Mobirise

Teaching

Modernism & Crisis

Co-Instructor, Bucknell University (Spring 2020)
Comparative Humanities Department

Course Description: Virginia Woolf once wrote “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” This seminar explores the pervasive sense in modern culture that fundamental shifts in cultural patterns and paradigms have occurred, changing not only our relationship with tradition and with the physical world, but even the ways we think and feel about ourselves and about each other. This sense of a cultural destabilization has been viewed as threatening by some and as potentially liberating by others. Many of the most influential modern artists and thinkers have questioned how or even whether value and belief can be sustained in a culture undergoing such rapid changes. We will trace the development of modernity by looking at selected interdisciplinary texts and documents—from philosophy, literature, psychology, film, art, and other related disciplinary fields—that reflect or directly address cultural transformation during the 20th century. Readings from writers and artists such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Jorge Luis Borges, Simone de Beauvoir and others will illuminate our discussions of philosophy, history, politics, art, film, modern physics, literary texts, and cultural criticism. 

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Graduate Writing Lab Consultant

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
University of Virginia (Fall 2017 - Spring 2019)

Responsibilities: Organized workshops in writing software, reference management, and best writing practices; led graduate student peer review groups; and held one-on-one consultations with graduate students.

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TESOL Instructor

Apollo Education and Training, Hanoi, Vietnam (Summer 2017)

About: Taught advanced English courses for Vietnamese students wishing to study abroad for college. Apollo is the only International House World Organization (IHWO) recognized CELTA trainer in Vietnam. IHWO is a global network of language schools that are committed to “excellence in language teaching and teacher training.”

Courses Taught: IELTS & College Preparation (1 section); ESL: Advanced Language and Reading (1 section)  

Certifications: Certificate in TESOL, XploreAsia (May 2017)

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History of European Literature II

Teaching Assistant, University of Virginia (Spring 2017)
English & Comparative Literature Departments

Course Description: This course surveys European literature from the seventeenth century to the present. As a course in literary history, it seeks to develop an understanding of period concepts, as well as concepts of genre (including the novel, Romantic lyric, and modern drama) and concepts of literary modes, such as realism and the Gothic. Readings, sometimes in the form of selections, include: Moliere’s Tartuffe, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Madame De Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves, Goethe’s Faust (Part One), Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Hoffmann’s Tales of Hoffmann, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and poems and short stories from Blake, Wordsworth, Eliot, Kafka, Cavafy, Rilke and Calvino.

TAed for 2 sections

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History of European Literature I

Teaching Assistant, University of Virginia (Fall 2016)
English & Comparative Literature Departments

Course Description: This course surveys European literature from its origins in Ancient Greece and Rome into the European Renaissance. As a course in literary history, it seeks to develop in students an understanding of period concepts, such as Republican Rome, Medieval and Renaissance, as well as concepts of genre, such as epic, tragedy, and comedy. Readings, sometimes in the form of selections, include: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Euripides’ Bacchae, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Inferno from Dante’s Divine Comedy, several of Montaigne’s Essays, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and poems by various poets.

TAed for 2 sections

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(Post)Digital Writing

Instructor, University of Virginia (Spring 2016)
English Department

Course Description: In 2008, Roy Ascott provocatively asserted: “the digital moment has passed.” New innovations in the arts are now being labeled “postdigital,” a term that signals the “humanization” of technologies, or the fusion across digital and pre-digital platforms to allow for the integration of the human actor or participant. Indeed, English musician and composer Jem Finer has defined the “postdigital” as “a return to a tactile relationship with ideas and materials informed by over 30 years of working with computers. A practice that seeks to transcend mediation via a screen and locate itself in the physical world, rather than at one stage removed, through digital representation.” In other words, whereas the digital is concerned with hyperreal and virtual scenarios, the postdigital engages digital technologies in the service of concerns facing the real world, including issues related to the environment, social inequity, privacy, and information control. Our critical inquiry will thus engage with concerns central to postdigital media, taking shape around these questions: In what ways has our thinking changed as a result of digital media? How, in turn, have digital technologies altered both our environment and our methods of and abilities to communicate with one another? As user-participants of new media texts, in what ways are we implicated in stories that use new media technologies? Likewise, how should we read and interpret new media, including films, comic books, and “twitter” fiction? What are the specific formal methods that various kinds of technologies employ in order to communicate content, and how do stories change as they are adapted across media platforms? We will explore these questions through the three units around which this course has been structured: Unit 1: Digital Changes: Restructuring Thought Unit 2: New Forms and Modes: Interpreting Media Unit 3: Translations: Storytelling across Media Each of these units will culminate in a substantial writing project.

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Manifestations of Madness

Instructor, University of Virginia (Fall 2015)
English Department

Course Description: In his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil writes: “The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one.” Sanity and insanity, normalcy and madness, reality and fiction: Modern psychology has suggested that these divisions are constructed, dependent upon the stories that we tell and the rationalizations that we make. Our critical inquiry will thus take shape around these questions: Is there a normative way of seeing reality? To what extent is “the real” a narrative fiction? What are the historical and cultural valences surrounding the concept of madness, and how have these valences shaped the ways that we understand both our own positions and that of others within the world? In what ways have we represented aberrant or “transgressive” thinking in art, both verbal and visual? Are such transgressions merely the product of a historical moment, or are they rather attempts to reveal some elemental truth about the society in which we live? We will explore these questions through three units around which this course has been structured: Unit 1: Troubling the Divisions: Normalcy vs. Madness; Unit 2: Questioning the Definitions: Histories and Cultures of Madness; Unit 3: Representing the Mind: The Art of Madness. Each of these units will culminate in a substantial writing project.

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Breakthrough Collaborative

Instructor, St. John's School, Houston, TX
Writing Department (Summer 2011 & 2012)

About: Taught for the Breakthrough Collaborative initiative during the summers of 2011 and 2012. Responsibilities included designing and approving syllabi for the writing department, leading weekly department meetings, and grading assignments. Breakthrough Collaborative strives to “increase academic opportunity for highly motivated, underserved students and get them into college ready to succeed.”

Courses Taught: 9th grade writing (2 sections); 7th grade writing (2 sections); Poetry and Creative Writing (2 sections)

Academic Appointments: Head of Writing Department & Writing Instructor (Summer 2012); Writing Instructor (Summer 2011)

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