Teaching Philosophy
My goal in the classroom is to create lively, productive conversations by inviting students to share and broaden their experiences through close encounters with complex texts. In my summer courses at Skidmore College, high-achieving high school students from under-served communities learned alongside current Skidmore students and adults from the Saratoga community. At UC Davis, I worked with international students, non-native English speakers, parents, students returning to college after other careers, those with disabilities, and those from different racial, economic, and cultural backgrounds. I have continued to teach students from all of these backgrounds, first at Ithaca College and now at Colby College, both of which are majority white and majority young-adult communities; I use collaborative learning practices that I have developed in response to my students and that encourage diverse perspectives in my classrooms.
Close analysis of a broad range of texts forms the core of each of my courses, and we support our close textual work with individual and group research projects. My students’ close readings become a foundation for their work as sophisticated readers and writers, whether they are comparing disparate texts, responding creatively to our readings, gathering evidence to support their claims, or placing their ideas in relation to those of classmates and experts. These skills are central to literary study, and also to students’ engagement as citizens within and beyond college.
Spring 2024 Courses
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Staging Pirates and Captives in Early Modern Romance: Pirates, slaves, and shipwrecks are ever present in romances from the 16th and 17th centuries. We will place representations of these figures from ballads, plays, and prose fiction—including texts by William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Margaret Cavendish—alongside historical accounts of captivity, forced migration, and environmental violence in both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic worlds. We’ll examine early modern discourses about race, class, gender, and ability and the ways that writers use romance, across genres, to reinforce and also to challenge social prejudices.
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Literature and Environment: In this course, you will explore some of the many ways to read and write ecocritically. We will examine the history of the field of ecocriticism and dig in to several theoretical approaches to the environment, human-nonhuman entanglements, and planetary-scale crises. Equipped with theorists’ big ideas, we will practice ecocritical methods for reading and writing about literature, broadly conceived. We’ll begin with poems, stories, and a graphic novel that define and redefine home, place, and land. Next, we’ll explore a film, a novel, and more stories and poems that probe the impulse to voyage and to escape; these texts ask what events and crises and environments makes us move, voluntarily or involuntarily, through physical or mental spaces. If home or place or earth is compromised, where can we go? Who can go? Is going really the solution? How do race, ethnicity, caste, location, class, ability, gender, sexuality, family history, economic position, species, and other factors affect answers to these questions?
Colby College Courses
- Language, Thought, and Writing: Community Literacy and Migration
- Foundations of Literary Studies
- Introduction to Environmental Humanities
- Literature and Environment
- Staging Pirates and Captives in Early Modern Romance
- Shakespeare and Injustice
- Women, Science, and Politics in 17th C Literature
Ithaca College Courses
- Academic Writing I
- Literature and Environment: Vital Rivers, Rivers in Crisis
- Renaissance Literature: Women, Science, and Politics in 17th C Literature
- Introduction to Poetry
- Shakespeare (sophomore level)
Teaching History
- 2015-2021 Lecturer at Ithaca College
- 2009-2015 Associate Instructor at University of California, Davis
- 2008-2009 Teaching Assistant at University of California, Davis
- 2011-2012 Instructor at Skidmore College, Summer Program