Courses Designed and Taught as Primary Instructor:
Twisted Bodies and Twisted Plots: Reading Physical Disability in Literature (Spring 2023)
Since antiquity, authors have used physical disability as a character-making trope. Sophocles ironizes Tiresias’s blindness to convey his “special sight” as a seer, whereas Shakespeare exaggerates Richard III’s crooked hunchback to dramatize his vice. Following the injunction of disability studies scholars to reexamine disability’s limited “use” as shorthand in characterization, this course will explore how writers deploy disability for a variety of purposes, from cultural critique to expressing the lived experience of bodily impairment. Tracing physical disability in literature from the eighteenth century to the present, we will place characters—from maimed veterans in the English countryside to a traveling carnival of genetically-engineered “freaks” on the American roadside—within their historical context. Situating disability alongside the atrocities of war, the inhumanity of the Atlantic slave trade, the limb-lopping of factory machinery, and the exploitation of a mutant cult leader, while considering its intersections with class, race, and gender, this course will introduce students to literary studies through a disability-studies framework.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will satisfy one General Education requirement in Literary and Cultural Analysis in the Arts and Humanities Foundation Area. This course’s consistent engagement with literature, close reading, and disability studies provides a basis for the Literary and Cultural Analysis credit. Students will also fulfill the Writing II requirement, as the writing process is an integral component of this course. By reading a variety of genres, from Romantic poetry to the postmodern novel, students will learn how to translate observations about a text’s form into paper-length arguments about its social or artistic content; how to incorporate research into their papers; and how to intervene in scholarly conversations. They will write in a range of modes through ungraded and graded assignments, including an explication paper, a longer research paper, and a reflective essay, producing a total of 17 to 20 pages of revised prose by the end of the quarter. Finally, this course counts toward one elective in the Disability Studies Minor. It will be of particular interest to students who are majoring in English, comparative literature, history, Human Biology and Society, and gender studies, as well as students who are minoring in disability studies.

Critical Reading & Writing: The (Dis)orderly Body in Literature (Summer 2020)
How do literature and culture shape our notions of “orderly” and “disorderly” bodies? By reading literature from the sixteenth century to the present, we will consider how different texts construct, disrupt, and comment on so-called “normative” and “non-normative” (or “deviant”) embodiment. The premise of our course will draw from disability studies, a multi-disciplinary field that understands disability as a social category, rather than medical in origin. However, we will not focus ​solely​ on disability. We will also ask: How do categories of identity, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship, become inscribed on the “non-normative” body?

Critical Reading & Writing: Literature and Science (Spring 2019)
Challenging the assumption that literature and science represent incompatible ways of knowing, this course will use the relationship between both disciplines as its organizing principle. We will engage with a wide range of mediums, including poetry, the essay, scientific literature, drama, and the novel, as well as literature from different national contexts, dating from the seventeenth century to the present. Thinking about the past, present, and future, we will explore microscopic worlds, outer space, and science on the human scale in readings that relate to the scientific fields of biology, astronomy, evolutionary theory, anatomy, environmental science, quantum mechanics, and genetics. This course will ask: What sort of epistemological projects do literature and science represent? How do these disciplines complement each other? What do they have in common, and how do they differ? How does the literary genre of science fiction, in particular, allow us to imagine alternative futures? How can disability and illness narratives help us understand the clinical encounter? And, what sorts of ethical stakes do scientific discoveries pose?

Critical Reading & Writing: Illness and Disability Narratives (Fall 2018)
In “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf lamented that it is “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” However, for the past several decades, scholars in disability studies have made significant strides in centering illness and disability as urgent themes in literary studies. In this course, we will study how literature from the seventeenth century to the present deploys these themes. Engaging with a variety of mediums, including poetry, memoir, fiction, drama, and film, as well as literature from different national contexts, we will ask: How can we think about illness and disability in relation to literary form and genre? How do race, gender, sexuality, and class inflect disability, and how does literature formalize these intersections?

Courses Taught as Teaching Assistant/Teaching Fellow:
Literary Cities—Service Learning: Refugee Literature, Then and Now (Spring 2024)
Introduction to Visual Culture (Winter 2019)
Major American Authors (Spring 2018)
Literary London: Tales of Two Cities (Winter 2018)
Literatures in English, 1700-1850 (Fall 2017)