Teaching

My approach to teaching nineteenth-century literature constructively defamiliarizes the expectations that sometimes frame our encounters with cultural objects, narratives, and the historical past. As a teacher, I aim to make challenging texts accessible to students approaching literature from varied disciplinary backgrounds and with diverse experiences as readers, writers, and thinkers. I draw on my own interdisciplinary research in visual culture to galvanize my students’ curiosity about unfamiliar literary forms and difficult concepts.

I have previously served as instructor of record and teaching assistant for undergraduate courses in English, Comparative Literature, and Environmental Studies, covering topics in literary and intellectual history, literary methods, and the environmental humanities at Ursinus College, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Students in my classes hone their research skills, craft writing portfolios, participate in roundtable discussions, engage in community projects, and curate art exhibitions.

Courses Taught

Assistant Professor, Appalachian State University

Fall 2025      ENGL 2020-101 and 102: British Literature Since 1789 (Introduction to Literature)
                        ENGL 5880: Victorian Futures (Graduate Seminar)

Visiting Assistant Professor, Ursinus College

Spring 2025     CIE 200: The Common Intellectual Experience (First-Year Seminar)
                        ENGL-290W: Methods in Literary Study (Gateway to English Major)

                        ENGL/EDUC-250: Education and the Novel (Intermediate Seminar)

Fall 2024          CIE 100: The Common Intellectual Experience (First-Year Seminar)

                        ENGL-104W: Representing the Global Village (Introductory Topics in Literature)

                        ENGL/ENV-262: The Environment in Literature (Intermediate Seminar)

Selected Course Descriptions

Instructor, Curtis Institute of Music

Fall 2023 LIT 341: Writing Nature, Writing the Self (Liberal Arts Elective)

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.

Assistant Professor, Appalachian State University

Fall 2025 ENG 5880: Victorian Futures (Graduate Seminar)

How did the Victorians view themselves in relation to history and the recent past—and how did they envision the future? In what ways has our own cultural moment (as twenty-first-century scholars and citizens) been shaped by disciplines, conventions, and institutions crystallized by those speculative visions? And what kinds of communities, collectivities, and institutions do we want to imagine or re-imagine today? As the authors of the V21 Collective’s manifesto assert, “In finance, resource mining, globalization, imperialism, liberalism, and many other vectors, we are Victorian, inhabiting, advancing, and resisting the world they made.” Taking up this call to reimagine Victorian Studies for the twenty-first century, our aims are twofold. First, we will explore how Victorian writers and thinkers theorized their own relationship to the era and grappled with conceptual problems and political quandaries that resonate into the present (such as the consequences of imperialism, war, technological change, and the devastating effects of ecological extraction) by engaging literary works that span genres, including the utopian romance, historical and speculative fiction, and the Bildungsroman. Second, we will trace Victorian culture’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as an object of study, and examine the current “state of the field”: How do scholars debate the rubric “Victorian” today? As you develop responses to these questions through your writing and research, you will become acquainted with new approaches to Victorian Studies envisioned by critics embracing comparatist, formalist, and presentist approaches to the field, and learn to apply these methodological frameworks to your own scholarly work. Readings will include novels by George Eliot, William Morris, Edward Bellamy, Richard Jeffries, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner; students’ responsibilities include discussion leadership and participation in a mock conference.