New Syllabus: Ethnic American Digital Literature and Writing

Screenshot of syllabus with DEFCon logo superposed on it.

Last year, I received a Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) Fellowship to develop a course on Ethnic American Electronic Literature, with the interest of diversifying my beloved field with representation from historically underrepresented voices in the US and Canada. This is attuned to my recent work to diversify the field internationally and within the U.S. with the ELC3, the Antología Lit(e)Lat, and my recent research and presentations.

You can access the syllabus here.

This, and all my other course syllabi and course blogs, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, so feel free to download it and adapt it to your needs.

Acknowledgements

This course was catalyzed and partly supported by a small grant from the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon), for which I am very grateful. I had long wanted to develop a course like this and the DEFCon fellowship helped me focus my energies for this timely endeavor. Part of the support offered by the fellowship was having bi-weekly meetings with a mentor and I had an excellent one in Amanda Visconti. Thank you, Amanda, for thinking with me through the challenges, research, and mental processing needed to develop this course. The DEFCon Teaching Fellows meetings with Roopika Risam were also very valuable and helped me connect with a developing community and draw inspiration from their projects. I also received support from a graduate research assistant in my English Department, Cassidy Queen, who helped me gather data and identify authors from underrepresented ethnic minorities in this course. Thank you to the editors and curators of publications like the Electronic Literature Collection (Volume 4 is a treasure trove of diversity!), Antología Lit(e)Lat, Taper, The New River, Reviews in DH, and The NEXT, who have curated valuable works to assign in this course. Finally, I would like to thank the electronic literature and digital humanities communities for answering my call for help and offering valuable leads, which allowed me to discover artists I wasn’t aware of.

And the work is ongoing! I’m always eager to learn about writers and artists I wasn’t aware of, of all nationalities and ethnicities. Thank you all for your help with this first version of the syllabus, and for your future help that will lead to new iterations!

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By Leonardo Flores

Professor Leonardo Flores is Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He taught at the English Department at University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus from 1994 to 2019. He is President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry, co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and has a Spanish language e-lit column in 80 Grados. He is currently co-editing the first Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.