Teaching
Virginia Tech (2015-present)
English 5314 (Genre Studies): The Early American Novel
This master's level seminar introduces students to the early American novel as a genre distinct from both the British novel tradition and the post-Civil War American novel. Primary source readings include Olaudah Equiano, Susanna Rowson, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frank Webb. Secondary scholarship includes works by Cathy Davidson, Hortense Spillers, Leonard Tennenhouse, Judith Fetterley, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon.
English 5244 (Studies in American Authors): American Women's Writing to 1900
This master's level seminar provides an intensive study of women's writing in North America from the colonial period to the turn of the twentieth century as well as a survey of both contemporary and recent critical responses to women's writing. Readings include Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Winnemuca Hopkins, Edith Wharton, and others, as well as important works in feminist criticism and literary recovery.
English 5074: Introduction to Digital Humanities
This master's level course introduces students to major topics and trends in the digital humanities in order to prepare them for further graduate study or future careers. In addition to readings in the field ranging from digital archiving to large-scale textual analysis and "big data" to innovations in scholarly communications and publishing, the course includes a hands-on project component tailored to students' skills and interests.
English 4784 (Senior Seminar): Scrapbooks and Nineteenth-Century American Culture
This advanced seminar for senior English majors explores the centrality of poetry to nineteenth-century American culture through both traditional readings and a student-led digital project. Students study the conditions of poetic production and circulation as they create a publicly available online digital edition of a nineteenth-century poetry scrapbook held in the Daniel Bedinger Lucas Papers in Virginia Tech's Special Collections. The course offers a capstone experience as students conduct primary and secondary source research and produce both formal and informal writing for a public audience.
English 4434 (The American Novel): American Revolutions
This undergraduate seminar immerses students in the American novel tradition through works that engage with the theme of revolution: the Revolutionary War (Catharine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods), slave revolution (Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave; Herman Melville's Benito Cereno), economic revolutions (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby), sexual revolution (Kate Chopin's The Awakening), and revolutions in literary form (Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony; Toni Morrison's A Mercy).
English 2534: American Literary History
This required course for English majors introduces students to five periods in American Literary History: the Colonial period, Enlightenment and Revolution, the American Renaissance, the Gilded Age, and the Modernist period. Assignments and lectures provide a solid foundation for future study by scaffolding major historical and literary events and movements. Readings feature traditionally canonical works by Emerson, Melville, and Hemingway alongside radical or recently recovered voices including David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2006-2015)
English 530: Digital Humanities History and Methods
This course, offered online through UNC's Friday Center for Continuing Education in Spring 2015, introduces graduate students and advanced undergraduates to the materials and methodologies that characterize work in the digital humanities. Students read both peer-reviewed and informal writing on topics ranging from digital archives and the TEI to topic modeling and other forms of distant reading and engage with the issues and debates (maker culture, cross-disciplinary collaboration, grant funding and corporatization) that inform both current DH practice and earlier work in "humanities computing." Students also experiment with and evaluate existing digital humanities tools and projects.
English 498 (Independent Study): Prudence Person Scrapbook Project
In this invitation-only course students work collaboratively to create an annotated online edition of the Prudence Person scrapbook, a nineteenth-century artifact held in the UNC Rare Books Collection. Students research and write scholarly annotations for each page of the scrapbook and craft contextual essays on nineteenth-century print culture, copyright law, popular poetry, gender roles, and other topics with relevance to the scrapbook's contents and the life of its owner, Prudence Person. Students learn the Scalar scholarly publishing platform as they design and build the edition; they also document the progress of the project on Tumblr and Twitter. Students thus produce formal and informal writing for the web while learning about the development and management of an online digital edition.
English 281: Technology and American Culture
This general education course, designed for sophomore and junior non-majors, engages philosophical and historical issues related to technological and cultural change in the United States from the 18th century to the 21st. The course is arranged thematically, centering on technologies of creation/identity, travel, communication, and profit, and explores how technology is imbricated in discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Texts include fiction, non-fiction, and film by Sherman Alexie, Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Jennifer Egan, Olaudah Equiano, Donna Haraway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Alan Turing, and Colson Whitehead.
English 128: Major American Authors
This general education course, designed for freshman and sophomore non-majors, covers seven important U.S. authors: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Kurt Vonnegut. The course emphasizes close reading techniques, theoretical perspectives for analyzing literature, and argumentative writing.
English 127: Writing About Literature
This general education course, part of UNC's Minor in Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Literacy, introduces students to platforms and tools for digital writing (including WordPress and Scalar) while emphasizing traditional research and writing skills including close reading, scholarly annotation, secondary source collection and vetting, drafting, editing, and revision. Students complete digital writing tasks based on course readings; authors studied include Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, William Goldman, and Ruth Ozeki.
English 123: Introduction to Fiction
This general education course, designed for freshman and sophomore non-majors, is subtitled "American Gothic: Tales of Horror and Suspense in the 19th Century U.S." The course emphasizes historical contextualization, genre and gender studies, close reading, and methodologies for research and writing. Authors studied include Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Silas Weir Mitchell, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Henry James.
English 105: Rhetoric and Composition
This first-year composition course focuses on college-level writing skills as applied to a range of natural science, social science, and humanities disciplines. Course topics include analysis of academic genres, advanced diction and style, college-level research skills, techniques for peer review and revision, and writing in digital contexts.
English 102i: Business Communication
This first-year composition course, taught under the auspices of UNC's Writing in the Disciplines Program, emphasizes college-level writing and speaking skills within the framework of business communication. Course topics include audience analysis, professional style, collaborative writing, research and citation skills, and writing with technology.
English 102: Rhetoric and Composition
This first-year composition course focuses on writing in the disciplines of natural science, social science, and the humanities. Course topics include audience analysis, academic style, research and citation skills, and techniques for constructive peer review.
English 101: Rhetoric and Composition
This first-year composition course focuses on college-level writing skills as applied to the fields of popular culture, public issues, and professional communities. Course topics include audience analysis, academic style, research and citation skills, and techniques for constructive peer review.
American Studies 101: The Emergence of Modern America
Taught during the summer session, this intensive introduction to American Studies methodologies (and course prerequisite for the American Studies major) combines short lectures with rigorous classroom discussions of important written and visual texts—historical documents, popular songs, political cartoons, paintings and photographs, fiction, and poetry—from the American Revolution to the present day.
Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd (2003-2004)
American Studies: Contemporary American Issues
Designed for German college students training to teach English in German primary and secondary schools, this discussion-based course introduced students to contemporary issues in U.S. politics and culture and offered opportunities for intensive English conversation practice.
American Studies: Essential American Texts
Designed for German college students training to teach English in German primary and secondary schools, this discussion-based course introduced students to significant texts from American popular culture. Course materials included songs, poems, short stories, and works of art from the 17th through 21st centuries.