RECENT COURSES at Washington State University:
HUM 101: The Ancient World (Spring 2027)
Studies of poetry, philosophy, medicine, and drama from ancient Greece and Rome, through more contemporary frames including through Anne Carson, Christopher Nolan, Madeline Miller's works.
ENG 584: Early Modern Monsters (Fall 2026)
Aimed at introducing graduate students to the conventions of research and professionalization, with particular focus on critical frameworks and their applicability to the study of English literature.
HUM 305: Shakespearean Drama Before 1600 (Spring 2026, 2027)
Introduced upper-division undergraduate students to diverse plays including Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, &etc. in a writing-intensive course covering discussions of language, emotions, and questions of identity.
HUM 306: Shakespearean Drama After 1600 (Fall 2026)
Introduced upper-division undergraduate students to diverse plays including Othello, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Merry Wives of Windsor, &etc. in a writing-intensive course covering discussions of language, emotions, and questions of identity.
CAP 415: Traditions of Tragedy and Comedy (Fall 2025)
Introduced undergraduate students in this capstone course to the plays of Middleton, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and others, leading conversations on premodern race, disability, & gender.
PREVIOUSLY at Syracuse University:
ENG 192: Gender and Literary Texts (Instructor of Record)
ENG 181: Race and Literary Texts (Instructor of Record)
ENG 182: Class and Literary Texts (Instructor of Record)
ENG 184: Ethnicity and Literary Texts (Instructor of Record)
ENG 146: Interpretation of New Media (Teaching Assistant)
ENG 121: Introduction to Shakespeare (Teaching Assistant)
RECENT COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ENG 584: Early Modern Monsters
What do conjoined twins, Irish women, and rhinoceroses have in common? Starting with this and other such questions, this course will investigate constructions of otherness in early modern England, with particular attention to histories of disability, race, and gender. Drawing on sources including Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Milton's Paradise Lost, alongside lesser-known medical and theological treatises written prior to the eighteenth century, we will attend to the harmful vocabulary describing “witches,” “barbarians,” and “cripples" as well as their continued resonances. Instead of thinking about monstrosity as an essentialist, ontological, and fixed category, we will consider how scripts surrounding debility, neurodiversity, blackness, religious or national otherness, can all be mobilized through literary works, creating hierarchies between the “normal” and the “abnormal”. We will interrogate how religious, colonial, capitalist, and ableist demands for normativity frequently overlap in their identification of othered bodyminds. Narrowing our focus to a particular geo-political location, we will think about various structures of power and their operations that disenfranchise human beings, often (and especially) through the rhetorics of "cure," "conversion," or "expulsion." Using methodologies drawn from disability studies, neurodiversity studies, affect theory, crip theory, trans studies, performance theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory, we will think more expansively about constructions of identity, both in this period and in our own. Through all of this, we will also consider what it means to work with archival materials, employ critical terminologies with care, and undertake rigorous literary analysis. By the end of the semester, students will have gained significant experience in producing book reviews, leading discussion sections, presenting conference-style papers, and writing longform articles that can be sent out to academic journals, all in a structured and supportive environment.
ENG/HUM 306: Shakespearean Drama After 1600
In this course, we will explore some of the themes, contexts, and issues that arose in the early seventeenth century in England, as presented through the lens of drama. During our weekly meetings, we will incorporate readings of play-texts, disentangling a complicated web of lies, fabrications, and universal truths presented from an array of texts including popular comedies and tragedies. Along the way, we will grapple with some of the contemporary theoretical frameworks and adaptions (either film or stage) in order to better understand the political, social, religious, and moral concerns of the early modern period, and its continued legacies.
ENG/CAP 415: Traditions of Tragedy and Comedy
This course introduces students to the dramas of the early modern period, ranging from “forgotten” comedies to wildly popular tragedies (think: summer blockbuster). Drawing attention to the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Middleton, Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger, Ford, Dekker, and Rowley, this class will interrogate some of the dramatic tropes and conventions that extend from the Greeks to Renaissance England and beyond. During the course of the semester, we will discuss the discourses of politics, medicine, religion, morality, nationality, identity, and bodily norms that informed and in turn were shaped by the early modern theater. Some of the questions we will ask include: what did it mean to be considered “normal” or “atypical” in this period? How did genre affect individual plays and their reception? What does it mean to think of disability, especially neurodivergence, gendered, racialized or class-based identity in a period that does not necessarily have the same vocabulary as us? Along the way, we will use the frameworks of premodern critical race theory, disability studies, the history of affect, and the history of science, to expand our vocabulary and dealing with the complex issues at work in these dramatic works.