My teaching focuses on 20th and 21st century literature in a variety of contexts, from Anglo-American poetic traditions to literature and human rights to literature, sociology, and social theory. In addition, I have taught thematic courses on academic writing at Dartmouth College and as part of the Warrior Scholar Project from 2016-2021, and emphasize writing skills in all of my syllabi. At Bard College and University of Chicago, I have taught key required courses in literature and the social sciences; I have also acted as a preceptor for BA theses. A sample of course descriptions in which I am instructor of record are as follows:
Bard College, Spring 2023
Rights Beyond Humans: Speculative Worlds and Science Fiction
In this course, students will explore issues central to contemporary Human Rights discourses through the lens of alternate, imagined worlds, proximate to ours yet not our own. While such discourses often, and importantly, rely upon the consensus that human rights are inherent, we will practice defamiliarizing and reexamining the multiple meanings of categories such as “the universal,” “the human,” “the citizen,” and “the alien” as well as the production of socially constructed concepts and lived realities such as race and gender. Combining theoretical texts with works of speculative and science fiction, we will come into contact with new forms of physical bodies, social collectivities, legal systems, territorial borders and technologies. At turns utopian and dystopian, these other worlds invite us to approach both human rights violations and acts of advocacy in the present from the radical perspective of contingent futures or counterfactual pasts. We will ask such questions as: what can we learn about human rights as an international movement from interplanetary coalitions and regimes of power? How can representations of non-human or humanoid consciousness help us reframe our definitions of freedom and dignity? Given the centrality of data to the documentation of human rights abuses and of law to their protection, how can fictional works advance human rights on the plane of the imagination? In answering, we will address themes that include imperialism and colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality, bio-politics, immigration, globalization, and environmental justice. Projected authors may include such figures as: Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Isaac Asimov, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Kim Stanley Robinson, Frederick Jameson and Edward Said.
Bard College, Fall 2022
Literatures of Human Rights
This course introduces students to the global history of literature and human rights from the sixteenth century to the present. While human rights are often, and importantly, read through legal documents and declarations, this class will complement the political and juridical traditions of human rights by exploring the central ways in which human rights discourses have been addressed, defined and advanced through literary texts. Beginning with early human rights testimonies around settler colonialism and slavery in the Americas, we will move on to examine twentieth-century literature that grapples with the Holocaust in Europe, military dictatorships in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and Apartheid in South Africa. We will end by considering contemporary texts that confront the issues of war in the Middle East, immigration and detainment, and the treatment of refugees. Throughout the term, we will pose such questions as: what exactly are human rights, and how have they been allocated to particular groups and denied to others in different places and at different times? How can literature appeal to the feelings of empathy and collective recognition necessary to support human rights claims? What strategies do works of art use to bear witness to human rights violations, compel their audiences to act against injustice, and help victims heal? What are the possibilities and limits of the written word in the face of the inarticulable, and of aesthetic representation in the face of atrocity and trauma? In our search for answers, we will examine a range of literary genres, from autobiography and testimony to the graphic novel, drama and poetry.
Narrative/Poetics/Representation
What does it mean to study literature today? How, precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small, unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social identities. This course is a pre-moderation requirement for all prospective Literature and Written Arts majors.
Dartmouth College, Fall/Winter 2021-2022
The Art of Description: Literary Non-fiction in the 20th Century
What does it mean to describe, and what makes a good description? How might different modes of description correspond to different objects, from material things and historical events to sensations and emotional realities? What are the stakes of privileging granular details over broader themes, and vice versa? What role do literary strategies and devices like narrative, metaphor, and imagery play in reporting objective facts without reducing subjectivity and felt experience? In this course, we will approach these questions by exploring the dimensions of non-fiction in 20th-century American literature. Reading across a range of genres such as reportage, the photo-essay, New Journalism, and documentary poetry, we will reflect on the ways in which writers and artists have experimented with describing their world. In doing so, we will consider the relationship between non-fictional styles and subject matter by giving particular attention to works that struggle with the limits of representation in the face of social issues such as economic inequality, racism, war, and criminality.
As students develop an understanding of generic borders while thinking across them, they will also use course material as a gateway into academic writing. Throughout the term, we will practice the key steps towards crafting an argumentative essay, including making observations about (describing) an object of analysis, generating questions to motivate an argument, assembling and synthesizing evidence in support of a defensible thesis, and revising. Many facets of our work will be collaborative, and students will learn from one another in peer-review exercises and writing.
University of Chicago, Winter and Spring Quarters, 2020 and 2021
Self, Culture, & Society III
In Spring Quarter, we will consider the evolution of social scientific approaches from the post-1945 period to the early 21st century. As we do so, we will ask: what counts as scientific or objective knowledge, and how is knowledge entangled with socioeconomic structures that change over time? What are the explanatory limits of canonical theories of social science in light of radical shifts in global power, in technology, and in our collective understanding of human rights and responsibilities? Beginning with post-modern, post-colonial, and other critiques of sciences of self, culture, and society (as articulated by Kuhn, Foucault, and Said), the course investigates how new theories arise and new problems are addressed, how new perspectives (more global, more inclusive) test and challenge established frameworks, and how social scientists reconsider, renew, and improve their insights. The second half of the quarter, then, will focus on applications of social theory to topics of contemporary concern, including race and gender identity within and outside the West, the rise of global capitalism and globalization, and the human impact on the environment.
Self, Culture, & Society II
The Winter quarter of Self, Culture, and Society builds on the canonical discourses about political economy, capitalism, and modern society introduced last quarter to focus on the cultural and social constitution of the self, foregrounding the exploration of race, gender, and sexuality. Together we will investigate and complicate the meaning of symbolic representation; the strength of social forces, the unconscious, and embodied experience; and the construction of categories such as gender, race, and nationhood. As we do so, we will ask: What binds human beings together into social collectivities, and what alienates us? How do symbols, rituals, and other forms of collective action and cultural representation shape individual minds? How do we understand social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in relation to individual agency and self-understanding? What counts as evidence for social scientific theories of self and society, and what forms of articulation can they take on? We will begin with two foundational approaches to such questions through canonical works by Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, then expand upon and interrogate their methods and theories through the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. In closing, we will consider the major themes of the quarter as they play out in a novel by South-African author Bessie Head.