Currently Teaching

Writing Specialist: Human Being and Citizen I (Autumn 2021-present)

Overview for students:

Your Writing Seminars are affiliated with your Humanities Core Sequence, and they are structured to help you succeed as a writer in your core courses. These seminars also constitute their own course, however, which is pass/fail and necessary to graduate. Throughout the quarter, we will use your written work for Human Being and Citizen as a point of departure for thinking through best practices in argumentative writing. While I have set topics for discussion corresponding to each week, it is best to think of these topics as provocative, rather than delimiting: it is most important to me that you become a better writer. The tools and approaches I prepare are means toward that end.

Main course blurbs:

The autumn quarter explores the ways that Ancient Greek [sic] and the Abrahamic text of Genesis conceive of, express ideals about, and articulate tensions in conceptions and practices of justice, human and divine law, and emotion. We examine the ways these conceptions figure in literary, philosophical and religious texts concerned with rupture and continuity in the social order. We consider the ways human beings come together in groups (families, cities, armies, but also beliefs and aspirations) and strive to understand what binds these groups as structures of meaning-making and social practice. Texts include Homer’s Iliad, the book of Genesis, Plato’s Apology and Laches, and Sophocles’ Antigone.
In the winter quarter, we examine conceptions of the human good in connection with practices of the self as they pertain to virtue, the social order, spiritual beliefs and practices, and community. We ask what constitutes human flourishing and explore relations and tensions between individual self-formation and the social and political good. Texts include Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, and Dante’s Inferno.
The spring quarter addresses matters of community, law, freedom, morality, and ideology in a (broadly speaking) modern idiom of citizenship and its attendant idea of the human being as a rights-bearing subject. We ask what (whether culture, religion, reason itself) might ground our moral judgments, and what the limits and freedoms are of thinking the human being as a subject accorded rights through instruments of philosophical or political law. Resourced by our autumn and winter texts, we consider the impact of thinking matters of race, ethnicity, and gender through a modern lens and how these considerations both challenge and draw on the past. Texts include Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and Baldwin’s No Name in the Street.

Past Courses

Imagining the Medieval in Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction (Fall 2020)

From the sensationalized violence of Game of Thrones to Luke Skywalker’s monastic planet in The Last Jedi, in advertisements for light beer (dilly dilly!) and in the fairytale castle that appears before every Disney movie – the contemporary imagination is suffused with fictional representations of the European Middle Ages. In fantasy and science fiction writing in particular, postapocalyptic futures and magical parallel universes are indebted frequently to a mythologized version of the medieval past. We recognize “the medieval” intuitively by its shining knights, dour monks, clever witches, and grimy peasants. But what do these fictions have to do, if anything, with the way the medieval world thought about itself? And why do so many modern thinkers turn to an unfamiliar past in order to question the urgent political, social, religious, and ecological concerns of the present? What, in short, does the medieval have to do with the fantastic, the unnatural, or the strange?

Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites (1987), N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)

Excerpts from medieval texts at my discretion.

Early Texts and Contexts (Fall 2018)

How did what we now call English literature emerge? How did literary activity shape the world, and how did the world shape writing? How can literature help us understand the history of art, race, religious identity and sectarian conflict, nations and empires, gender, sexuality, and class? We will address these questions by studying the early history of literature in English, from the Middle Ages through the late eighteenth century, as well as the tools, vocabularies, and critical practices of contemporary literary studies. We will learn about both the material forms of English literature (manuscript, print, and performance traditions) and major poetry and prose forms (sonnet, epic, blank verse, romance, letter, slave narrative, and more). In addition to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Ignatius Sancho or Olaudah Equiano, the syllabus may include authors and texts such as “Beowulf,” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Julian of Norwich, Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Eliza Haywood. NOTE: Satisfies one of the two 200-level requirements for the English Major.

Future Courses?

Works in progress, suggestions for improvement welcome

Medievalism, Medieval Studies, and Speculative Fiction

Modified from IMMFSF, Fall 2020

This course explores the legacies, uses, and abuses of medieval imaginative writing in contemporary literatures. We will adopt medievalism – loosely, the study of the reception of the “medieval” – as our primary lens for understanding how the Middle Ages linger in modern works of speculative fiction. We recognize invocations of the “medieval” intuitively by its shining knights, dour monks, clever witches, and grimy peasants, as a source of sensationalized violence and fairytale adventure. We also witness reliance on the “medieval” as a revisionary political category, whether in white supremacist claims to “Anglo-Saxon” heritage or in Supreme Court Justice Alito’s repeated citation, in his opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, of thirteenth-century jurist Henry of Bracton. The Middle Ages may fascinate, but they are not innocuous. So, with one eye on the past, our other eye cannot leave the present: the worlds we build are inextricable from the worlds we inhabit. We therefore also ask how medieval authors and their speculative heirs contribute to critical discourses on identity (including race, gender, sex, age), ecology, politics, and religion today. All medieval texts will be read in translation.

Medieval works: Anonymous, Sir Orfeo, William Langland (?), Piers Plowman [selections], Geoffrey Chaucer, House of Fame, The Book of Margery Kempe [selections], Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies [selections]

Modern works: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015), N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015), Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway (2016), Arkady Martin, A Memory Called Empire (2019), Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun (2020)

Reading Manuscript Texts in Material Contexts

This course offers an introduction to the bibliographic techniques and critical practices afforded by careful examination of pre-modern books. We will study the making of books, methods in material analysis, and modes of circulation and reception in order to form and reform our own interpretive approaches to the texts they contain. The scope of inquiry is global: the first part of the term will survey Western European, Ethiopic, Arabic, Byzantine, East Asian, and South Asian book production. Our critical aims, however, will be local: in the second part of the term, our conversations will revolve around the material and textual significance of specific manuscripts and manuscript groups. Students will learn to navigate robust digital repositories for archival work. The overall trajectory of the course will move from bibliographic analysis to critical interpretation, introducing technical vocabularies alongside current methodologies in literary and comparative historical practice. We come to understand better how diverse historical agents understood themselves by examining the legible artifacts they produced, read, and modified over time.

Sample Reading List: Bryan C. Keene, ed., Toward a global Middle Ages: encountering the world through illuminated manuscripts (2019), Christopher De Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2017), Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, Eric Ross, “A Historical Geography of the Trans-Saharan Trade” in The *Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, ed. Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon (2011), Jinah Kim, “Buddhist Books and Their Cultic Use,” in Receptacle of the Sacred (2013), “General Introduction,” in Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies (2015), Arthur Bahr, “Introduction” in Fragments and Assemblages (2013)