Teaching
I used to think my job was to simplify texts for students; now I aim to show them just how complex poems, plays, novels, and other writings can be. Simplifying works invites learners in, but teaching students to appreciate and cope with ambiguity, shifting voices, and different perspectives (including historical difference) cultivates patience, curiosity, empathy, and imagination. Students learn to interpret layered meanings, appreciate historical literary forms, and value perspectives beyond their own. By navigating pre-modern texts, students gain more than literary and historical knowledge; they develop habits of inquiry essential for navigating our complex modern world and engaging with the challenges and possibilities of modern life.
For a full list of courses I’ve developed and taught, see my CV.
Sample Courses
READING AUSTEN READING (Undergraduate)
Most of us know what Jane Austen wrote, but how many of us know what (and how) she read? How did Austen “read as a writer”? In this course, we focus on Austen as a reader, as well as writer: one who was deeply read in eighteenth-century literature and who incorporated her reading in her works. Along with texts by Austen, we read texts that she drew on, alluded to, or mentioned in her writing, and that she expected her contemporaries to recognize. When Marianne Dashwood assesses her suitors according to how they read William Cowper’s poetry, for instance, what is Austen trying to tell us? When Mr. Collins reads James Fordyce’s Sermons to the Bennett sisters, or Henry Tilney lectures Catherine Moreland on the “picturesque,” does Austen expect us to listen? What did Austen know (and not know) about the slave trade, and how did this shape her works? Readings include novels, poems, plays, essays, political writing, and conduct books by authors such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, John Gay, William Cowper, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Samuel Johnson, John Gregory, and Mary Wollstonecraft. (We sometimes also read selections from Matthew Lewis, whose “wicked” novel The Monk, is one of very few works the boorish John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey declares “tolerable” and claims to have read.) Along the way, we will consider how we too “read as writers”: how our reading shapes us, serves us, and sometimes, liberates us: in short, becomes the stuff of which we’re made.
ARCHIVES, MONUMENTS, AND CULTURAL MEMORY (Graduate)
A practical and theoretical seminar whose goals, readings, and (to some extent) fieldwork are shaped in part by participants’ own concerns. On the one hand, we examine issues in archive and museum studies of special interest to students of literature; on the other hand, we consider literary texts as sites of remembering and the question of “monumental” literary works. Beginning with the monuments all around us (or formerly around us, such as the Roosevelt Statue at the American Museum of Natural History), we engage critically with our local landscape, learning to situate monuments in time and space and interrogating the purposes, uses, effects, and value (if any) of monuments. We then turn to the history, philosophy, and uses of archives, balancing practical training with discussion of issues such as preservation, conservation, and repatriation; intellectual property and censorship; and the effects of institutionalization and the modern system of the disciplines. What is the relationship between cataloguing and canonization? What can librarians access in a library catalogue — let alone in a library — that you will likely never see? What is the relationship between an “author’s papers,” an “author’s library,” and an author’s works? How do we archive and catalogue oral texts? Along the way, we will read (and/or physically examine) texts concerned with cultural memory, such as elegies, novels (e.g. There There by Tommy Orange) and memoirs (e.g. Martha Hodes’ My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, 2023), and “monumental” texts concerned with cultural memory themselves (e.g. The Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Edward Curtis’ 20-volume The North American Indian, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Tony Morrison’s Beloved, and the multimedia artworks of East Village AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS & REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN (Undergraduate)
An introduction to British women's writing between Aphra Behn and Jane Austen. Students read poetry, drama, fiction, satire, and political writings, considering issues such as sexuality, courtship, and the institution of marriage; personal liberty vs. familial duty and religious and political allegiances; shifting social hierarchies in an increasingly commercial society; the rise of new genres such as the periodical essay and the domestic novel; debates concerning women's literacy and education; and colonialism, slavery, and abolition. An important element of the course is our reflection on the significance of how we access early women writers’ texts. What difference does it make whether we read these works in manuscript, in print, in modern commercial paperbacks or textbooks, or in digital form by means of electronic databases? Several of our class meetings are held at the Fales Library and Special Collections of Bobst Library, allowing students a rare opportunity to work with original eighteenth-century materials and to employ this historical evidence in their own oral and written projects. Sample texts include works by Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, William Hogarth, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Jonathan Swift, Francis Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Phyllis Wheatley, and Jane Austen.
PAPYRUS TO PDF: AN INTRODUCTION TO BOOK HISTORY NOW (Undergraduate, Graduate)
This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary nexus of field(s) known as "Book History." A rapidly expanding discipline that engages researchers across the globe and in many different fields of study (history, literature, media and communications, and librarianship, to name only a few), Book History address far more than books: it investigates the production, dissemination, and readership of texts of all kinds, from the earliest pictograms to handwritten letters to modern e-books. Some book historians also address communications media such as voice and gesture and audio and video recordings. We will survey a range of topics and approaches, encouraging participants to work from specific texts and objects of interest to them to larger questions of social, cultural, and historical importance. Sample topics addressed include orality and writing systems; the introduction and implications of printing technology; ideas and practices of authorship, readership, and publishing; censorship and intellectual property, and the special challenges of non-book formats (newspapers, magazines, periodicals, ephemera, and so on).
Field trips to the New York Public Library, the New York Center for Book Arts, NYU Special Collections, and the NYU Libraries Preservation Department offer students unique opportunities to study texts and tools of the trade in situ. Students learn how to set type and operate a hand press, but also address pressing theoretical and political questions faced by book historians today, such as the relevance or irrelevance of the theoretical frameworks developed by book historians focusing on post-1500 Europe for understanding the signifying practices of non- alphabetic, non-typographic, or non-Western cultures, or the (often negative) environmental impact of the digital preservation of texts.
