Teaching

I teach courses on 20th and 21st Century literatures in America and Canada, on topics such as poetry and poetics, migration and mobility, voice and testimony in documentary literature, theories of gender and sexuality, race and class in southern modernism, cultures of resource and labor extraction, and writings of repair, revenge, and redress. My courses have been cross-listed in the Department of English, the Creative Writing Department, the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

I work to keep abreast of contemporary pedagogical research and continue to develop supplementary pedagogical resources for my students and colleagues such as research dossiers and workshops. I also continue to adapt my own teaching approaches and syllabi in light of developments in learning technologies and questions of equity, accessiblity, and universal design in educational infrastructures. I am attentive to the importance of engaging themes of gender and sexuality, race and racialization, documentation status, disability, and class inequity, even in courses where they are not primary topics. I do this understanding that these perspectives are valuable, especially as they can charge a discussion and bring the lived stakes of reading a text into focus. I also do this from the belief that the literature I teach is inextricable from the wider social and political contexts of the 20th and 21st centuries in which it is produced, and from the audiences to which it speaks.

The following are samples of courses that I have offered at the University of Chicago, and additional course syllabi that I have prepared for teaching in a variety of contexts. Course materials are available by request. 

Each week pairs central theoretical texts from feminist, queer, critical race and disability studies with literary texts, works of poetry, and contemporary cultural objects in order to examine how these questions are enacted and answered in a variety of lived and literary perspectives. We will begin by examining the current state of the "field" the course proposes: asking how “being wrong” and the affects of guilt and shame have been taken up or disavowed by gender theory. We will then examine accounts of how various historical and institutions have attempted to establish and enforce codes of behavior and “cure” deviance, and we will end the course by examining what José Munoz calls "disidentifications", refusals, escapes, and alternatives to compliance, as well as other ways in which we might navigate—through apologies and other performances—conflicts between norms, failures, harms and behaviors. 

Students will be able to: 

• Articulate a variety of theoretical stances and employ a variety of methodologies to analyze gender and normative affects in society and in their own life experiences.

• Use close reading tools to analyze gender dynamics across a wide variety of genres of text and objects, and craft arguments about how those discourses function.

• Take risks, experiment, and pose creative and critical questions about course texts in collaborative and collegial dialogue—written and spoken—with peers.

Beginning after World War I with the rise of petroleum as the predominant modern fossil fuel, we will examine the material processes of coal mining, oil drilling, and the transportation of these resources via trains, trucks, and pipelines, and their impact on bodies, natural landscapes, built neighborhoods, and cultural imaginaries. We will also trace how the traffic in and desire for these substances undergirds regimes of racialization and white supremacy, indigenous relocations and resistance and issues related to immigration, in addition to structuring the most banal of our daily activities. This course will progress thematically as we begin to investigate the “petroliteratures” and other forms of writing produced by the devastatingly global and simultaneously intimate scale of these industries.

We begin with how coal mining, oil drilling, and work cultures around resource extraction were fundamental to conceptions of rural masculinity and American identity—reading works by Upton Sinclair, Breece D’J Pancake, Mark Nowak, and Muriel Rukeyser. We will contextualize this in the large archive of Native American and Canadian Indigenous literatures, performance art, and direct action around Unistʼotʼen and Standing Rock, reading works by Nick Estes, Audra Simpson, and Rebecca Belmore. We will build towards a globalized understanding of the fossil fuel economy and how it intersects with regimes of racialization and class stratification in the United States, as explored through poetic and literary material. 

Students will be able to: 

• Discuss how literature produced of, about, and through fossil-fuel extractive industries engages questions of modernity, environmental politics, indigeneity, relationships to land, and notions of belonging and internationalism. 

• Engage, critique, and formulate their own opinion on a variety of literary, cultural, and historical approaches to understanding extractive economies, and to making sense of questions of scale and agency in relation to those things.

• Identify how the history of particular literary forms in the United States such as the novel, the work song, the blues, the documentary, the elegy, and a variety of other poetic forms, is linked to and articulates the history of fossil fuel extraction and consumption. Students will have the opportunity to experiment creatively with producing texts in such forms. 

What does it mean to address oneself to, or attempt to repair, legacies of violence and harm? What theories, resources, and models of personal, psychoanalytic, legal, political repair are available, and what kinds of possibilities do they enable? Is repair even a possibility, or a useful framework, for change? This course tracks the question of repair through contemporary conversations and historical case studies. Reading works by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Saidiya Hartman, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, we will track how the concept of repair and reparation has motivated political action, activism, economic decision-making, artistic creativity and interpersonal ritual. We will read poems, engage performances, and consider other rituals of repair, breaking, and re-making. In addition, we will read literary and activist material pertinent to historical movements for reparations, including works from the Redress Movement for Japanese Internment in Canada and the United States, ongoing projects of the repatriation of Indigenous remains and cultural materials in museums, and transformative justice models of conflict resolution.

Students will be able to:

• Articulate a variety of theoretical stances and employ a variety of methodologies to consider reparative projects and modes of redress and conflict resolution in society and in their own life experiences.

• Use close reading tools to analyze how power, identity, race, indigeneity, and difference operate and articulate themselves in discourses of repair across a variety of genres of text and objects, and craft arguments about how those discourses function.

• Take risks, experiment, and pose creative and critical questions about course texts in collaborative and collegial dialogue—written and spoken—with peers.

The work of description—the way that writers convey the characteristic features and significant details of people and places in language—can contain and confirm biases and anchor stale tropes of identity, but can also refuse, exceed, play with, and subverting readerly

expectations. Descriptions made for the purposes of political consciousness-raising, journalistic documenting, or narrative storytelling bring into sharp relief senses of ourselves in relation to perceptions of “otherness” along lines of place, race, class, and gender. In this class, we will read literary and photographic works by authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Agee and Walker Evans and focus on how they experiment with methodologies of description and representation of people borrowed from

anthropology, photography, and documentary journalism, as well as literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness narration and first-personal disclosure—to productively account for the limitations of their individual perspectives and authorial voices as a narrative and poetic tool. Particular attention will be paid to how gender and sexuality, race and racialization, and embodiment impact these accounts of social worlds, relations, and cultures, and person.

Students will be able to:

•  Use tools of close literary analysis to attend to the formal features of novels, documentary accounts, and works of poetry in order to parse how they employ description as a tactic for portraying a world. 

• Identify how particular literary forms and projects such as the stream of consciousness novel, the documentary, the work song, the blues, traditions of representing dialect, and structures of analogy, are linked with the ethnographic. 

• Articulate and marshal textual evidence to support original arguments about the course texts. Take risks, experiment, and pose creative and critical questions about course texts in collaborative and collegial dialogue—written and spoken—with peers.