Teaching
I have experience teaching literature and culture at the University of Michigan and Tel Aviv University.
Complit 322: Translating World Literatures
Semester: Fall
Offered: 2023
This course provided an opportunity for students to build on their skills in reading a foreign language by translating literary texts into English, and in the process integrating broad theoretical concepts about translation into the textual practice of translating. The readings and writing assignments work together to introduce students to the history and theory of the practice of translation, extending a language-based approach to translation into a scholarly framework that emphasizes the process of interpreting and re-writing texts.
The course satisfied the University of Michigan's upper-level writing requirement.
Complit 100: Global Vampires
Semester: Fall
Offered: 2021
This course examined the phenomenon of vampirism in verbal and visual culture from different periods in various cultures. We began with the vampiric folklore in Eastern Europe, following the legend’s variations since the 18th century all the way to the contemporary Hollywood and pop culture fascination with blood, sex, and eternal life. The course explored how and why the vampire captures the imagination of audiences, what qualities it incarnates, and what social-historical events may have caused heightened interest and its popularity.
The course satisfied the University of Michigan's humanities distribution requirement.
Complit 122: Course Name
Semester: Fall
Offered: 2020
This course uses the telling and re-telling of stories of migration and displacement as a means for sharpening participants’ thinking and writing. We will seek to understand how art helps us see the ethical, psychological, social and cultural implications of migration. Our sources will include literary texts, historical documents, comics, journalistic and autobiographical writing, photographs, film and TV that address themes such as home and displacement, belonging and exile, multilingualism and translation.
This class is primarily about writing and academic inquiry. Effective arguments stem from well-formulated questions, and academic essays allow writers to gain deeper understanding of the questions that they are exploring. In this course, we will utilize the theme of immigration and displacement as a platform for discussion, in order to learn to create complex, analytic, well-supported arguments that matter in academic contexts. The course will also hone your critical thinking and reading skills. Working closely with your peers and with me, you will develop your essays through workshops and extensive revision.
The course satisfied the University of Michigan's first-year writing requirement.
English 125: The Animal in Me
Semester: Fall and Winter
Offered: 2019-2020
In this course, students read texts engaging with the general subject of Animals and Animality to situate ourselves around a set of common interests as we explore the dynamics of effective, written argumentation. Animals appear in a broad range of contexts in our lives – we eat them, wear their skins, care for them as pets, study them scientifically, watch movies and read books about them, use animalistic metaphors in our language, and much more. We encounter many instances in our daily lives that call into question our understanding of the difference and border between the animal and the human, sometimes without the actual presence of animal: we often turn to this border, and to our conception of what is “animal” and “animal-like” behavior in our attitude to other human beings and societies. Students examine different discussions on this topic as well as how to use our own writing to effectively and critically explore research questions in topics they are interested in.
The course satisfied the University of Michigan's first-year writing requirement.