Please click on the Syllabi tab for PDFs of the syllabi for the courses I have designed.
While an initial cursory look at the courses I have taught might suggest that they are only loosely connected, there is an intrinsic coherence to my teaching repertoire: what I believe to be the fundamental purpose of the liberal arts, that is, to explore what makes us human and what it means to be human in order to prepare students to engage with an increasingly complex world. A university education should offer students opportunities to grow as scholars, as members of a community, and, most of all, as people. As Toni Morrison proclaimed in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” The tangible outcomes of this approach are the development of my students’ ability to communicate in a variety of settings, to think critically and sophisticatedly about complicated issues, and to more deeply understand human nature.
Accordingly, in my courses, both those centered on literary studies and those with a focus on gender studies, we pay careful attention to language. This translates into a particular approach to time in the classroom and the assignments I design. Class meetings typically combine short lectures about the historical and/or theoretical context to the texts, close analytical readings of key passages, and broader questions that prompt students to discover connections and analyze thematic concerns. One successful question I have posed a class (of non-majors) was asking them after we read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices how they knew Bowen could not have written The Land of Spices. As they worked to articulate the reasons for their initial strong reaction that she could not have written it, they scrutinized the two texts’ styles and themes, only realizing when I pointed it out that they had just done literary criticism.
Language is not just a theoretical abstract about which we ruminate; I also employ it as a pedagogical tool. In my course Jane’s Heirs, we read Jane Eyre and a sampling of 20th-century British and Anglophone responses in order to identify which elements of Brontë’s novel are so compelling that they have inspired such ongoing passionate engagement with the novel. My goal is for the students to deeply appreciate the impact of Brontë’s writing and understand the demands inherent to an adaptation’s attempt to establish a dialogue with her. One assignment requires them to write their own creative piece. I give them the two chapters that Brontë was working on when she died, and they write the next chapter and sketch out an outline for the rest of the novel. They also write an artist’s statement in which they reflect on the process of attempting to “finish” Brontë’s last, unfinished novel. Then they read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and Clare Boylan’s Emma Brown, both inspired by Brontë’s manuscript. Engaging with the texts in these varied ways pushes students to consider register with respect to audience and offers the concrete opportunity to play with language. For many of my literature courses, I have assigned blogs for my students which require them to seek out and articulate the thematic connections between the fiction we read and current events, thereby engaging with a broader audience than just our class.
In my Gender Studies courses, we examine the ways in which an understanding of “gender” has been socially, politically, and culturally formed, performed, and deployed; the tool through which we accomplish this task is, as I remind my students, language. In addition to appreciating the power of language, I want student to understand the connections between their coursework and their lives. When possible, the readings reflect this wider engagement. We do not just read about social activism in theory; we also read an essay about students who convinced their university’s administration to make the restrooms on campus functional and accessible to everyone, regardless of gender identity, physical ability, and parental status. The final project for my Introduction to Gender Studies course requires them to turn this critical eye on their environment. In groups, students identify a gender issue on campus, research it, and formulate a solution. They present the issue to the class, educating their peers about why this is a problem, and they write a letter to the university president outlining the problem and advocating their solution. Students leave this project with the knowledge that they can read their environment and the sense that they can contribute to a culture of change.
Ultimately, my scholarly methodology is driven by a belief that literary studies can no longer be confined by national boundaries. Narrowly-defined national departments no longer adequately study and promote literature in the twenty-first century; it is crucial to study national literatures within their global context, and the transnational nature of my research, exemplified by my book project, contributes to this refinement of literary studies. English literature of the 20th and 21st centuries cannot be fully understood outside the framework of postcolonialism, and I design my courses to engage students in this scholarly debate. For example, when I designed Monstrous Mothers of Literature, I began with the British Empire as a conceptual framework. I selected novels from the former colonies (including Ireland, the Caribbean, Africa, and India) and the UK to explore the impact of colonialism, the decolonization process, and migration on women’s lived realities. Each culture that we examined has been marked by British imperialism’s reach; analyzing the collective whole enabled my students to discern the mutual, reciprocal effects of political apparatus and women’s mothering practices, as well as to appreciate the artistic impulse to chronicle this tension.
In my classes, we “do language” in all of its various and varied permutations. In my teaching and research of literature, I hope to amplify the voices that society has forgotten or chosen not to hear. Thus, I teach and write upon novels written by women in societies that have discounted women’s perspectives; these novels depict women’s lived realities that too often have been glossed over in the recording of “official” history. In my classes, I aim to evoke in students a sense of problems, and in the course of delving into these problems, I aspire to guide them towards answers that might be found—or, at the least, debated meaningfully—in literature. As Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel observes regarding the future of the humanities, “our readers – our young readers in particular – come to us with a certain hunger, and if we cannot or will not satisfy their hunger then we must not be surprised if they turn away from us.” Students leave my courses with a new (or renewed) appreciation for the power of language to satisfy their desire to understand their world. I have offered them multiple chances to challenge their previous beliefs; they have acquired not only definitions like third gender or postmodernism, but also a fresh understanding of human nature that they can apply to their lives.
