Teaching
I teach courses in literature, composition, linguistics, and digital editing. My approach centers on close reading and on writing as practice, working carefully with texts to help students find their own voices on the page.
Undergraduate Courses Taught
- Freshman Composition A course in critical writing and revision, working through the major rhetorical modes and the structures of academic argument.
- Early British Literature Survey of texts from the medieval through neoclassical periods, with attention to historical context and the ways these works continue to speak to questions of power and belief.
- Early American Literature Survey organized around the question "What is America?", ranging from Indigenous oral traditions to the 1850s.
- Shakespeare’s Drama Study of four major plays (Romeo & Juliet, Twelfth Night, Henry IV Part One, and King Lear) with an emphasis on performance-based analysis and group scene work.
- Grammar & Linguistics A split course paired with Advanced Composition. Students work through linguistics modules while producing a research essay, studying how language functions by putting it to use.
- World Mythology Comparative readings from global creation stories and epics, approaching myth as a form of cultural memory.
- Adolescent Literature Reading across young adult fiction to examine how the genre defines itself and what it demands of readers at a particular moment in life.
- Advanced Composition Built around a single sustained research project, from initial proposal to final paper, with close attention to process at every stage.
- Public Writing & Rhetorics Covers the range of public argument, from journalism to the personal essay, with attention to how writing shifts when the audience changes.
- Genre Fiction: Fantasy Reading in the fantasy tradition, organized around an animating question that the semester's texts approach from different directions.
- Genre Fiction: Science Fiction Reading in the science fiction tradition, organized around an animating question that the semester's texts approach from different angles.
Teaching Strengths
- Integrating literary analysis with historical and rhetorical context.
- Designing multimodal and collaborative assignments.
- Building classroom discussion around critical questions and close textual work.
- Incorporating digital tools, including TEI-XML and GitHub, into student projects.
Workshops in Development
- Writing 101 Bootcamp A short-format workshop, taught cooperatively, focused on the fundamentals of academic argument and revision.
- TEI Encoding for Digital Scholarship A multi-phase workshop training student contributors in TEI-XML encoding for the The Chamberlain Letters project, with particular attention to Chamberlain’s correspondence.