Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

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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.

Fall 2026 Courses

Language, Thought, and Writing: Community Literacy and Migration: Where are we and what are we doing here? How did we get here and how do we know what we know? What’s next and who needs to hear our stories? These three sets of questions will guide our exploration of personal essays, literary texts, scholarly criticism, images, and more as we seek to gain literacy—not only the ability to read and write but also to engage cultural knowledge—about Colby College and Waterville, about the communities from which we come, and about the concept of migration. We will examine our arrival in the Colby College community through reflective, analytical, narrative, and research-based writing, peer editing, and other literacy-focused activities. We will place our own stories in relation to those of writers from the past and the present, including Joy Harjo, Margaret Cavendish, bell hooks, and Mohsin Hamid. Our goal will be to develop a successful college-level writing practice while gaining a textured understanding of what it takes to migrate, what kinds of knowledge we bring with us when we do, and how humans gain literacy and become creators of new knowledge when we join new communities.

Syllabus
Shakespeare and Injustice: “Mercy seasons justice,” Portia famously says to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, but what does she really mean by that? Taking this question as a starting point, students in this course will examine justice and injustice in Shakespeare’s plays as well as in/justice in the many adaptations of them. We will research, adapt, and write about a set of plays that students select, asking what we ought to do with Shakespeare and his fraught legacies, and whether it is possible or desirable to use Shakespeare’s work to seek justice or to describe and uncover injustice in our own communities.

Syllabus

Spring 2027 Courses

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 Aphra Behn—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.
Women, Science, and Politics in 17th Century Poetry: Can a poet, or a poem, do science? Does gender matter when we’re talking about early modern science and politics in England? In this seminar, we will explore the poems and other writings of three poets who, I contend, would have said “yes” to both of these questions: Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton. We will begin by investigating the cultural impacts of the English Civil War (1642-51)—before, during, and after the conflict—on early modern literary and scientific works, and we will excavate the English reception of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), a first-century BC poem detailing epicurean theories about atoms, among other topics. Next, we will read selections from Pulter, Cavendish, and Milton’s poetry and prose that foreground their unconventional theories about scientia (that is, knowledge or understanding), natural philosophy (the phrase early moderns used to refer to what we now call science), erotic desire and marriage, monarchy and the gender of political subjecthood, biblical and artistic creation, and humans and their relations to nonhumans. In the final unit of the course, students will guide our discussions, working in teams to deepen our understanding of selected topics through re-reading and reading new works by our core authors.

Colby College Courses

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