Teaching
Courses
- Honors Academic Writing (115)
- Introduction to Folk Narrative (332)
- Louisiana Folklore (335)
- Narrative Games (370)
- America in Legend Online and Off (432)
- Seminar in Narrative Studies (531)
- Proseminar in Folklore Theory (632)
New Digital Culture & Analytics Curriculum Courses
Courses in Development (Coming Soon!)
Guides and Statements
There are some things all participants in a course I lead/facilitate need, or want, to know:
- If you need texts as data, start with here.
- Here’s my list of interview tips.
- If you are not quite sure what a literature review is and you are in a course that requires one, here’s a basic guide.
- Revising and editing go hand-in-hand.
- Speaking of editing, having a text editor that works for you is a good idea.
- You may use any citation system, preferably the one used by your major, so long as you do so consistently and competently. In the absence of any other system, please feel free to use the one employed by social scientists and humanists around the world known as the Chicago Author-Date System. (It’s easier, and makes more sense, than MLA.)
- Navigating the library proxy when connecting to online databases when you are off campus, and understanding the relationship between the library’s website and something like JSTOR can be confusing. Here’s some help.
- A (Kind of) Handbook on Writing includes sections on how to think of sentences and paragraphs as building blocks, on introductory paragraphs, on how to write summaries, and how to write thesis statements. If you need help with writing, and almost all of us do, then seek it out. Find me, find the Writing Lab, find an experienced writer – FTR, lawyers write a lot – or search the web in general or Medium or Youtube in particular.
- There is a common set of guidelines/requirements on how to be a participant in a course I facilitate. Read The Essentials.
- For my writing-intensive courses, which is almost all of them, I prefer to use Google Drive. Please make sure you have an account and you know not only how to create and edit documents, but you are also familiar with the reviewing functionality, which Google calls Suggesting. Google for Education has produced a video on how to research and write a paper using Google Docs, which also has useful tips on how to take and organize notes: Research and Writing.
- If you don’t know about Open Culture, then you should take a look. A variety of materials – audio books, textbooks – are available there. In particular, I regularly use their archive of films for teaching.
- Interested in the quantitative / digital humanities but don’t know where to start? There’s a page for that.
Texts & TEI
There are a number of texts which are regularly useful:
- AT 510: The Turkey Herder
- AT 513: Ein bato ki té koné navigué on la terre com on la mer
- Grimms 5
- Grimms 91
- Ray Hicks’ “Jack and the Fire Dragaman”
- Kenneth Burke’s “Literature as Equipment for Living”
- 27 Treasure Legends from Louisiana
There are also a couple of TEI files: a template and an example.
About These Materials
This site is designed to be available to course participants and interested others without having to negotiate LMS logins, or outages. It is built using Jekyll and is hosted in a GitHub repository.
While I try to make as much as possible available publicly, both for students in my courses as well as to interested others, some course materials must remain behind the university paywall (aka Moodle) due to copyright restrictions. (I take fair use seriously.) If you are a visiting student or scholar and would like access to those materials, please get in touch with me.
As I note elsewhere, this [site][] replaces an older WordPress blog which I maintained for over a decade and a half. I would like to thank the good folks at WordPress/Ottomatic for creating powerful software that is also open source.
As much as possible, most things on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Code (CC BY-SA 4.0).