My courses generally take up questions about race, resistance, and systemic oppression in literary and cultural texts and digital spaces. These courses are generally informed by my specific interests in Asian American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Digital Humanities. While course objectives are tailored to the specific courses, I believe that a broad goal of the Humanities classroom is to teach students how to reflect on their own lives as global citizens who are embedded in local and national communities and social practices.
SAMPLE COURSE DESCRIPTION
Digital Literary Studies
This course traces the shifting landscape of literary studies in a digital age. In investigating the “encounter” between the digital and the literary (as Alan Liu puts it), students will examine digital forms and genres, particularly hypertext, the digital archive, and e-literature, which are indicative of the changing nature of the literary text. We also focus on how digital forms and digital methods can enhance our study of traditional literary texts. Our corpus constitutes of a set of texts drawn from multi-ethnic U.S. literature and world literature, and we will examine how digital approaches to these texts can animate research on migration, exile, race, gender, diaspora, and globalization. Despite the importance of digital forms and methods to our course, our central concern remains humanistic: we are invested in understanding how immigrants and refugees navigate systems of oppression, and their lived experiences of political violence, discrimination, economic insecurity, and families and relationships.
COURSES TAUGHT
- Methods in Digital Humanities
- Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature
- American Literature
- World Literature
- Race, Gender, and Technology
- English Composition
Dhanashree Thorat 