Intersectional Syllabus Design

Intersectional Syllabus Design

Eric Weiskott, Boston College

I organized my introduction to British literature syllabus around social identities: bards and beer halls, ladies, visionaries and prisoners, Puritans and rakes, and so forth. I tended to do pairs. It worked as a way of putting social power at the center of our discussions every day, and I think it addressed students’ inherent desire to know the people behind/in course texts. Moreover, creating those units inevitably suggested new people and texts to assign, not just the usual canonical ones. I used the Broadview anthology because it had good coverage of non-English-language texts. Finally, the units were cumulative, so that by the end we were equipped to read for race, gender, class, religious identity, and so on in combination.

Type of course: Lower Level; General Education/Literature for Non-Majors; Literature Survey; In-Person
Time required: A few hours of syllabus design before the semester begins