Current Classes / Classes Taught

Mount Holyoke College

“I Would Prefer Not To: Marxism and Early American Literature,” Fall 2024

This class considers how the political economy of slavery is mediated through early and nineteenth-century American literary texts. We will read a range of literature as well as texts in economic, aesthetic, and cultural theory to consider how slavery has been a defining aesthetic force in American literary production. While a large number of readings in the class are focused directly on slavery, we will explore how the political economy of slavery structured what could be written, thought, and represented in the context of early America. We will consider, for example, how literary form reflects and refracts material, economic conditions; how slavery dictates the flow of capital and the formation of the credit economy; how representations and non-representations of economics betray a dependence on its foundations in enslavement; how literature diagnoses and articulates the conduits of political economy; and how the political and psychoanalytic dimensions of economics depend upon their own fictitious narratives to function.

“Abolition and Climate Change,” Fall 2023.

What makes change so difficult? Why do people always seem to be so apathetic to the most pressing political and social issues? In the face of the climate crisis and racial injustice, why do so many people today remain absolutely unmoved? These were central problems for the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century, and remain crucial issues for people today who similarly believe that another world is possible. This class will primarily focus on an in-depth study of the larger antislavery movement in the nineteenth-century United States. However, we will theorize nineteenth-century abolition by way of climate change activism. And, we will make sense of climate change activism through an affective political-economic exploration of nineteenth-century abolition. We will use a cultural studies model of inquiry to think about the relation between literature, art, politics, economics, and social change by reading the writing of antislavery activists, Black radical figures, and political and economic theorists, scholars, and critics. Genres will include pamphlets, speeches, newspapers, journals, poetry, and fiction. This course aims to examine specific abolitionist figures and the strategies and tactics that antislavery activists used to make the impossible possible, while also considering how the abolitionist movement was intertwined with the birth of environmentalism—a nineteenth century understanding of the deleterious effects of extractive capitalism. Students will pursue their own research projects, and will be encouraged to consider the political and economic linkages between the climate crisis and the institution of chattel slavery.

“The Early African American Novel,” Spring 2023.

This course tracks the beginnings of the African American novelistic tradition in the nineteenth century. The early African American novel had to contend with a number of other literary forms within its political and cultural context such as the slave narrative with its central claim to truth. We will consider: What is specific to the form of the novel? How does it differentiate itself from and even include other forms of writing and literature? What are the politics of the early African American novel in the era of slavery and abolition? We will examine how early novels by Black Americans imagine more emancipatory futures while also critiquing the unfreedom of the nineteenth century.

“American Literature I: Narratives and Counter Narratives,” Fall 2023, Spring 2023.

This course situates early American literature within the context of settler colonialism and slavery and abolition by surveying a wide range of forms of literary expression from early contact and colonization in the fifteenth century to 1865. By framing American literary and cultural history as a series of hegemonic narratives and counternarratives, in this class we will question how narrative has been used to justify violence and oppression, and how Indigenous writers, women, and Black antislavery activists have consistently resisted and critiqued those justifications. We will explore how this culture of protest permeates literary production in the early American period and we will trace its effect on the development of literary form in the American context, including the essay, speeches, sermons, the slave narrative, the short story and fiction more generally, and poetry. By centering social reform and political change, in this course we will consider how American literature has been defined and how literary and cultural production has helped to define America. We will think about how nationality depends upon narrative while considering how those narratives have excluded others, and we will track the development of American myth and ideology by thinking through settler colonial violence, race, gender, and class. Finally, we will consider how genre and literary form relate to the formation of national identity and how writers have used literature to articulate a subversive politics.

“Race and Sensory Perception in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” Fall 2022.

Upper-level seminar that considers the role of the senses in imagining what Black freedom might look like. Can freedom be sensed? How are the senses shaped by politics, economics, and history? By examining a range of African American literary texts before 1900, this class tracks how Black writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Martin Delany, Charles Chesnutt, and Phillis Wheatley Peters have used literature to explore the intertwinement of political possibility with sensory perception. In addition, this course draws upon a number of texts from the larger abolitionist movement, while also being guided by Black radical scholars such as Christina Sharpe and Rinaldo Walcott and other figures such as Karl Marx and W.E.B. Du Bois.

