Teaching

I aim to make challenging texts accessible to students. I approach to nineteenth-century literature in ways that constructively defamiliarizes the expectations that sometimes frame our encounters with cultural objects and narratives. In my pedagogy, I draw on my research in visual culture to galvanize my students’ curiosity about unfamiliar literary forms and difficult concepts. My teaching experience includes work as instructor of record and teaching assistant for undergraduate courses English, intellectual history, and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania and the Curtis Institute of Music.

Courses Taught and Assisted

Instructor of Record:

  • COML 127: Sex and Representation (Penn, Spring 2021)

This course introduces nineteenth and twentieth-century literature that resists normative categories of gender and sexuality. By focusing on figures writing from the margins, we will explore how their radical approaches to narrative form and subject-matter invite us to think in new ways about desire and identity. We will read texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, hybridizing the genres of poetry, drama, and autobiography to produce new forms of expression, such as the graphic novel, auto-fiction, and prose poetry. From Virginia Woolf's gender-bending epic, Orlando, to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, this course traces how non-normative desire is produced and policed by social structures and literary contexts—and how those contexts can be re-imagined and transformed.

  • LIT 341: Writing Nature, Writing the Self (Curtis, Fall 2023)

What is a journal, and why keep one? For the artists, poets, and writers whose work we will examine this semester, journals log outward observations of nature, sustain inward self-reflection, and contain the preparatory work of writing. We will read personal writing—in the form of journals, letters, and essays—about the self and the natural world from Dorothy Wordsworth to Bernadette Mayer. Journals document encounters between self and nature; artist and world. In this course, we will also engage with writing by theorists like Roland Barthes and Christina Sharpe, and naturalists and essayists like J. Drew Lanham and Robert Macfarlane, to guide us in reconsidering ideas of nature and the self in relation to questions of identity and history—race, gender, nation, and empire.

Teaching Assistant:

  • Penn, Fall 2022 | HIST 1200-401: Foundations of European Thought

  • Penn, Fall 2020 | HIST 343-401: 19th Century European Intellectual History

  • Penn, Spring 2020 | ENG 38: The Age of Milton

  • Penn, Fall 2019 | ENG 90: Women Writing, 1660-1760