University Writing Program

Among animals, individuals choose mates based on biologically informative features such as long colorful tail feathers, large canines, or a red, swollen posterior. We typically assume that human attraction (and love) is much more nuanced and complex ... but is it? Many features that humans find beautiful or attractive, such as small waists, curvy hips, and large eyes, can be tied to biological explanations. Even behavioral features, such as nurturing behaviors, may be attractive for adaptive reasons. In this course, we will explore and write about biological explanations for these and many other aspects of human attraction. Using an evolutionary perspective, we will examine global patterns of attraction and challenge stereotypes of beauty. Do nice guys really finish last? Do traditionally attractive features in western cultures — such as low body weight — actually provide an evolutionary benefit, or might some preferences be culturally derived? For the final essay, students will supplement library research with data collection to produce an interdisciplinary research paper.

Elissa Jacobs

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Forensic science has helped to identify the dead, to solve crimes, and to bring culprits to justice. Forensic techniques, later discredited, have also led to false convictions: a man     was found guilty of rape and spent decades in prison before DNA tests confirmed his innocence; a convicted arsonist was proven innocent but had been exe­cuted years earlier.

This course invites students to explore the achievements and shortcomings of forensic science. We will investigate the work of forensic scientists, take a look at real-life cases to learn about the history and effectiveness of investigative techniques, and analyze how forensic science has been portrayed (and transformed) in popular television series such as CSI or Bones.  

Katrin Fischer

Humans often consider themselves to be "the moral animal," distinguished from other animals by our complex and socially derived systems of morality, characterized by empathy and cooperation. However, when comparing humans with the rest of the animal world, are we really so different? In this course, we will examine through discussion and writing the degree to which human morality is grounded in our evolutionary past. We will explore the development of human morality during childhood and adulthood through the lens of evolution and will look at classic scientific tests of morality/ethics (e.g., the trolley problem). Additionally, we will engage with evidence for morality in non-human species and probe the degree to which our primate relatives engage in altruistic, empathetic, and moral behaviors. During the final paper, students will have the freedom to choose their own topic and to utilize interdisciplinary literature in their exploration of the nature and nurture of morality. Usually offered every year.

Elissa Jacobs

Storytelling plays a crucial role in our lives. We draw on stories to make meaning of ourselves and others, to shed light on our experiences, and to express who we are or would like to be. The same holds true for businesses. Storytelling is not only a core competency of business leaders but an indispensable component of functional organizations. Successful companies take pride in compelling stories; troubled companies tend to lack institutional stories and a culture of storytelling. Capable business leaders are effective storytellers, and strategic storytelling has been a proven means of initiating change and of turning companies around. This course invites students to investigate the power of stories and storytelling in business contexts. By analyzing texts from various media, we will discuss questions such as: What characterizes effective stories? What is the importance of storytelling and story-making in companies? How can storytelling bring about organizational change? Which traits do storytellers and business leaders share? What is the connection between storytelling and leadership?

Katrin Fischer

Over the past year, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen an increasing reliance on public health data to inform public policies, monitor progress, and guide individuals’ health decisions. Public health data has been spun into narratives about right versus wrong, infographics that motivate action, and graphs that illustrate trends, among others. Since we’ve been inundated with quantitative data, you likely know what it’s like to experience data as an audience member, however in this course, you’ll become the composer with data at your communicative disposal. This course will encourage you to think about questions like: What is public health data? How is data generated and collected? How is public health data used or misused in academic, professional, and societal contexts? How do writers frame data to achieve certain ends? How does data visualization relate to communication? We will explore these questions across a variety of texts including CDC and NIH publications, TedTalks, and academic articles. After analyzing public health data use in different genres, you’ll then embark on your own quantitative reasoning journey by crafting a research essay that incorporates public health data and strategic data visualization. 

