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 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.

Courses Taught

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)

Course Descriptions

Instructor, University of Pennsylvania

Spring 2021 COML 127: Sex and Representation

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.

Instructor, Curtis Institute of Music

Fall 2023 LIT 341: Writing Nature, Writing the Self

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.