Teaching

Pedagogy as Practice

My teaching—whether in courses on American culture or contemporary novels or advanced workshops on gender, sexuality, and theory—reflects my interdisciplinary and experimental approach to research.  I invite students to let their own curiosity drive the development of skills in making cultural arguments based on closely read evidence.  In my “Sexual Violence in America: Literature, Theory, and Activism,” students create podcasts interviewing organizations in the antirape movement in order to situate their activist philosophy within the theory we have read as a class; in “American Horrors,” they adapt horror movies into other genres in order to theorize the specificty of horror as a mode of remediating structural violence; and in “Practicing Theory,” they metabolize complex concepts such as performativity in a writing-intensive workshop.  In my experience, creative assignments nurture critical reading and writing skills by providing a multiplicity of forums in which to practice them.  At the same time, they increase the classroom’s accessibility for students from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, because the sense of experimentation they cultivate invites students to jump in, take risks, and participate in a collaborative co-creation of knowledge.

Below I provide a few syllabi from some of my most recent classes.

Sample Syllabi

• Queer Communities, Theory, and Film (Beloit)

• Literature and Decolonization (Beloit)

• Introduction to Literary Analysis (Beloit)

• Queer and Feminist Art and Literature (Beloit)

• American Cultures after 1945 (intensive 7-week course at Beloit)

• Sexual Violence in America: Theory, Literature, Activism (Chicago)

• Practicing Theory (Chicago)

• Theories of Sexual Violence in American Culture (Chicago)