A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Todd S. Hasak-Lowy

Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

Education: BA, 1992, University of Michigan; PhD, 2002, University of California, Berkeley. Publications (Fiction): The Task Of The Translator (Harcourt, 2005); Captives (Spiegel & Grau, 2008); 33 Minutes (Aladdin, 2013); Me Being Me Is Exactly As Insane As You Being You (Simon Pulse, 2015). Publications (Nonfiction): We Are Power: How Nonviolent Activism Changed The World (Abrams, 2020). Publications (Academic): Here And Now: History, Nationalism, And Realism In Modern Hebrew Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2008). Publications (Co-written): SomewhereThere Is Still A Sun: A Memoir Of The Holocaust (with Michael Gruenbaum) (Aladdin, 2015); Roses And Radicals: The Epic Story Of How American Women Won The Right To Vote (with Susan Zimet) (Viking, 2018). Awards: Risa Domb/Porjes Prize for Hebrew Translation (2013); Finalist, National Jewish Book Award for SOMEWHERE THERE IS STILL A SUN (2016).

 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course reads major historical catastrophes as represented in comics (graphic novels or graphic memoirs). Students will explore the ways this medium conducts a dialogue between history and memory, on the one hand, and image and text, on the other.
Course texts include Art Spiegelman's Maus, Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do, Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza, and Nora Krug's Belonging. Students will also read theoretical material on comcis (e.g. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics) as well as standard historiography on the various historical events at the center of each book/comic we read.
Students will write two short essays (2-3 pages), one creative project, and one 7 page final essay.

Class Number

2278

Credits

3

Description

A study of the nature of the novel as an invented form of literary art. This course typically includes works by a variety of authors representative of a wide range of cultures and historical periods, so that the variety of the novel is explored.

Class Number

2274

Credits

3

Description

This course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of nonviolence. Students will study nonviolence as a philosophy of social and political change, in large part by reading the writings of important nonviolent theorists and activists, including Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Vaclav Havel. We will also explore the history of specific nonviolent movements, in which this theory has been applied and tested, with special focus on the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In their own project, students will investigate the potential and limits of nonviolent change by researching other nonviolent movements in order to answer questions that arise during our study of this rich, complex topic.

Class Number

1484

Credits

3

Description

NARRATIVE DESIGN. What makes a story? How does form reveal meaning? How do narrative structures orient a reader to what?s important in a text? This is a workshop in fiction writing with a built-in, inescapable, in-your-face focus on narrative design. Concepts to include arc, plot, scene, rate of revelation, modular, linear and lyric structures. The readings focus on concepts that the workshops will integrate as we roll along. Don't take this class unless you have already drafted two stories.

Class Number

2084

Credits

3

Description

This workshop focuses on the mechanics and politics of style. We'll look at commonplace virtues such as 'clarity,' 'energy,' 'fresh expression' and try to understand, technically, what is meant by these terms and, culturally, how they're constructed so as to appear desirable or natural. Readings in cultural theory, but emphasis on writing well: when looking at a sentence, how to put the thingamiggy here and what happens if you move the whosits there. Students will write in class and do wildly satisfying exercises on sentence rhythm, subordination and coordination, metaphor, and diction.

Class Number

2381

Credits

3