarded for that one day, eventually, in the future, maybe, is making me feel better... who knows?

Each week, Money blog readers share their thoughts on the subjects we've been covering, and over the last seven days your correspondence has been dominated by these topics...

• Iceland's new slogan
• Rising mortgage rates
• Giving kids cash for grades

Iceland's new catchphrase

We learnt on Monday that Iceland had dropped its tagline "That's why mums go to Iceland", replacing it with "That's why we go to Iceland".

The move was made to reflect the store is for everybody, said brand ambassador Josie Gibson. Readers were split - with some feeling so strongly that they're prepared, they suggest, to sacrifice those frozen Greggs steak bakes forever...

I previously contacted Iceland about their slogan because I didn't think it did single dads justice, as dads can go to Iceland too. Their response was that people understood that it's not just mums that go to Iceland. It's about time they changed the message. Dave T  

Neither I, my wife or my children will shop in Iceland again due to this stupidness and woke attitude. To hell with you [Iceland boss] Richard Walker. John  

Banks hike mortgage rates

This week we reported that high street lenders such as Halifax, TSB, NatWest, Barclays, Leeds Building Society, HSBC and Coventry had all hiked mortgage rates. 

You said...

With house prices at already extortionate levels, now mortgage rates rising again, is there any hope for first-time buyers? Honestly, the situation is so bleak, people may need to consider other countries. GenZ 

Why would this happen? So many young couples struggling to get on the property ladder. I live in Dorset - a one-bedroom flat costs from £230,000. In Scotland, one can get a beautiful two-bed house for that price. Feel sorry for all couples living down in the South. Need huge deposits. Barbs

Why are they called high-street banks? Most banks in my town have closed. Martin J

Parents offering cash for good grades

A lot of views came in after our feature exploring the positives and negatives of parents incentivising good school grades with cash...

We had scores of comments on this - with a fairly even split...

We did it for our son at GCSE time. We think it made a difference of about a grade on most subjects. Got a two-grade lift on maths. Cost us £350. Thought it was good value as it has taught him how things work in the world. Andy

The whole world is built on a reward system which symbolises access to money commensurate with effort and excellence. The Nobel prize goes with a cash reward! Tom Deggs

Employees are offered incentives for achieving targets, so why not offer kids incentives for better grades? Claire228 

But others had concerns...

I think it puts too much pressure on kids who are under enough pressure at exam time. Parents should encourage their kids to do the best they can, not add to their stress levels. Emma

Children should value their education without it being monetised. My parents expected my brother and I to have the motivation, maturity and self-discipline to work hard for our GCSEs. We both achieved all As and A*s. Eliza 

When I was at school, from 1964-83, my parents never gave me money for good exam results, because "I should want to do well for myself". No matter what my grades were, they said that they would be proud of me if I had tried my best. Cash kills self-motivation. Nicola B 

The money story of the week has been mortgage rates - with a host of major lenders announcing hikes amid fears the Bank of England may delay interest rate cuts.

Swap rates - which dictate how much it costs to lend money - have risen on the back of higher than expected US inflation data, and concerns this could delay interest rate cuts there. 

US trends often materialise elsewhere - though many economists are still expecting a base rate cut from 5.25% to 5% in the UK in June.

The reliable Bloomberg reported this week: "Still, while some economists have since scaled back their predictions for BOE cuts, most haven't changed expectations for a summer move.

"Analysts at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group, Capital Economics and Bloomberg Economics are all among those still anticipating a shift toward easing in June."

The publication also quoted Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, as saying: "Markets have superimposed the US cycle on the UK, but the US and UK are on very different tracks.

"The UK is coming out of technical recession. Inflation is falling more convincingly. Pay settlements are following inflation expectations. And crucially, real policy rates in the UK will be higher than in the US."

None of this reassurance changes the fact that financial markets, which dictate swap rates, are pricing in delays.

This week's hikes came from Halifax, BM Solutions, TSB, NatWest, Virgin, Barclays, Accord, Leeds Building Society, HSBC and Coventry.

This is what average mortgage rates looked like as of Thursday...

The next Bank of England decision on rates comes on 9 May - and pretty much no one is expecting a cut from the 16-year high of 5.25% at that stage.

The Money blog is your place for consumer news, economic analysis and everything you need to know about the cost of living - bookmark news.sky.com/money.

It runs with live updates every weekday - while on Saturdays we scale back and offer you a selection of weekend reads.

Check them out this morning and we'll be back on Monday with rolling news and features.

The Money team is Emily Mee, Bhvishya Patel, Jess Sharp, Katie Williams, Brad Young and Ollie Cooper, with sub-editing by Isobel Souster. The blog is edited by Jimmy Rice.

The family home where Captain Sir Tom Moore walked 100 laps to raise nearly £40m for the NHS during the first COVID lockdown is up for sale for £2.25m.

The Grade II-listed Old Rectory is described as a "magnificent seven-bedroom property" by estate agents Fine & Country.

In a video tour of the house, a sculpture of Captain Tom with his walking frame can be seen in the hallway, while a photo of the fundraising hero being knighted by the Queen is on a wall in the separate coach house building.

Introducing the property, an estate agent says in the tour video: "I'm sure you'll recognise this iconic and very famous driveway behind me as it was home to the late Captain Sir Tom Moore who walked 100 laps of his garden, raising over £37m for NHS charities."

It comes less than three months after the demolition of an unauthorised spa pool block in the grounds of the property in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire.

Speaking at an appeal hearing over that spa, Scott Stemp, representing Captain Tom's daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore and her husband, said the foundation named after the fundraising hero "is to be closed down" following a Charity Commission probe launched amid concerns about its management.

For the full story, click here ...

