
Teaching Portfolio
In my literature and composition courses at SLU, I use my research interests in collaboration and community to foster student engagement through collective production and discussion.
By leading each course with the conviction that a student’s independent thoughts and interpretations are important, I challenge class participants to become their own interpreters, to formulate and expand their own arguments, supporting their interpretations with evidence and close reading through multimodal processes.
See below for recent course offerings, including links to course websites. Syllabi are also available on my Academia profile.
British Literature After 1800
Beginning with the Romantics, we trace major aesthetic developments with a particular eye towards their interaction with social and political trends.
Technology, Media, and Literature
This course will discover the mixed-media properties of literature by exploring relationships among various mediums of technology: text, image, sound, and touch. We explore how media and technology have become extensions of humanity, whether psychically or physically.
Advanced Strategies of Rhetoric & Research: Gender and Identity
Gender, Identity, and Literature
What does it mean to lose one’s sense of self? Or, to have one’s identity written by another? If our identities make us who we are, what do we become when these vital aspects of ourselves are taken from us—by force or by choice? This course explores how literature and art has shaped, responded to, and transformed cultural and political conceptions of gender and identity, including aspects of race, class, and sexuality.
Nature, Ecology, and Literature
The focus of this Nature, Ecology, & Literature course is on the question of the animal in literature and culture. We will look at how animals are represented at different historical periods and in different media. We will consider the ethical questions raised by human interaction with, and use of, animals, and how human-animal relationships might be re-imagined.
Business & Professional Writing: Rebranding
Intro to Literary Studies
This course will focus specifically on depictions of excess in a variety of genres–poetry, drama, novel, novella, and short stories. Therefore, as we read each work, we will push against boundaries by questioning the various definitions of excess: what does it mean to be out of control? to have unrestrained feeling? to be in violation of law or morality? to overstep moderation?
Intro to Women's & Gender Studies
Women’s and Gender Studies is a broad, interdisciplinary field that covers a vast range of issues. As an introductory course, this class will give you a first insight into some of the historical foundations, theoretical concepts, political manifestations, and social issues at stake.
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