For Undergraduate Students
Current students: be sure to check your UTA email for information. Please use my official UTA email address for all inquiries regarding current courses or letters of recommendation: alaimo@uta.edu. Please do not use Facebook for anything "business" related. (For reasons of professional ethics, I cannot be a FB friend to anyone currently enrolled in my classes.) Students of the past: send me an email and let me know what and how you are doing!
My office hours for Spring 2012: Tuesdays12:30-2:30 and Thursdays 12:30-1:00 and 5:00-6:00. And by appointment. Please email for appointment. [Note: sometimes I will need to be in meetings or dissertation defenses during those times.]
Fall 2012:
English 3366: Topics in Literature and Environment: Environmental Film and Ecotheory. T/TH 9:30-10:50. [This course counts for the English major and for the ESS--Environmental and Sustainability Studies-- Minor.]
English 4399: Senior Seminar: Modern American Poetry. T/TH 11:00-12:20.
Office hours for Fall 2012: T/TH: 12:30-2:00, starting the first week of classes.
Spring 2012
The Hermanns Lectures, focusing on Animal Studies will be held Friday March 30th, 2012. Students enrolled in my courses will have the opportunity to hear some of the leading scholars in the field of animal studies and the environmental humanities. Confirmed speakers include: Allison Hunter, Peggy McCracken, Cary Wolfe, and Neill Matheson. Click here for more information!
Undergraduate courses Spring 2012:
ENGL 3366: TR 11-12:20: Animal Studies
Please check your UTA email for the syllabus and other course information!
[Counts for the Environment and Sustainability Studies Minor.] Course Description: This course will focus on the representation of animals in literature and film, raising philosophical and ethical questions about how humans define, imagine, value, and interact with, other animals. We will read and discuss essays, poetry, and the following novels, Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, Jack London, Call of the Wild; Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone; Eva Hornung, Dog Boy; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake. We will also watch the films, Winged Migration, Grizzly Man, Being Caribou and Sharkwater. Topics will include animal advocacy and sentiment, animal perspectives, primitivism and the wild, postmodern animals, human/animal boundary crossing, and animal art. We will be fortunate to hear superb speakers in the Hermann's lecture series on "Animal Studies," Friday March 30th! Requirements include: midterm exam, short paper, final project, final exam.
To see sample undergraduate student projects click on "Teaching," in the panel to the right.
Writing and citation resources for all students:
- UTA Writing Center; Take advantage of this resource!
- MLA Formatting: Purdue Online Writing Lab
- Remember that the MLA Bibliography should be your first research resource for literary studies.
- If you'd like to work on your writing, I would highly recommend Richard Lanham's book Revising Prose.
For students interested in sustainability and environmentalism:
For a wealth of information about sustainability on university and college campuses see the AASHE (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education) website. You may wish to consider a career in the growing field of sustainability or another environmentally-related position. See Orion's Green Jobs list.
For more information about academic programs, events, and other opportunities to get involved in sustainability and environmentalism at UTA click here for the Mavericks Go Green web pages. UTA has an active student group, The Environmental Society, with a FB page.
UTA now offers an exciting new interdisciplinary minor in Environmental and Sustainability Studies! If you have taken a course in the English department that focused on the environment, this course will probably count toward the minor. Click here for more information. I am currently serving as the Coordinator for this minor.
Internship and Volunteer Opportunities in Ocean Conservation
[Check with the Advisor in your major for information about whether these internships would receive credit from UTA. Note that many of these internships seek people with strong communication skills, including written, electronic, and verbal communication skills.]
Click on the following organizations for more information.
Letters of recommendation (undergraduates): If you would like to ask me for a letter of recommendation, please gather up all the written work you did in my classes, with my comments, along with copies of your statement of purpose and resume or c.v. and put them in a folder in my campus mailbox for me to review. Please make it clear what sort of positions or graduate programs you are applying for. Note that even though students are sometimes advised to "get letters" from faculty, nearly all jobs and graduate programs require confidential letters sent directly to them, so obtaining letters yourself does not work. If I agree to write the letter, please provide an organized folder of materials, with all the deadlines clearly listed. Make sure to fill out all forms as much as possible and include addressed envelopes. If the letters are to be submitted electronically, please provide me with *one* clear email explaining everything (not multiple, scattered, fragments.) Allow three weeks for processing or at least a month during the summer when I may be out of town. If you are applying for graduate school or law school you will want several faculty members to critique your statement of purpose and c.v., as many programs are extremely competitive. If you need to send letters to more than two schools you should consider using Interfolio or a similar dossier service.Please note that the only time I can write letters of recommendation for graduate programs, law schools, etc. is from September through November 15th. I will not be able to write letters from mid-November through February. Please plan ahead and be organized.