Teaching is one of my first and enduring loves—an even tie with reading and writing.  I have developed a range of undergraduate courses in literature and composition over the past decade. Below is an overview of these courses.

At both Menlo and UCLA, my pedagogy has been recognized for its effective blend of venturesome and traditional techniques. Most notably, in 2018, I received Menlo’s college-wide Charles B. Emerick Teaching Award.

My commitment to pedagogy extends beyond the classroom. I spearhead campus initiatives to raise mental health awareness, lead Menlo’s English assessment work, and co-chaired our General Education program review. I have also published numerous pieces on my classroom practices. An essay on teaching critical thinking and reading appears in The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. A chapter on teaching Voyant Tools, Google Ngram Viewer, and other digital methods to undergraduates appears in a recent volume for the MLA Options for Teaching series.

RECENT COURSES:

English 102 (Menlo): Joking Matters: Humor and Modern American Fiction. Seminar, three hours. Examines humor’s forms and functions in American media from the twentieth and twenty-first century. Includes fiction by Dorothy Parker, Edith Wharton, George S. Schuyler, George Saunders, and Colson Whitehead, as well as film. Weekly writing assignments, one oral presentation, three course papers, and final exam.

English 102 (Menlo): Sex & Culture. Seminar, three hours. Explores concepts of biology and sexuality in American media from the twentieth and twenty-first century. Includes works by Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Bret Easton Ellis, as well as music videos and film. Weekly writing assignments, one oral presentation, three course papers, and final exam.

English 102 (Menlo): Modernism / Modernity / America. Seminar, three hours. Examines constructions of modern experience in American literature from 1900 to World War II, with a final unit on the contemporary interest in this period. Focus on artistic trends, historical contexts, and themes of individual psychology, social change, and industrial and cultural transformation. Weekly writing assignments, one oral presentation, three course papers, and final exam.

English 450 (Menlo): Messy Subjects: Identity and the Body. Seminar, three hours. Explores concepts of subjectivity and personhood in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. Includes works by Edith Wharton, George S. Schuyler, bell hooks, E. Annie Proulx, Ang Lee, and Hannah Gadsby. Weekly writing assignments, one oral presentation, and final thesis.

English / Humanities 450 (Menlo): American Mental Health. Seminar, three hours. Focuses on evolving concepts of cognition, wellness, and pathology in modern America. Includes works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Chester Himes, Joan Didion, Betty Friedan, and Kay Redfield Jamison. Weekly writing assignments, one oral presentation, and final thesis.

Humanities 301 (Menlo): Digital Humanities and Cultural Analytics. Seminar, three hours. Explores computer-aided practices used to study literature and culture at scale. Includes recent academic scholarship in the digital humanities and experiments with digital tools and techniques. Biweekly methods assignments, two oral presentations, and final project.

English 102 (Menlo): Feeling American. Seminar, three hours. Examines individual experience and national belonging in works by artists tethered to the United States. Includes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, films, and visual art, primarily from the twentieth and twenty-first century. Weekly writing assignments, one oral presentation, three papers, and final exam.

English 102 (Menlo) / 183C (UCLA): American Adolescence. Seminar, three hours. Explores the concept of coming of age in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural forms. Includes advertising, non-fiction essays, works by J.D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, and the film Inside Out (2015). Weekly writing assignments, one oral presentation, three papers, and final exam. (see UCLA Syllabus)

English 88M/177 (UCLA): Sex Without Consequence: Modern Fiction and Femininity. Seminar, three hours. This course considers the consequences of sex for the modern woman. Includes six US interwar novels, as well as the 2011 novel and 2015 film Fifty Shades of Grey. Weekly writing assignments, one oral presentation, and two papers. (see course website)

English 174B (UCLA): American Fiction Since 1945. Lecture,  four hours. Survey of the American novel and short story since World War II. Focus on formal and thematic developments of fiction in this period, with attention to aesthetic innovation, historical contexts, and themes of mass media, technology, socioeconomics, and individual, regional, and national identity. Two course papers, one oral presentation, and final exam.

English 4W/4HW (UCLA): Hybrid Forms. Lecture, four hours. Introduction to literary analysis, with close reading and carefully written exposition of selections from principal modes of literature, including poetry, prose fiction, creative non-fiction, drama, and film. Minimum of fifteen pages of revised writing. (see course website)

back to top