Accordingly, in my courses, both those centered on literary studies and those with a focus on gender studies, we pay careful attention to language. This translates into a particular approach to time in the classroom and the assignments I design. Class meetings typically combine short lectures about the historical and/or theoretical context to the texts, close analytical readings of key passages, and broader questions that prompt students to discover connections and analyze thematic concerns. One successful question I have posed a class (of non-majors) was asking them after we read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices how they knew Bowen could not have written The Land of Spices. As they worked to articulate the reasons for their initial strong reaction that she could not have written it, they scrutinized the two texts’ styles and themes, only realizing when I pointed it out that they had just done literary criticism.
Language is not just a theoretical abstract about which we ruminate; I also employ it as a pedagogical tool. In my course Jane’s Heirs, we read Jane Eyre and a sampling of 20th-century British and Anglophone responses in order to identify which elements of Brontë’s novel are so compelling that they have inspired such ongoing passionate engagement with the novel. My goal is for the students to deeply appreciate the impact of Brontë’s writing and understand the demands inherent to an adaptation’s attempt to establish a dialogue with her. One assignment requires them to write their own creative piece. I give them the two chapters that Brontë was working on when she died, and they write the next chapter and sketch out an outline for the rest of the novel. They also write an artist’s statement in which they reflect on the process of attempting to “finish” Brontë’s last, unfinished novel. Then they read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and Clare Boylan’s Emma Brown, both inspired by Brontë’s manuscript. Engaging with the texts in these varied ways pushes students to consider register with respect to audience and offers the concrete opportunity to play with language. For many of my literature courses, I have assigned blogs for my students which require them to seek out and articulate the thematic connections between the fiction we read and current events, thereby engaging with a broader audience than just our class.
In my Gender Studies courses, we examine the ways in which an understanding of “gender” has been socially, politically, and culturally formed, performed, and deployed; the tool through which we accomplish this task is, as I remind my students, language. In addition to appreciating the power of language, I want student to understand the connections between their coursework and their lives. When possible, the readings reflect this wider engagement. We do not just read about social activism in theory; we also read an essay about students who convinced their university’s administration to make the restrooms on campus functional and accessible to everyone, regardless of gender identity, physical ability, and parental status. The final project for my Introduction to Gender Studies course requires them to turn this critical eye on their environment. In groups, students identify a gender issue on campus, research it, and formulate a solution. They present the issue to the class, educating their peers about why this is a problem, and they write a letter to the university president outlining the problem and advocating their solution. Students leave this project with the knowledge that they can read their environment and the sense that they can contribute to a culture of change.
Ultimately, my scholarly methodology is driven by a belief that literary studies can no longer be confined by national boundaries. Narrowly-defined national departments no longer adequately study and promote literature in the twenty-first century; it is crucial to study national literatures within their global context, and the transnational nature of my research, exemplified by my book project, contributes to this refinement of literary studies. English literature of the 20th and 21st centuries cannot be fully understood outside the framework of postcolonialism, and I design my courses to engage students in this scholarly debate. For example, when I designed Monstrous Mothers of Literature, I began with the British Empire as a conceptual framework. I selected novels from the former colonies (including Ireland, the Caribbean, Africa, and India) and the UK to explore the impact of colonialism, the decolonization process, and migration on women’s lived realities. Each culture that we examined has been marked by British imperialism’s reach; analyzing the collective whole enabled my students to discern the mutual, reciprocal effects of political apparatus and women’s mothering practices, as well as to appreciate the artistic impulse to chronicle this tension.
In my classes, we “do language” in all of its various and varied permutations. In my teaching and research of literature, I hope to amplify the voices that society has forgotten or chosen not to hear. Thus, I teach and write upon novels written by women in societies that have discounted women’s perspectives; these novels depict women’s lived realities that too often have been glossed over in the recording of “official” history. In my classes, I aim to evoke in students a sense of problems, and in the course of delving into these problems, I aspire to guide them towards answers that might be found—or, at the least, debated meaningfully—in literature. As Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel observes regarding the future of the humanities, “our readers – our young readers in particular – come to us with a certain hunger, and if we cannot or will not satisfy their hunger then we must not be surprised if they turn away from us.” Students leave my courses with a new (or renewed) appreciation for the power of language to satisfy their desire to understand their world. I have offered them multiple chances to challenge their previous beliefs; they have acquired not only definitions like third gender or postmodernism, but also a fresh understanding of human nature that they can apply to their lives.