According to Charles Darwin, “A naturalist’s life would be a happy one if [they] had only to observe and never to write.” Unfortunately (or fortunately!), much of a naturalist’s practice involves writing. In fact, the same holds true for those in other scientific fields — scientists must not only do science, but they, too, must write science. But what exactly are professional scientists writing? What motivates their composing and to whom do they write? What rhetorical choices do scientists make when communicating complex information? In this course, we’ll examine the discursive and generic requirements scientists face when composing in different contexts for different audiences. By considering a number of professional scientific genres — including research articles, grant applications, poster presentations, and public talks — we will explore questions of accessibility, writerly agency, persuasion, and objectivity. You’ll even have the opportunity to interview faculty members in the disciplines to learn about the writing tasks you might encounter as a working professional in your field. By the end of this course, you’ll have a more sophisticated understanding of professional writing in the sciences, and as such, you’ll be asked to produce two distinct genres of writing that take up the same research topic, albeit for different audiences and different communicative purposes. 

This section of UWS focuses on “Environmental Justice,” which encompasses the equal access of all people, regardless of race, ethnic origin, or socio-economic status, to the benefits of nature as well as the equitable distribution of environmental harms.  It gives visibility and voice to those who have been historically marginalized and suffered the most from environmental hazards and the effects of climate change: communities of color, indigenous peoples, and the poor.  The course invites students to examine power inequities, historical contexts, and scientific concepts to understand the causes and effects of environmental injustices and environmental racism.  It also invites students to explore stories of resilience and hope by researching, learning, and writing about inspirational individuals, groups, and movements who have taken action for a more just and equitable future. 

Video games afford opportunities to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds in an interactive and engaging manner. The creativity and imagination behind game design necessitate the interaction of a wide range of skills: coding, graphic design, storytelling, musical composition, and sound design.

How is it that we can spend hours picking up virtual weeds in Animal Crossing, be fearful of turtle shells in Mario Kart, or experience immense satisfaction when leveling up our Pokemon or beating a boss in Dark Souls? This course addresses these questions by tracing the development of video games from the early pixelated heroes of Mario and Pac-Man to online spaces that involve the global participation of millions of people, such as League of Legends and Call of Duty. Students are required to think critically about the virtual worlds they inhabit and consider how video games implement play, immersion, and engagement and how their unique function as an interactive medium has evolved throughout the latter half of the 20th century to the present day. The interdisciplinary nature of game studies allows students to think and write critically on an array of topics concerning narrative, immersion, gender, music, technology, and game design

James Heazlewood-Dale

When something goes viral, it spreads. The pandemic has triggered a medical awareness of social distancing and community spread, but it has also instigated mob mentality and rampant misinformation through technological sharing. How do these concepts of contagion function? How do they impact individuals and communities, making connections while also causing marginalization? Can they be controlled? We will investigate how ideas and disease are spread, their short-term and long-term consequences, and the measures taken in response. Course readings and media will encourage students to think critically about human behavior that creates and destroys viral community. Students will analyze and research cultural and historical examples from zombies, to Twitter, to witch trials through the interdisciplinary lens of epidemiology, sociology, and psychology. By applying rhetorical analysis to instances of uncontrollable forms of communication, students will learn and reflect on their own strategies of academic communication.

Laura Kremmel

This course considers music as a radical political tool for social justice. Guided by different genres of music and different social justice issues, we will listen to politically resonant songs in order to explore how music not only actively participates in and shapes our culture, but also offers modes of resistance to regimes of power. From the pro-labor and anti-war politics of folk music, the anti-establishment and anti-normative bents of punk, and the racial and social justice orientations of hip-hop, students will examine how music fights power, encourages activism, and effects social change. This course is designed in such a way that students may participate fully regardless of the level of their prior musical knowledge or experience. All of the music we will be examining involves texts that are linguistic, sonic, and occasionally, in the case of music videos, visual. Our study of these musical texts will be enhanced through various critical and theoretical approaches to the intersections of race, gender, and class. For final research papers, students will be encouraged to develop a research topic about music and social justice issues that are meaningful to them. 