"Status symbol" pets are being given up by owners who get scared as they grow up, an animal charity has said, with the cost of living possibly paying a part in a rise in separations.

The Exotic Pet Refuge, which homes parrots, monkeys, snakes and alligators among others, says it receives referrals across the country, including from zoos and the RSPCA.

"They're a status symbol. People will say, 'OK, I'll have an alligator or a 10ft boa constrictor'," co-owner Pam Mansfield told the BBC.

"But when the animal gets big, they will get too frightened to handle them, and then the pet has to go."

She added people who want to get rid of the pets sometimes call zoos for help, which then call on her charity.

In some cases, owners don't have licences to own dangerous animals, she says, blaming a "lack of understanding" for what she says is a rise in the number of exotic animals needing to be rehomed.

She says people "just don't have the space" for some snakes, for example, with some growing to as much as 12ft and needing their own room.

The cost of living crisis has also forced owners to give their pets away, she says.

Her charity has also been affected by those increased costs, with the electricity bill rising to £10,000 a month at their highest, to fund things like heated pools for alligators.

Private car parks are accused of "confusing drivers" after introducing a new code of conduct - despite "doing all they can" to prevent an official government version.

The code of practice launched by two industry bodies - British Parking Association and the International Parking Community - includes a ten-minute grace period for motorists to leave a car park after the parking period they paid for ends.

It also features requirements for consistent signage, a single set of rules for operators on private land and an "appeals charter".

Private parking businesses have been accused of using misleading and confusing signs, aggressive debt collection and unreasonable fees.

That comes after a government-backed code of conduct was withdrawn in June 2022, after a legal challenges by parking companies.

RAC head of policy Simon Williams said: "We're flabbergasted that the BPA and the IPC have suddenly announced plans to introduce their own private parking code after doing all they can over the last five years to prevent the official government code created by an act of Parliament coming into force.

"While there are clearly some positive elements to what the private parking industry is proposing, it conveniently avoids some of the biggest issues around caps on penalty charges and debt recovery fees which badly need to be addressed to prevent drivers being taken advantage of."

BPA chief executive Andrew Pester said: "This is a crucial milestone as we work closely with government, consumer bodies and others to deliver fairer and more consistent parking standards for motorists."

IPC chief executive Will Hurley said: "The single code will benefit all compliant motorists and will present clear consequences for those who decide to break the rules."

Sky News has learnt the owner of Superdry's flagship store is weighing up a legal challenge to a rescue plan launched by the struggling fashion retailer.

M&G, the London-listed asset manager, has engaged lawyers from Hogan Lovells to scrutinise the restructuring plan.

The move by M&G, which owns the fashion retailer's 32,000 square foot Oxford Street store, will not necessarily result in a formal legal challenge - but sources say it's possible.

Read City editor Mark Kleinman 's story here...

NatWest says its mortgage lending nearly halved at the start of the year as it retreated from parts of the market when competition among lenders stepped up.

New mortgage lending totalled £5.2bn in the first three months of 2024, the banking group has revealed, down from £9.9bn the previous year.

The group, which includes Royal Bank of Scotland and Coutts, also reported an operating pre-tax profit of £1.3bn for the first quarter, down 27% from £1.8bn the previous year.

An unexplained flow of British luxury cars into states neighbouring Russia continued into February, new data shows.

About £26m worth of British cars were exported to Azerbaijan, making the former Soviet country the 17th biggest destination for UK cars - bigger than long-established export markets such as Ireland, Portugal and Qatar.

Azerbaijan's ascent has coincided almost to the month with the imposition of sanctions on the export of cars to Russia.

Read the rest of economics and data editor Ed Conway 's analysis here...

Rishi Sunak has hailed the arrival of pay day with a reminder his government's additional National Insurance tax cut kicks in this month for the first time.

At last month's budget, the chancellor announced NI will be cut by a further 2p - so some workers will pay 8% of their earnings instead of the 12% if was before autumn.

The prime minister has repeated his claim this will be worth £900 for someone on the average UK salary.

While this additional cut - on top of the previous 2p cut in January - does equate to £900 for those on average full-time earnings of £35,000, there are two key issues with Mr Sunak's claim:

• Once the effect of all income tax changes since 2021 are taken into account, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reports an average earner will benefit from a tax cut of £340 - far less than £900;
• Moreover, anyone earning less than £26,000 or between £55,000-£131,000 will ultimately be worse off.

In short, this is because NI cuts are more than offset by other tax rises.

We explain below how this is the case...

Tax thresholds

This is partly down to tax thresholds - the amount you are allowed to earn before you start paying tax (and national insurance) and before you start paying the higher rate of tax - will remain frozen. 

This means people end up paying more tax than they otherwise would, when their pay rises with inflation but the thresholds don't keep up. 

This phenomenon is known as "fiscal drag" and it's often called a stealth tax because it's not as noticeable immediately in your pay packet.

That low threshold of £12,570 has been in place since April 2021. 

The Office for Budget Responsibility says if it had increased with inflation it would be set at £15,220 for 2024/25.

If that were the case, workers could earn an extra £2,650 tax-free each year.

Less give, more take

Sky News analysis shows someone on £16,000 a year will pay £607 more in total - equivalent to more than three months of average household spending on food. 

Their income level means national insurance savings are limited but they are paying 20% in income tax on an additional £2,650 of earnings.

In its analysis , the IFS states: "In aggregate the NICs cuts just serve to give back a portion of the money that is being taken away through other income tax and NICs changes - in particular, multi-year freezes to tax thresholds at a time of high inflation."

Overall, according to the institute, for every £1 given back to workers by the National Insurance cuts, £1.30 will have been taken away due to threshold changes between 2021 and 2024.

This rises to £1.90 in 2027.

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