“American Literature I,” Fall 2022.

This class surveys the history of American literature from early contact and colonization to 1865. This course questions how American literature has been defined and how literature has helped to define America. Central this course’s considerations is how nations are defined in part by narrative while considering how those narratives have excluded others. By focusing on Black writers, women, and social movements for justice and equality, this course considers how genre and literary form relate to the formation of national identity and how writers have used literature to articulate a subversive politics in some of the most oppressive conditions.

Emerson College

“Honors Seminar: Reading American Literature and Culture,” Spring 2022.

This course surveys contemporary (20th and 21st century) American culture through literary texts, films, visual art, and critical and cultural theory. By using an American Studies model of inquiry and theories of race, gender, sexuality, and imperialism, this course analyzes topics such as performance, identity, militarism, modernism and postmodernism. Major texts include James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Ling Ma’s Severance, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees.

“Sensing Freedom: African American Literature and Perception,” Fall 2021.

Elective course on the relation between politics, sensory perception, and aesthetics in African American literature. Through a survey of Black writers from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, this course considers how different forms of literature such as the slave narrative, fiction, poetry, the essay, and oratory engage with issues of politics, democracy, and economics. The central theme of the course is how African American writers have turned to the senses to mark the exclusionary limits of citizenship and freedom while also imagining how literature provides a site for both revolutionary and emancipatory thinking. Major texts include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

“U.S./American Literatures,” Fall 2021.

Survey of American literature from the colonial period to the twentieth century. Class focused on how genre relates to the formation of national identity and how writers have used literature to develop subversive politics. Major texts include Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

“Honors Seminar: Literature and Culture of the Americas,” Fall 2021.

Course designed to introduce first-year Honors students to key critical and literary texts that represent the diverse literary and cultural histories of the Americas. Students learn to write and think about a range of critical and literary modes of expression through an intensive regimen of class discussion and varied writing and research assignments. As an introduction to the Honors Program, critical theory, and the literature of the Americas, this course serves as the foundation for new students in the Honors Program at Emerson College.

Boston College

“Discontinuous Histories in American Literature,” Spring 2019.

Upper-level seminar for English majors focused on the treatment of history in early American and African American texts. Small, discussion-based classes prioritized student involvement. Central ideas included how American writers have questioned the problem of tradition in democracy; how Black writers draw from historical precedent to imagine a more emancipatory future; the influence of economics on society. Major texts included David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

“Literature Core: The Political Labor of Literature,” Fall 2018

Required general education literature course for non-majors. Focused on the development of interpretative methods and critical thinking and writing skills. Major texts centered around the theme of how literary writers have thought about the role work can or should play in our lives, and included W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

“Literature Core: Capitalism and Resistance,” Fall 2017, Spring 2018.

Required general education literature course for non-majors. Focused on the development of interpretative methods and critical and analytical thinking skills. Major texts considered the intertwinement of politics, economics, and social life and included Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Bernard Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees.”

“First-Year Writing Seminar: Culture and the Self,” Fall 2013, Spring 2014.

Inquiry-based intensive writing course for freshmen that emphasizes the role of revision in the writing process and focuses on the community aspect of writing. Students practice writing in a number of genres and gain familiarity with analytical and rhetorical conventions, while benefitting from regular one-on-one conferences with me and peer-review with their classmates.

TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language)

English Language Teacher, Jazyková Škola Glossa. Prague, Czech Republic. 2014-2015.

Private language school. Taught university students as well as working professionals in international business contexts. Classes ranged from one-on-one preparation for graduate study in the U.S. to larger classes focused on business and technical English for employees of international companies.

English Language Teacher, Jazyková Škola Jipka. Prague, Czech Republic. 2011-2012.