Drawing from different disciplines, textual genres, and forms of media, I challenge students to critically examine urgent problems from multiple angles and scales. I am committed to providing students with the tools to interrogate and respond to contemporary social problems, and my courses foreground the relationship between skills acquisition, theory, and methodology. I design courses that put students at the center of creating new knowledge, and I support students by providing them with the tools to read, write, and think critically, and to adopt the habits of mind associated with self-directed learning. 

Fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and…there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities. 

–James Wood, How Fiction Works

As the epigraph suggests, all fiction contains elements of both the unreal (artifice) and the true to life (verisimilitude). Some genres play with these two possibilities in more direct ways than others. Historical fiction, for example, is a genre that is extremely attentive to historical accuracy while at the same time crafting entirely fictional characters and events to fill its worlds. If you’ve ever watched a film “based on actual events” or “inspired by true events,” you’re no stranger to the ways that fiction can blend artifice and verisimilitude to craft compelling narratives. This is the jumping off point for this course, whose primary object of study is the true crime genre. This is a genre that presents itself as being more “true” than your average historical fiction novel, and yet models itself on a type of narrative deployed by detective fiction and mystery novels. 

Have you ever wondered what makes your favorite superhero so compelling? From Batman to Superman, the Wasp to Wonder Woman, these fictional characters have qualities of the “good guy” or “good gal,” as the case may be. However, part of what makes them heroic is also the journey they are on. It is not just who they are but what they do that makes them heroic.

This course introduces students to the critical study of heroes, antiheroes, and villains from multiple genres, periods, and traditions, with attention to aesthetics, ideas, and values. Together, we explore a rich suite of texts including the book and film versions of The Wizard of Oz, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. 

We begin our exploration with traditional heroes—brave, determined, compassionate, altruistic, and resilient. We study some of the traditional myths that form the basis for our modern-day heroes, and we examine the hero’s journey as an integral part of what makes the hero who she or he is. But what would a hero be without a villain? Dastardly, conniving, and sometimes downright evil, the villain is the character we love to hate—but also the character without whom our hero would have no purpose! After all, who is Superman without Lex Luther, Batman without the Joker, Catwoman, and the Riddler? Finally, we study of the complex antihero—a protagonist who is not a villain but who conspicuously lacks the qualities of a traditional hero. The antihero, arguably the most complex of our three figures, compels us to ponder the value of human flaws and contradictions. 

Course Philosophy

In his book, Play Anything, philosopher and game designer Ian Bogost argues that “when we play, we engage fully and intensely with life and its contents.” For Bogost, “play invites and even requires greater attention, generosity, respect, and investment than its supposedly more serious alternatives do.” That is, when we play, we are extremely attentive to the rules of the game, and it is these very rules that make the games we play meaningful. Without them, there is no possibility of winning or losing, and indeed there is no game at all. Imagine if you were a baseball player who showed up at a baseball game with no rules or a video game enthusiast who downloaded the new Hollow Knight only to find that you could vanquish enemies by simply wishing them so. No, play derives its value from the rules of the game and therefore “cultivates humility, for it requires us to treat things as they are rather than as we wish them to be.” 

A course about heroes and antiheroes seemed a particularly apt one in which to cultivate play. 

I invite students to approach this class as play, in the sense that Bogost means when he says that “play isn’t doing what we want, but doing what we can with the materials we find along the way,” and to have fun—not as “the experience of pleasure, but  [as] the outcome of tinkering with a small part of the world in a surprising way.” In this class, our small part of the world is a selection of literature and films that are sometimes fun, sometimes disturbing, and oftentimes both. Students have the option of approaching any class in such a manner, to take its idiosyncratic frameworks for understanding reality and its rules for researching and writing and play them as they would play the guitar or Settlers of Catan. This class, though, is designed to be played. 

The world of heroes and villains, mythic quests and dastardly evils, is a game with ample rules to be learned. These rules are learned not simply to write research papers or satisfy a curricular requirement but to revel more fully in the enjoyment of literature and film—which themselves are a kind of game consisting of complex rules (some to be followed and some to be broken) about character development and narrative structure (among others). There are also rules to the game of literary and film criticism (some to be followed and some to be broken), such as the way we analyze texts, make arguments, and use evidence, and this class operates with those rules in mind too. However, it also offers students the opportunity to play with these rules and use them in the service of their creativity and intellectual pleasure.

