teaching

Prior to arriving at Boston College in 2014, I taught at Yale University while completing my doctorate.

In my teaching, I aim to bring literature to life through formal and historical analysis. A significant linguistic and cultural distance separates us from premodern Britain. I lead students to close that distance through comparisons to modern literature and then reopen it with their newfound expertise. I present historical study as a dialectical process of identification and estrangement. Two foci of my teaching and course design are literary genre and social placement. My goal is to help students become critically aware readers and citizens by confronting the multiple histories that led to the present moment.

Chaucer and Gower

In fourteenth-century London, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower were “frenemies.” Chaucer was the upwardly mobile bureaucrat, ready to poke fun at everyone; Gower was the well-heeled and straitlaced lawyer. Their bodies of poetry, spanning four decades and three languages, influence and respond to one another. We will read the two poets side by side, with…

Digital Humanities

Foundational course for the use of digital scholarship in the humanities. By the end of the course, students will have a grounding in what digital scholarship is as well as an arsenal of techniques for utilizing DS in their own work. Note: I am not a coder. I will be running this version of the introductory…

Creative Writing

An introductory course in which students will write both poetry and short fiction and read published examples of each. We will experiment with the formal possibilities of the two genres and look at what links and separates them. The course is workshop-based, with an emphasis on steady production and revision. Through exercises and/or open and…

Studies in Poetry

This course is a general introduction to poetry and poetics. The goals of the course are close reading of poetry, developing the student’s ability to ask questions which open poems to analysis, and writing lucid interpretive papers. This section of Studies in Poetry is organized around significant poetic traditions, from alliterative meter to iambic pentameter…

Issues and Methods in English Studies

This course offers an introduction to the field of English studies, with focus on problems of method revolving around the field’s burning question, What is literature? We read a range of recent scholarship, exploring approaches, methods, and issues of interest, including formalism vs. historicism, literary and cultural theory, poetics, periodization, and digital humanities. Primary works…

Game of Thrones: Medieval English Political Poetry

Before House Stark and House Lannister came the House of York and the House of Lancaster. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England witnessed a series of social and political upheavals, from the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt to the Wars of the Roses. English poetry responds to and intervenes in these events. Political…

Literature Core: Prisoners and Visionaries

While the United States makes up 4% of the world’s population, it imprisons 22% of the world’s prisoners. This course takes the prison system as a starting point for investigating literary imagination. Many celebrated writers (Margery Kempe; Queen Elizabeth I; Ezra Pound; Martin Luther King, Jr.) were both prisoners and visionaries. Others (Shakespeare, Octavia Butler)…

Middle English Alliterative Poetry

In the fourteenth century, there were two ways of writing poetry in English. Chaucer’s rhyming, syllable-counting iambic pentameter exemplifies one tradition. This course makes a survey of the other tradition, known today as alliterative poetry. Among the poems we will read are tales of King Arthur’s court, the story of a resurrected corpse discovered in…

Introduction to British Literature and Culture I

Britain, Ireland, and their archipelago were home to an exceptionally vibrant early literary tradition spanning English, French, Irish, Latin, Norse, and other languages. Writing from these islands connected rulers and rebels, merchants and monks, brewers and bureaucrats. This course is a survey of ‘British’ literature (we’ll question the term) from the beginnings to 1700. Most texts are in English;…

Periodization

Must we divide literary history into periods? This course focuses on the history, politics, and consequences of periodization. Topics include the medieval/modern divide, the concept of renaissance, the relationship between literary periods and national politics, modernity and postmodernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, and alternatives to traditional periodization. As the PhD seminar, this course also functions as…

Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was the first poet writing in English who was lauded and studied as literature in his own time. His body of writing, covering a breathtakingly wide range of subjects, is a subtle mix of satire and the sublime. This course is an introduction to Chaucer’s poetry, including but not limited to his masterpiece,…

Literature Core: Doppelgangers

From Beowulf to Blade Runner, Western culture is obsessed with representing humanoid monsters and alter egos. The nightmare of a doppelganger impersonating or even replacing an individual has haunted writers as diverse as Mary Shelley and Vladimir Nabokov. Computer technology seems to have made the fantasy of being in two places at once a reality,…

Chaucer: Verse History

A practical and theoretical introduction to issues in medieval and modern poetics, focalized through Chaucer’s verse forms. Emphasis on metrical form, the momentum of metrical traditions, the translation of prosody between languages, and the circulation of cultural stereotypes about meter. We ask how poetic traditions develop, why they endure or disappear, and how the practice…