Courses

  • In this introduction to medieval literature, we will look to medieval bodies as our point of entry. How is the body presented in scientific literature different from a saint's body in a vita (a saint's "life")? Where did medieval thinkers draw boundaries between celestial, divine, human, animal, and non-vital bodies (if at all)? (EN122)

  • Our class will focus on the role of “nature” as a structuring tool of embodiment and being in medieval texts. Reading medieval and early modern literature and drama alongside recent scholarship in gender and sexuality studies and queer ecologies, we will attend to the multiple and mutable forms of the premodern body. (“The Arts of Gender” EN326/WGS326)

  • This course introduces students to literary analysis through writing on monsters. From a young age we are invited to wonder what lives under the bed or in the shadows. As the etymology goes, monsters reveal that which is unknown or difficult to comprehend. In this course we will ask: How do we differentiate between human and monster? At what point does one exceed or not meet the standards of humanity and become a monster? What do monsters reveal? Together we will turn a light onto some of literature’s iconic and lesser-known monsters. Expect to encounter dog-headed saints, love-lost werewolves, cursed revenants, lesbian vampires, and shape-shifting aliens. (EN220)

  • This course introduces students to literary analysis through writing on dreams. Interspersed with poetry, drama, film and a short 2D art game "Every Day the Same Dream," our texts will challenge us to rethink the boundaries between reality and dreams and technology and imagination. The literature for this course is multigeneric, and thus will include a range of genres, periods, and media. (EN220)

  • This class considers the histories of transgender embodiment in literary, scientific, natural philosophical and religious texts from the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500). We will read about trans saints, alchemical hermaphrodites, sex workers, eunuchs, and personified vices and virtues. What can a medieval trans studies offer to contemporary trans studies and vice versa?

  • Is there such a thing as trans literature? This class explores how gender variance has long been bound up in text-based representation. We will read texts with trans resonance (to use Alexander Eastwood’s term), explore trans media objects, and read contemporary poetry and prose by trans writers. Some authors: Cameron Awkward-Rich, Ari Banias, Chase Berggrun, jos charles, Miller Oberman, Casey Plett, Jordy Rosenberg, Kai Cheng Thom, among others.

  • This course, "Major Authors," will introduce students to several authors and texts in the ancient and medieval world that have held sway in the literary canon for centuries. At the same time, this course will ask students to think critically about how literary canons form along the lines of race and gender, how authors become and remain "canonical," and most importantly, who gets to make these decisions about literary traditions. (EN221)

  • When we speak of personification, we speak of allegory, a mode of writing and a mode of interpreting. Allegory means to speak otherwise (from the Greek allos, ‘other’ + -agoria, ‘speaking’) and when this literary mode is fashioned with personification (prosopopoeia, from the Greek prosopon, ‘person, face, mask’ + poeiein, ‘to make’), we are faced with flexile, signifying textual bodies. Our course on medieval personification allegory will meditate on this bold literary device as an entry point to explore the contours of embodiment, faculty psychology, and personhood in premodern literature. We will chart how medieval allegory – its religious, moral, historical, and political interpretations – merges with ideas of metaphor, signification, and figural language, as well as how medieval allegory intersects with medieval genres like dream visions, morality drama, and debate poetry. We will read Latin and French works in translation, such as Prudentius’s Psychomachia and The Romance of the Rose. Following this, we will turn to medieval English texts like The Owl and the Nightingale and Piers Plowman, plus debates between the body and the soul, lyrics on Fortune’s Wheel, sermons on the deadly sins, and the morality drama Everyman. Some of the Middle English works will be available, and others we will read in translation.

  • Topic TBD

Pedagogy

What is DIY pedagogy?

Creation

My teaching is built on the belief that students are creators who learn not just how to create but the ethics of creation in their projects and engagements. I aid my students in their work toward creating a more equitable world. As a teacher, I encourage my students to believe that their thoughts are worth composing and sharing as active members of a conversation: they are the architects, assemblers, designers, makers, and creators of information and ideas. 

Versatility

I always tell my students that “DIY” does not mean “Do It Yourself” in the sense of isolated work but rather it means to self-equip the tools needed to enact a creative vision. It is the practice of creating without the aid of professionals and with limited or differently sourced resources. As instructors we must build versatility into our syllabi and classroom design, as well as meet students at their own points of flexibility.

Collaboration

I equip my students with the tools and confidence to effect positive change in the communities they inhabit. To be in a classroom of individual creators crucially reroutes my position as an instructor; I present myself as a collaborator to my students’ creative process, not an authority meant to evaluate a final product. I tell my students that they have more to learn from each other than from a single author, professor, or resource.

DIY is a ... “revolutionary tool because it is one means of empowering society’s most dispossessed people […] we have not been afraid to defy white male logic, which will always tell us ‘no,’ when our hearts and spirit tell us ‘YES!’”

Barbara Smith, Co-Founder of Kitchen Table Press

“It was important that we could do it on our own. It was very important to us that we publish it ourselves. That people of color had done it on our own. It was important to us that women did it.”

Ntozake Shange, Third World Communications

​“The whole point of what we were doing was D.I.Y., create it yourself, taking over the means of production for ourselves, and creating something ourselves.”

Allison Wolfe, Bratmobile

“DIY” as a creative process has many geneaologies: the Black Liberation Movement, the 1980s Black feminist publishing world, notably Kitchen Table Press, transgender life-survival techniques, and later in the 1990s queer-feminist punk scene. The work of DIY is characterized by disalienation, political intervention, and alternative media through self-publishing (zines, distributed information pamphlets, and independent presses) and collaborative communication (lyrics, art installations, etc.). As a literary scholar I am fascinated by and indebted to this underground textual moment.

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