Julie Johannes

Principal Lecturer, English

School of Communication and English

College of Liberal Arts

jmwgla@rit.edu

585-475-2467

Office Location

LBR-2315

Julie Johannes

Principal Lecturer, English

School of Communication and English

College of Liberal Arts

Education

BA, State University College at Geneseo; MA, University of Rochester

Bio

My teaching and scholarly interests center on the ways stories, genres, media, and technologies shape how we understand and represent the world around us. A particular focus is detective and mystery fiction, including the evolution of the genre from its nineteenth-century origins through Golden Age detective fiction, noir and neo-noir, and contemporary adaptations and reinventions. My work explores relationships among literature and other media, including film, television, games, and digital forms, with particular attention to adaptation, storytelling, and the ways genres change as they move across historical periods and media.

I also examine artificial intelligence and its intersections with writing, literature, education, and creative practice. My teaching increasingly considers both the possibilities and the complications introduced by generative AI: how these technologies affect the ways we read, write, research, revise, create, and understand authorship. More broadly, my professional interests include popular culture, postmodern and contemporary literature, and emerging forms of storytelling and textual production. Across these areas, I focus on helping students make connections among critical analysis, creative practice, technology, and the rapidly changing ways stories are produced and encountered.

I currently serve as Program Director for the BS in English and am committed to helping students understand the breadth of an English degree, develop their individual paths through the discipline, and recognize the many academic, creative, and professional possibilities available to them.

Outside the classroom, I am an enthusiastic reader of literary fiction, detective and mystery stories, memoir, and creative nonfiction. I also enjoy international travel, learning languages, crossword puzzles, board games, running, aviation, opera, and hockey.

jmwgla@rit.edu

585-475-2467

Currently Teaching

ENGL-101

English Studies

1 Credit

This course will introduce students to the field of English Studies and the kinds of reading, writing, and critical thinking practices central to the field today. English Studies, consolidated as a field in the 19th century in European and American Universities, has evolved well beyond its initial focus on English-language literatures, language practices, and socio-linguistic concerns while retaining its primary concern with literature, language-arts, linguistics, rhetorical practices, and their participation in broader national and global cultures and subcultures.

ENGL-210

Literature and Cultural Studies

3 Credits

In this course, students will study literature, movements, and writers within their cultural contexts and in relation to modes of literary production and circulation. Students will hone their skills as attentive readers and will engage with literary analysis and cultural criticism. The class will incorporate various literary, cultural, and interdisciplinary theories--such as psychoanalytic theory, feminist and queer theories, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory. Using these theoretical frameworks in order to study texts, students will gain a strong foundation for analyzing the ways literary language functions and exploring the interrelations among literature, culture, and history. In doing so, they will engage issues involving culture, identity, language, ethics, race, gender, class, and globalism, among many others.

ENGL-309

Topics in Literary Forms

3 Credits

This course explores the evolution of an influential literary form (the short story, drama, poetry, autobiographical literature, or the novel). Reading a series of variations on this literary form, likely bridging cultural or historical contexts or themes, the course develops critical perspectives and artistic insights into this genre of writing. Criticism and theory appropriate to the genre will be discussed as a way to understand the form, its social functions, and its cultural and political significance. The course can be taken up to two times, for a total of 6 semester credit hours, as long as the topics are different.

ENGL-373

Media Adaptation

3 Credits

This course introduces students to the field of adaptation studies and explores the changes that occur as particular texts such as print, radio, theatre, television, film, and videogames move between various cultural forms and amongst different cultural contexts. The course focuses upon works that have been disseminated in more than one medium.

ENGL-500

Capstone in English

3 Credits

Students will use the capstone as an opportunity to design a project that integrates the knowledge they have gained throughout their English program with experience in the professional track. Students will work with faculty to develop, manage, and execute a project that will culminate in the creation of an academic research paper, analysis of text using digital methods, construction of an argument across media, demonstration of theoretical and/or aesthetic language use in digital form, portfolio of previously written coursework that is revised with reflective introduction, or creative work in text or digital form . Students will work with course instructor and/or faculty mentor on project design, creation and reflection . Students will present their project in a venue appropriate to their specific work.