Ethan King 

Our contemporary moment has been marked by various catastrophes and crises: the pandemic, the climate emergency, the refugee crisis, widening economic disparities, rising nationalist extremism, and racial inequalities and police violence. These crises have combined to create a present moment of profound uncertainty and growing unrest, and daily life has become undergirded by a rising tide of anxiety. Using contemporary events and recent cultural texts as sites of inquiry about the global tumult of our present, students will consider how the convergence of the everyday and the catastrophic frame our “new normal,” as well as how distinctions between normalcy and emergency are connected to media narratives, corporate agendas, and political rhetoric and policy. Altogether, the course invites students to examine our experience of the contemporary world from multiple lenses and encourages students to research, learn, write about, and potentially reimagine the social, economic, and environmental challenges of our time.

Ethan King

The ocean, the open road, and the automobile all entice us to travel. From Thelma and Louise, a female buddy road crime film, to acclaimed food critic Anthony Bourdain, who samples foods from across the globe, travel has long worked in popular culture to offer the tantalizing possibilities of reinvention, of getting lost, of escape into the new. However, travel is more than just a romantic fantasy about self-transformation. In fact, British travel essayist Pico Iyer argues that our travel experiences are always structured by our preconceptions about ourselves and the world; for Iyer, we can never completely escape from ourselves. Building on the ideas of Iyer and others, we will investigate what we do when we travel and the motivations that drive the urge to explore. How does travel relate to identity, gender, and self-discovery? In this course, we will probe this question and others by watching films and reading texts from a variety of genres and disciplines, examining the desires, pressures, and delusions that propel us to hit the open road or take flight. Building on ideas from the course, students will be encouraged to write papers that engage with issues related to travel and self-exploration that they find compelling.

Collin Cook

Despite being united by the common desire to win, few relationships in popular culture are as fraught as the relationship between athletes and the various organizational structures—teams, leagues, coaches, agents—of sports. Indeed, given the amount of money at stake, the sports industry’s many competing interests make it a productive case study for thinking about this ever-shifting balance of power. Beginning with the film Jerry Maguire, this course will track these ongoing power negotiations by looking at a variety of relationships within sports, attempting to understand how different actors—athletes, coaches, owners—try to win, maintain dominance, and get paid. How do organizations respond, for example, when individual players like Tom Brady and Aaron Rogers upset the traditional hierarchies that govern teams? Are some coaching styles—such as those of Steve Kerr or Phil Jackson—better suited than others to balancing the competing personalities and interests of professional sports? To further engage with the topics we discuss, students will be encouraged to write papers that grapple with sports-related questions and issues of power dynamics that are of interest to them.

Collin Cook

 The Times They Are A-Changin …When Bob Dylan wrote this song in the early1960s, it was the time of political and military upheaval in America. Dylan was trying to rally people to come together to bring about needed change in our society: culturally, socially, and politically. The decade marked revolutionary ideas and turmoil, and the most prevalent included individual freedoms, Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, the Viet Nam controversy, Woodstock, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Gay Liberation, and more. Students played a major role in bringing about change as campus protests occurred across America. To explore their role, we will start by examining primary sources and personal narratives between 1960 and 1974 from the extensive archive at Brandeis. Through a series of writing assignments, this UWS will provide students an opportunity to examine the Sixties phenomena, first through the lens of music, then through a comparative analysis of controversies, and finally through research into movements that accomplished social change. 

Marsha Nourse

As Disability Studies scholar, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, writes, “If we live long enough, we will all become disabled,” and the CDC claims that as many as 1 in 4 adults may experience what they would define as a disability at some point in their lives. If disability is so common, how much do representations of disability reflect this reality? What do they tell us about societal attitudes and expectations about disability? What are the power dynamics at work in such representations? Who gets to control narratives of disability, and what impressions do they give audiences? In this section of UWS, we will explore visual and written rhetorics of disability, applying some of Garland-Thomson’s theories as a lens to read representations in TV, advertisements, and creative non-fiction. We will discuss the two major models of disability—medical and social—and how they function. In the second half of the course, students will learn about Universal Design and research a particular area of interest within this exciting and innovative social transformation initiative. They will engage with multiple disciplines as they research a particular problem that can be improved with universal design and propose a solution as part of their argument. By writing about these topics, students will practice skills in analysis, information literacy, and critical thinking while uncovering the impact representation and design have on diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Laura Kremmel

This course offers an examination of hip-hop as a form of social commentary, focusing on how hip-hop artists use their music to address social, political, and cultural issues. Through readings, discussions, and listening exercises, we will explore how hip-hop artists have commented on topics such as racism, police brutality, poverty, and other social issues.

