Teaching
Sample Course Descriptions
The Poetry of Precarity
In this course, you will attend to how precarity is expressed, produced, experienced, and resisted in poetry from the 17th to the 21st century. You will recognize how race, gender, and class shape experiences of precarity, understand the social structures that enable precarity from a variety of cultural perspectives, and experiment with understanding contemporary experiences of precarity from a historical point-of-view.
Eighteenth Century Survey
In this course, we will examine a selection of natural histories, poems, and plays that engage with Britain’s global traffic of goods and people. Throughout, we will pay special attention to how different writers harnessed the rhetoric of growth and decay to frame particular bodies and spaces and spaces as more effective for the expansion of empire.
Readings in the Medical Humanities
In this course, we will join a rich, interdisciplinary conversation around medicine. Reading essays that explore biomedical ethics, medical anthropology and medical education, we will challenge our basic assumptions about illness, disability, and caregiving. We will also ask how empathy and storytelling can inform clinical practice, as well as how patients can advocate for themselves. These questions will thread throughout the semester.
It’s a Dog’s Life
There are close to a billion dogs on Earth. Not all walk on leashes and play fetch. Some scavenge near garbage dumps, some are worshipped as gods, some are preyed upon, while others are trained to attack on sight. So, what makes a dog a dog, and why have they enjoyed such a privileged place in human culture and society? In this course, we explore how dogs navigate their worlds and express themselves, challenging human perspectives of personhood, kinship, and the wild.
Literary Texts, Critical Methods
In this course, you will read works from different genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction), drawn from the medieval period to the present day, learning the different interpretative techniques required by each. You will also be introduced to a variety of critical schools and approaches and some ways you might integrate them into your own critical writing.