Teaching

Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 2016-2019.

Breaking Form/Making Books: Literary Experimentation in the US after 1800, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2019, 1 section. This course consisted of three five-week units based on the study of single authors who were considered innovators in their own time: Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Ronald Johnson. Each unit began with a session working with rare editions of the authors’ works in the university’s special collections. Student projects were based on the study of these archived materials.

Inhabiting an American Self, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2018, 1 section. This course explores concepts of selfhood and citizenship from literary and ethical perspectives in texts by Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Claudia Rankine, Martha Roberts, Leyli Long Soldier, and Joy Harjo. Theoretical frames for our discussions range from Saidiya Hartman’s reading of Douglass to Judith Butler’s concept of performativity.

Reading and Writing about Poetry, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2018, 1 section. This course is an introduction to the study of poetry as a genre that includes a variety of sub-divisions, such as prose poetry, song, and electronic texts. Students experiment with a variety of critical modes that allow them to conduct analysis through close reading, try popular critical genres (the book review), and branch out into interdisciplinary inquiries.

Fitzgerald and Hurston, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2018, 1 section. This course compares and contrasts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Moses, Man of the Mountain. Discussions and written assignments focus on the multiple facets of American Modernism, as well as treatments of language, race and gender in the novels of both authors.

American Poetry, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2018/19, 2 sections. This course begins with the question: “What is American about American poetry?” Class discussions and written assignments explore this question alongside readings of Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and others. Because this class is a survey, it emphasizes the heterogeneity of voices and traditions in American poetry.

Poe & His World, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2017, 1 section. This course tracks the evolution of Edgar Allan Poe’s career as a writer, from the early self-published books of poetry through his years as a magazine editor and widely circulated writer of tales and literary criticism. Class discussions as well as assignments draw upon online historical magazine archives as well as The Poe Society of Baltimore website. The

Science Fiction: Dystopias, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2016, 1 section. This course begins with classics (Brave New World and 1984) and ends with recent works that blur the boundary between genre literature and literary fiction (Parable of the Sower and The Circle). Students in this class are asked to think historically about why dystopian fictions continue to speak to our present moment.

Reading and Writing about the Novel, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2016, 1 section. This first-year course for English majors introduces students to the study of the novel in history and theory. Emphasis is placed on methods of interpretation and the composition of literary critical essays. In-class thesis writing and draft workshops allow students to develop their writing skills.

Post-doctoral Guest Lecturer, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, 2014-2016.

Early American Oratory: Free Speech and Self Possession, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, Instructor, 2016, 1 section. This course provides a foundation for readings in colonial American literature by tracing a historical narrative of the exercise of public speech from the Puritan sermons of the late seventeenth century through the abolitionist, feminist, and Transcendentalist lectures of the antebellum decades.

Literature in Times of Crisis: The American Civil War, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, Instructor, 2015/2016, 2 sections. Students read fiction, autobiography and documentary accounts from Douglass, Alcott, Whitman, and others, that account for the social and institutional transformations brought about by the Civil War. At the end of the semester, we follow the legacy of the war into the realism of Bierce and Crane.

The Public Works: Writing and the American City, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, Instructor, 2014/2015, 2 sections. In this course on American Literature from 1830 to 1860, students explore primary sources from periodical databases, digital resources on manuscript history, and secondary literature on urban history and media studies, as they read the literature of canonical as well as under-read authors from the period.

Documentary Poetics: Theories and Practices from Whitman to Goldsmith, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, Instructor, 2014/2015, 2 sections. In this course on literature from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first century, students develop research projects based on texts that attempts to affect immediate contact with a historical event and that respond to new media of their period, such as photography and sound recording.

Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 2010-2013.

The Interpretation of Literature, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, Instructor, 2010-2013; 2017, 8 sections. Readings assigned for this survey course span the English literary tradition from Shakespeare to contemporary authors. It is the required English literature course for all undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences. Students write two essays and participate in group research projects using digital resources and archives.

Online Teaching

Moderator, “Whitman’s Civil War: Writing and Imaging Loss, Death and Disaster.” Summer 2016. Responsibilities included posting of weekly discussion prompts, monitoring of student discussions and evaluation of student writing exercises.

Teaching Assistant, “Every Atom: Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself,’” Winter 2014. Responsibilities included daily monitoring of the online discussion forums and leading three live Q&A discussions with 2000+ registered participants. My teaching sessions can be viewed online: http://courses.writinguniversity.org/info/every-atom.