Students will be encouraged to engage in critical thinking and discussion about the social issues addressed in hip-hop music, and to analyze how these messages are conveyed through the music. 

By the end of the course, students will have an understanding of how hip-hop can be used as a form of social commentary, and will have developed the skills necessary to analyze any genre of text that addresses social issues.

 Joshua Lederman

In recent news, Adnan Syed – the lead figure in the seminal true crime podcast Serial – was released from prison after 23 years. Syed had been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his girlfriend, Hay Min Lee, but the podcast shed enough doubt on the conviction that a court eventually overturned it, leading to Syed’s release. At the same time, many have noted that the emergence of true crime podcasts and docuseries has its roots in the exploitation of people’s misery for the entertainment of the masses (and the financial benefit of the media outlets). In this course, we will examine the ethics of this genre. We will read texts in ethical philosophy (authors like Kant, James, and Mill), as well as arguments about true crime series themselves. In the end, we will have examined some of our own beliefs about right and wrong, and will have conducted a critical investigation into the culture that surrounds us. 

 Joshua Lederman

The Zombie genre is a staple of horror. But in the same way that most art is a reflection of society, authors, filmmakers and creators have used the Zombie hoard to interrogate important issues in society. Max Brook’s World War Z is really a critique of the failures of global disaster preparedness. George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has been broadly interpreted as a meditation on consumer culture. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend asks the question “what does it mean to be human?” The Un-dead are a blank canvas, ready to become what we believe them to be. In this way, they are an effective vehicle for cultural commentary. This class will use novels, comics, film and television to investigate the zombie genre as a form of social critique. Topics will include immigration and migration, disaster preparedness, sickness and death, the essence of humanity, mourning and loss, and climate change. This class will also draw on scholarly literature in history, English, medicine, sociology, and anthropology.

Sara Beth Gable

Autobiography is an extremely popular genre among comics artists. Masterpieces like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home are now common inclusions in high school and college curricula. These works share an uncanny ability to take difficult subjects — e.g. warfare, violence, and family trauma — and portray them in a human dimension that is accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds. Other texts in the genre depict lighter subject matter, but these also claim to represent the past through images drawn much later in time than the episodes that they depict actually occurred. What is it about comics as a medium that draws artists to reflect on their personal experiences and enchants readers to engage? What should we make of the connection between lived reality and its portrayal in comics? Are comics more or less “real” than other media like text, photography, film, and paint? 

In this course, we will pair autobiographical comics with theory from various disciplines: art and visual representation, history and narrativization, and psychology and memory studies. Students will be encouraged to write papers that investigate the relationship between comics, the self, and the notion of truth.

Rafael Abrahams

Yes and no. On the one hand, each writing seminar has the same types of assignments and course policies. On the other hand, each seminar uses a different topic. 

Both options are viable, but students who take UWS in the fall can then apply what they’ve learned to their spring courses. Consult Academic Advising if you have further questions.

UWS is a full-credit course. It counts as one of the 32 courses required for graduation.

UWS instructors work closely with their students, providing one-on-one tutorials, sustained attention to individual development and extensive comments on drafts. With larger classes, instructors could not give this kind of individualized attention.

Depending on availability, students may change their UWS to another in the same semester.

UWS is a first-year requirement. If you do not fulfill it during your first year, you may be placed on academic probation.

An online writing assessment, taken in the spring before entering Brandeis, helps the Writing Program reach out to students who might most benefit from what the Composition Seminar has to offer. (Students wishing to enroll directly into CSEM without taking the online assessment may do so.)

International students must take UWS in their first or second semester at Brandeis. Nonnative English writers are strongly encouraged to sign up for free tutoring in the English Language Programs.

The Writing Center offers support for all students, including those enrolled in UWS, with 30- and 60-minute one-on-one tutorials available by appointment. The Writing Center also offers workshops on each of the major UWS assignments, including the lens paper and research paper.