My pedagogy is driven by an investment in diversity, compassion, and an attention to the possibilities of argumentation beyond the bounds of the classroom. Across my courses, I help students to develop an interest in active learning, rhetorical clarity, anti-racism and intellectual community building. At the same time, I recognize the ways in which students’ lives tend to exceed our knowledge as educators, a recognition that can be transformed into a deeper source of learning.
Selected List of Courses Taught (Sole Instructor), and Descriptions
At Columbia University
ENGL UN3485: Black Women Writing the City (Fall 2024)
If you wanted a poem, you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing. –Gwendolyn Brooks
During the twentieth century in the U.S., millions of Black Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North, ushering in new forms of sensory and social experience. This course focuses on Black women’s relationship to the modern city, from the fin de siècle, through the Civil Rights Era, to the present-day. Across a variety of genres and contexts—including novels, poetry, plays, memoir, journalism, diaries, manifestos, spoken word and travelogues—Black writers have imagined and theorized femininity through the ever-shifting contours of the metropolis. While traditional accounts of urban modernity tend to take a masculine frame, our course will remain grounded in contemporary queer and feminist critique, asking: how do the physical, material, and architectural dimensions of the city impact women’s conceptions of selfhood? How do semi-public, semi-private spaces, such as cafes, offices, nightclubs, and cabarets, enable (or fail to enable) community and group belonging? How might such spaces nurture queer of color communities specifically? What forms of economic racism and segregation did women of color encounter, and what strategies did they deploy to counteract them? Is it possible for a Black woman to remain “private in public”? What kinds of industrial and technological developments enhanced women’s independence and financial freedoms, and which, like state surveillance, ultimately impeded—and continue to impede—their ability to survive and flourish?
Primary authors will include Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dorothy West, Marita Bonner, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Shay Youngblood, Sarah Broom and Raven Leilani, supplemented with short critical readings by such writers as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman. Combining theoretical and literary analysis with regular fieldwork in New York City—including visits to the Schomburg Center and the Studio Museum in Harlem—the seminar ultimately encourages students to think creatively and rigorously about their own relationship to race, gender, and urban experience.
Core Curriculum- Literature Humanities (Fall 2024-Spring 2025)
In Literature Humanities, students make sense of literary texts together, on paper and in discussion. We read significant and challenging books that require collective exploration in a seminar setting to be best understood and appreciated, books that enable us to ask questions about literature and how it works, about our place in histories and traditions, about ourselves as beings and members of a society. We read with and against the grain of canon and tradition, and we pursue understanding together, in a shared classroom community, to learn not only how to be better readers and writers but also how to be in intellectual community with one another. Over the course of the semester, students become acquainted with specific works of literature; they become aware of those works’ relations to one another; and they become conversant in the questions those works ask and the questions they make it possible for us to ask.
At Indiana University
ENG-W170, “What is Blackness in U.S. Popular Culture?” (Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022)
Blackness has often been represented in problematic racial tropes that say more about the moments of their creation (and their creators) than they do about the figures depicted. Think: the Angry Black Woman. Her wild child. The “Magical Negro” saving white heroes, as in The Shining or Big Little Lies. Contemporary authors have responded in different ways, some by revising and others by departing entirely from these frameworks. This course investigates how Black artists and thinkers draw on images from the historical past to create new and more expansive understandings of racial identity. We will begin by examining the socio-historical conditions that gave rise to the Antebellum “pickanniny,” a caricature of a Black child, before turning to consider re-interpretations by filmmakers such as Jordan Peele, whose film “Nope” explores an extra-terrestrial invasion of a Black-owned property, and Shonda Rhimes whose “Bridgerton” imagines a Victorian-era England ruled by a Black Queen and love interest. We will also consider visual artists like Titus Kaphar, who renovates classical paintings to expose Black women behind white figures, and Kara Walker, whose cut-paper silhouettes engage stereotypes to reveal systemic racism. In addition to reading closely, analyzing texts, and developing original claims about representations of race, students will complete a final research paper in which they consider how the diversity of Black thought might offer a path forward to greater racial understanding and equity.
ENG-L204, “Introduction to Fiction” (Summer 2022, Spring 2023)
This course has two main goals: to develop your abilities to read fiction closely and critically, and to improve your writing skills by developing the ability to write about fiction compellingly. We’ll hone these skills by reading a wide variety of fictional works, including Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929); short stories by Nobel Prize-winning authors; and Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia, a postcolonial novella, in conversation with Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. We will explore how fiction writers use literary elements, such as plot, character, and setting, and we’ll practice analyzing fiction in short and long papers. Throughout the course, we’ll explore how authors create other worlds. You should leave this class not only with sharper reading and writing skills, but also with a sense of how to build further on your strengths in these areas.