​Sheri-Marie Harrison

English 3420: Black Women's Non-Fiction 

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In this course we will study the intersection of the personal and the political in black women’s non-fiction. We will read The History of Mary Prince by Mary Prince, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, Becoming by Michelle Obama, Citizen by Claudia Rankine and Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis, to think about the range of themes, topics, and forms engaged by black women in their writing. We will also think about how these have shifted across history from the slave narrative form to contemporary non-fiction by black women writers.

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English 4100: Genres - Gothic

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This course is an introduction to the history of gothic literature with special attention to the ways the gothic understands racial, class, and other forms of difference. We will begin with what is often considered to be the founding work of the gothic literary  tradition, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), and continue with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Helen Oyeyemi White Is for Witching (2009), along with two short stories: "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe (1839) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892).

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