Courses

For the academic year 2025-26, I’m on research leave and not teaching.

Summer 2026

English 365

Technical Writing

In this eight-week asynchronous online course, you’ll develop the skills necessary to communicate complex information clearly and effectively in professional contexts. To do so, we’ll practice understanding how to identify the audience, purpose, and context for professional communications, as well as learning their standard formats and modes. We’ll think of communication as a process, editing and proofreading for style and correctness, and we’ll conduct and reference research to inform, instruct, and persuade. The bulk of our projects this summer will center on advocating for an issue on our campus. By the end of the course, you’ll have a portfolio of sample communications that you can use for professional opportunities.

Fall 2026

English 302

Careers for Humanities Majors

This course is designed for humanities majors or potential majors housed in the English, History, Geography, and Philosophy, and Modern Languages departments to explore, design, and prepare for a variety of careers. The course will expose you to the versatility of the humanities degree and the multiple different career paths available to you through professional assessments, alumni networking, and community engagement. You’ll also learn about career design through self-reflection and design thinking with texts such as Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’s Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (2016) and assignments like an odyssey plan and statement of intent. Finally, you’ll prepare for your career through practical professionalization assignments, including developing a resume and Handshake/LinkedIn profile, informational interviewing, searching and applying for internships or summer research opportunities, and/or pursuing post-graduate opportunities. Through formulating and executing a community-based class project in which students take on different roles, you’ll develop practical skills in leadership, teamwork, and self-development while deepening your existing skills in critical thinking, communication, and equity and inclusion.

Fall 2026

English 550

Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Racial Capitalism and Democracy from Reconstruction through the First World War

This seminar will investigate how racial capitalism—the notion that “racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires,” in the words of Jodi Melamed—animates the US literary and cultural imaginary from Reconstruction (1863–77) through World War I (1914–18). In doing so, we’ll necessarily examine how the development of racial capitalism impacted the conception and execution of democracy in the United States, especially during westward (and later global) imperialism, Jim Crow, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era. If democracy is, as Fred Moten has described it, “government in which the common people hold sway,” how has racial capitalism impacted the practice of democracy? What does democracy look like in a racial capitalist nation? Attending to the work of authors such as Charles W. Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Dean Howells, María Ruiz de Burton, Sui Sin Far, Mark Twain, Ida B. Wells, and Zitkála-Šá, we’ll investigate how US literary and cultural texts understood and responded to the structural inequities and liberatory potentials of one of the most tumultuous periods of US history. Thus, this seminar will introduce a variety of methodological approaches to the field of US literary and cultural studies, including methods from Black studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, disability studies, Marxist studies, queer studies, and women of color feminisms. Course assignments may include leading seminar discussion, various scaffolded assignments culminating in a conference presentation and research article, and a public-facing project.