This cultivation of play is reflected in the course's literature and films, ones that feature famous and infamous heroes, villains, and antiheroes from popular culture. Even more so, it is reflected in the creative projects that students design: their own hero, villain, and antihero characters based on the course texts. 

The purpose of this course is to provide students with an introduction to the literary interpretation and analysis of drama: to determine what details in a text are significant, to identify topics for analysis in those texts, and to write critically about them. In addition to reading, watching, analyzing, and interpreting plays, we also considered how dramatic texts, styles, and movements have been adapted for the screen.

The theme of the course, Machines and Modernity, delimited our inquiry to the study of modernity, a cultural and political phenomenon beginning with the Enlightenment era, and modern drama, as part of an aesthetic period that is generally thought to begin around 1880. As for machines? These are both real objects and a metaphor for the technological innovations that contributed to the paradigmatic shifts in social, cultural, and political landscapes that we call modernity.

Students wrote a cultural artifact essay, in which they identified a cultural artifact in one of our literary texts and explained its significance within the play;  developed a staging project, in which they created a hand-drawn or digital visual rendering of a scene from one of our plays; and a review essay. They also worked in teams to interpret and perform a scene from one of our texts.

This course is designed for English majors and minors as an introduction to literary analysis and textual criticism, and it is a required course for an English major with a literature and language concentration. Students learn some of the formal elements of literature and use them to analyze and interpret literary texts as what Eagelton calls “matrices of capable of generating a whole range of possible meanings.” In addition to practicing the foundational skills essential to analyzing literature, students are introduced to key concepts and themes in literary theory, such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism. Readings, discussions, and writing activities engender diverse perspectives and interpretations, informed by various theoretical and critical approaches.

The course consists of five learning modules, based on the five chapters of How to Read Literature. During the first week of each module, we read one chapter from the text--on openings, character, narrative, interpretation, and value. During the second and third weeks, we read a variety of short literary texts and apply Eagleton's methods, all of which are consistent with the broad methodology of close reading. Students write one short paper for each module in which they identify and explain one of these methods and then apply it to the literary text of their choosing in order to develop an interpretive argument about that text.  

This vertically-integrated, competency-based design studio experience offers students the opportunity to engage with multiple disciplinary perspectives in a project-based learning atmosphere. The theme of the course, "ways of knowing," was chosen to introduce students to a variety of interdisciplinary epistemological and methodological conventions. One goal of the course is for students to participate in the iterative design process: to this end, the major deliverable is not a prototype, but a portfolio that demonstrates their participation in that process. 

This third-year, second-semester experience offers students the opportunity to develop a working prototype of a solution they developed the previous semester. The first part of the semester is spent rescoping the previous semester's work and conducting additional research, and the second part of the semester is spent developing and testing component prototypes. The third part of the semester is devoted to finalizing the full prototype. The primary teaching methodology was a series of project reviews, which were presented to and critiqued by the class and instructional team. The theme of "cyborgs" offers students a way to engage in a multidisciplinary way with human-machine interaction.

I envisioned the ePortfolio course as a framework that supports students' active participation in their own learning processes, namely through the creation of their portfolio of program-level competencies. Professional technologists, innovators, artists, designers, and engineers are reflective practitioners---they reflect on their skills, abilities, and process, both during and after completing a job or project. Experts share their reflections with their peers and actively challenge the habits and prejudices revealed by their reflections. For my second time teaching ePortfolio, I thought of the course as an opportunity for students to engage with their own learning experiences in this way---to develop a sense of their progress in attaining a transdisciplinary skillset over time, develop an archive of that progress, and to engage in self-critique in order to become more effective, lifelong learners. Students were encouraged to notice aspects of their projects and other learning experiences worth reflecting on, to interrogate what they notice, and to implement changes in these domains. I decided to keep my own reflective journal about my teaching practice for this course, and shared some of my learning with students and other faculty in the program.