Teaching is an indispensable opportunity to collaborate with my students and fellow educators. Favoring an expansive view of what constitutes literature or a literary topic, I am always searching for new texts and fresh teaching ideas. Please get in touch if you ever want to share pedagogical methods or recommend a good book!

Photo credit: Caitlin Cunningham, Boston College

Humanities and Fine Arts 191: Sick Lit: The History and Culture of Contagion - Fall 2020

This course explores the complex relationships between sickness and literature. We will conduct a wide-angle survey of writings about disease, analyzing the feedback loop of outbreaks shaping literary history and literature informing cultural responses of disease. Furthermore, we ask: how has the cultural meaning of “contagion” and “quarantine” and “outbreak” been refracted through discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism? The focus of the class will be expansive: the pathological metaphors used to describe literature (such as Aristotle’s catharsis or Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty”); literary representations of plague; historical definitions of “health” or “capacity;” the rise of systematic governmental responses to disease; and the literary-historical lessons that might be learned from a forensics of disease. Course texts might include: Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Eula Biss’s On Immunity, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Shakespeare’s Richard III, Night of the Living Dead (dir. George A. Romero), Sophocles’s Philoctetes, and Michel Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population.

English 132: Apocalypse, Catastrophe, and the Ends of the World - Summer 2019

This course takes a comparative approach to the literature of global environmental disaster. We will read speculative fiction and film from around the world, including China, Thailand, the United States, Czechia, Poland, Japan, and Egypt. Central to our study will be how cultural meaning is forged from moments of cataclysms, such as geological disruption and worldwide water scarcity. Over the course of the semester, we will develop a vocabulary for film technique and literary style, as well as a familiarity with apocalyptic tropes, such as eugenics, dystopianism, utopianism, anti-utopianism, “the commune,” and “the lifeboat.” Secondary themes to be explored include time travel, artificial intelligence, evolution, and alternate realities. In this course, we will practice essay-writing and communication skills, as well as critical thinking.

Course texts might include: N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Sun Ra’s Space is the Place, District 9 (dir. Neil Blomkamp), the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ursula Le Guin’s “Newton’s Sleep,” Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller), Pumzi (dir. Wanuri Kahiu), and Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise in Hell.

 English 221: Radical Shakespeare: Race, Gender, and Nature - Summer 2018

radical

etymology: Latin radicalis (“rootedness”); back to origins

contemporary uses: original, also reform-minded, out-of-control, at a political extreme

What is radical about the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616)? How have his works served to re-enforce the oppressive status quo? Can these plays also subvert or overturn what we find objectionable about prevailing systems of inequality? What would it mean to Occupy Shakespeare? We will carefully read six plays by Shakespeare, and hold them in counterpoise with Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969), a postcolonial rewriting of The Tempest, and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, an adaptation of King Lear set in Sengoku-era Japan. What emerges from this survey will be a protean literary figure who had an abiding distaste for some modern cultural formations, such as democracy, while also presciently anticipating 21st century understandings of identity and sexuality. This course takes a skeptical view of the “Bard cult” and claims for his “universal genius:” we ask how his works were deeply engaged in a specific time and place, and what his texts can say about a culture’s particular values, then and now. This class also reflects on whether Shakespeare can provoke us to “radically” reconsider our own assumptions about gender, sexuality, culture, and environment.

English 112: Writing Places - Spring 2019

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,

lending the land their waves’ own conformation.

-Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map” 

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

-Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”

How do places shape writing? Can the forms we choose to write in alter our understanding of our physical, geographic, and cultural locations? When does writing defamiliarize place, and how might it create places not yet imagined? What are the imaginative possibilities of representing space, as in Bishop’s “The Map,” and how might these representations threaten to block out reality, as allegorized by Borges’s short story? In this class, we will both reflect on the spaces—personal, distant, local, symbolic, theoretical—that inspire, confuse, challenge, frustrate, and even haunt us and attempt to extend our understandings of place into fresh new areas of inquiry. 

Each unit takes a unique angle on this theme: from ideas of placedness to feelings of placelessness to larger historical forces, such as climate change and globalization, that are radically transforming the planet we inhabit. Throughout the course, we will experiment with different modes of writing, from autoethnography to legal writing to a work of creative writing.

English 132: Cannibalism and the Culture of Disgust - Spring 2020

Is a cannibal just another body desiring bodies? When is eating human flesh erotic? When does it disgust? Cannibalism has provoked every possible response in the written record, from admiration to contempt to boredom. We will track cannibalism from the present moment all the way back to early modern Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and across the different forms assumed by the cannibal: the anthropophagi, the zombie, the man-eating femme fatale. The rich archive of the cannibal will be central to how we think and discuss sexuality, culture, gender, class, and race. We will investigate how “cannibal talk” was mobilized to justify colonialism in the Americas, as well as the significance of more recent heavily-publicized incidents like Jeffrey Dahmer and the “man-eater of Rotenberg,” Armin Meiwes in the cultural imagination. Texts that we explore include Christopher Columbus’s “Letter to Santangel;” the Egyptian folktale “The Place Where There Were No Graves;” Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago; Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês/How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos); the video game The Last of Us; Han Staden’s True Story; and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. 

English 362: The Literature of Enchantment - Spring 2017

This course explores children’s literature, from the folk tales first copied down by scholars in small European villages, to beloved 20th-century novels. We will read widely: tales by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Gene Luen Yang’s award-winning comic book American Born Chinese, and a celebrated novel about a school of wizards. (Not that one.) In addition to analyzing these texts, readings on history, developmental psychology, picture theory, and education theory will be assigned so that students will understand the concepts that shape children’s literature.

Humanities and Fine Arts 191: Introduction to Environmental Literature and Film - Fall 2019

Why is everyone so annoyed by environmentalists? What particular affects, such as self-righteousness or earnestness, does “the ugly environmentalist” employ that alienates a wide range of interlocutors? Inspired by Nicole Seymour’s book Bad Environmentalism, our goal will be to forge an approach to environmental thinking that makes use of irony, perversion, irreverence, subversion, and ambivalence. We will survey the kinds of writing and film that we usually associate with the environment—poems about shepherds and birds—as well as work that might seem at first “not environmental.” The course brings a critical perspective to how we talk about nature and culture, climate change, animal rights, and racialized and gendered environmentalisms. Outside of class, you will also be tasked with visiting the Durfee Conservatory, the Studio Arts Building, and the Fine Arts Center, and composing an “affective map” about your experience moving through these unique spaces on campus.

The course texts are as follows: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s “My First Black Nature Poem”; J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals; Grant Morrison’s Animal Man; Ian Parker’s article, “Killing Animals at the Zoo;” Daniel Beltrá's photography; Olafur Eliasson's sculpture Ice Watch; Matthew Barney's film Redoubt; and Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement.