Original Course Design

a 300-level English seminar

This course offers a broad, non-exhaustive overview of queer literature written in the U.S. over the past hundred years. Individual weeks will allow us to focus on facets of queer experience—how place (urban or rural), class stature (wealthy or working class), and race inform what is possible for queer individuals, relationships, and larger communities. Students are encouraged to pursue their own critical questions, but discussions will return to the question of how queer life and literature changes in the transition from the margins to the mainstream. What possibilities and what constrictions emerge as queerness seems to become more legible to larger numbers of people? Is there such a thing as a cohesive queer narrative style or form? Our reading list is comprised of fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, nonfiction, and perhaps some theory.

Readings include: Virginia Woolf, Richard Bruce Nugent, Patricia Highsmith, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Samuel Delany, Tony Kushner, and others.

This course was taught in Fall 2019 at Johns Hopkins University and Spring 2023 at the University of Maine at Farmington.

a 300-level English seminar

This course posits that novels offer a window through which to view the myriad upheavals wrought by the American Revolution and the feelings of promise, disappointment, and malleability that attended its early maturity. The assigned novels were both popular in their time and written by authors with a great sense of uncertainty as to how and whether America’s democratic promise could be fulfilled. With readers across social divisions of class, race, and gender, novels often spoke to (and were spoken by) figures without access to traditional political arenas and provided new terms for considering American realities and possibilities. In this class, we read works from the beginnings of the “New Republic” through the antebellum period and close with the labor unrest of the Gilded Age. By no means a complete survey, this course is designed to introduce students to the genres of sentimental romance, gothic horror, antislavery activism, Reconstruction-era utopianism, and turn-of-the-century realism in the emergent American literary scene.

Readings include: Susanna Rowson, Charles Brockden Brown, Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Pauline Hopkins, and William Dean Howells.

This course was taught in Fall 2022 at the University of Maine at Farmington.

200-level English and Editing & Publishing courses

Each of these creative and project-based courses introduces students to writing and editing in professional settings.

Editing: This course offers an overview of the principles and practices of technical and production editing. Students apply these principles through copyediting and proofreading documents, but primarily through the full production of an edited artifact of your choosing. The course considers tone, style, and organization, as well as professional communication. It consists of a mixture of reading, writing, and editing assignments; in-class activities and workshops; and visiting speakers.

Taught in Fall 2022 at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Professional Writing: This course focuses on professional writing, including internal and external communication for specific audiences. Attention is paid to style, grammar, visual design, and digital technology. Students analyze and produce professional writing in a variety of genres, media, and contexts, including proposals, brochures, copywriting, letters, and job portfolios. The goal is for students to leave the class feeling equipped to take on new and familiar writing tasks in professional settings.

Taught in Spring 2023 at the University of Maine at Farmington.

a 100-level expository writing course

Contemporary debates about the status of marriage in the United States, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling against the Defense of Marriage Act, have had to confront the question of how flexible the institution really is. What are the essential features of marriage, and what do certain theories tell us about how we imagine our selves, our ideal lives, and our romantic relationships? In taking a long view of the institution, we see that answering this question is not at all simple. It can be a legal contract, a religious ceremony, a social practice, and any combination of these—and only recently in history has “love” entered the stage as a powerful player. In this course, students approach the question from various angles, considering also questions about selfhood, personal relationships, and social recognition through the lens of marriage.

Readings include: Plato, Kant, Kate Chopin, Raymond Carver, Alexander Chee, and the Against Equality anthology.

This course was taught through a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship with Johns Hopkins’ University Writing Program in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021.

a 300-level interdisciplinary humanities seminar

In 1977, feminist theorist Marilyn Frye asked, “What is it about separation, in any or all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister, so exciting and so repellent?” Her essay, “Some Reflections on Separatism and Power” was a response to the emergence and persistence in the 1960s of a feminist separatist politics, as well as its many detractors, both from outside the feminist movement and within (many black feminists, for example, critiqued the movement’s essentialism and its positioning of gender and sexuality above considerations of race). Today, Frye’s question still remains a live one; think, for example, of the now-commonplace exclamation that one will “move to Canada” (or “leave Earth” as Tina Fey has it) in the face of an ominous political possibility. In a less facetious form, one might consider the separatism latent in the emergence of queer futurity politics, safe space discourse, and a more general pessimism about reform and assimilation as satisfying answers to a continually oppressive status quo. In this course, we consider the ongoing salience of the idea of separatism as it is engaged within politics of gender and sexuality, paying special attention to questions of intersectionality.

Readings include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Valerie Solanas, Andrea Dworkin, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Kate Bornstein, Andrea Long Chu, Joyce Carol Oates, The Combahee River Collective Statement, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and others.

This course was awarded a competitive teaching fellowship with Johns Hopkins’ Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and was taught in Spring 2018.

a 300-level interdisciplinary humanities seminar

Perhaps no other terrain in the American landscape has prompted more widely-varied psychic responses as the swamp. What was once thought excessively fertile land came to be seen as dank and monstrous when George Washington’s 1763 Dismal Land Company tried and failed to domesticate the swamplands of the eastern coast. As the murky, untamable swamp came to occupy a place of disturbing intrigue in the nineteenth-century literary imagination, such impenetrable landscapes also came to serve as secure places of refuge for fugitive slaves across the American south. Swampy landscapes came to evoke anxious fear of revolt and rebellion among white slaveholders while as many as two thousand escaped slaves found shelter and sustenance in the swamp’s mazy topography. Who and what was lurking just beyond the swamp’s wall of vines and veil of mist? Though the swamp of the 20th and 21st centuries retains a sense of dreary, foreboding mystery, a relatively new ecological discourse on swamplands (recast as “wetlands”) has emerged calling for protection of the strange and delicate balance of marsh life. The precarity of such ecosystems as the Florida Everglades comes to represent the toll two and a half centuries of environmental plunder has taken on the American landscape. At the same time, the 2016 presidential election saw the reemergence in American political rhetoric of calls to “drain the swamp” of the federal government.
By turns, the amphibious terrain of the swamp has represented growth and abundance, stagnation and decay, moral depravity, organic sanctuary, and has played the roles of both harbinger of devastation and safe-haven of the oppressed. At each twist, texts imagining or metaphorizing swamplands give us a unique glimpse into the aesthetic, social, and political anxieties and struggles of the moment. This course tracks these historical shifts and develops an understanding of precisely how and why they occur, all the while asking what it is about swamplands that attracts our deepest worries and our eeriest curiosities.

Readings include: eighteenth-century swamp surveys, narratives of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Susan Howe, Alan Moore, Karen Russell, and others.

This course was awarded a competitive Dean’s Teaching Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University and was taught in Fall 2018.