The College of New Jersey

Gender, Race, and the City (Fall 2021)

This course addresses how gender and race shape how people interact with cities. In this course, we will consider literary, cultural, and critical representations of how Black, South Asian, Arab American, Indigenous North American, and white writers interact with the cities they live in and move between. The course addresses formal and informal activist practice, and asks how literary texts honor the memory and legacy of previous generations of marginalized urban communities. In addition to thinking about literature, this course addresses a broad range of critical work in the humanities, social sciences, and design fields. Assignments include a keywords assignment, a place-based artifact presentation, an archival close reading assignment, and a final essay on a literary representation of a particular urban site.

Cultures and Canons (Fall 2021)

This is a foundational course in the English Major intended to help students analyze how what we read in the classroom relates to whose voices matter in public life. These questions are related to broader questions about who is empowered to share their experience in a public forum, and whose voices are discussed in public media, politics, and academic life. This version of the course is focused on questions of migration, immigration, and mobility in U.S. literature. The course uses a skeptical and flexible definition of U.S. literature, as we read the work of many authors who live in multiple countries that include the U.S., as well as authors who are first or second-generation immigrants to the U.S., and authors who have moved within the U.S. to escape harm or seek opportunity. In the course, students consider how this literature of migration can help us address the work of literary studies and what it means to study literature at a university in the U.S. Assignments include a close reading exercise, a pedagogy assignment (that involves teaching a poem from the course to someone who is not a student in the course) and a final research essay or draft syllabus.

University of Pennsylvania

Gender, Sex, and Urban Life (Spring 2019-Spring 2021)

This course considers feminist, queer, and trans theories of the city, and investigates how practices of using and making space are racialized, gendered, and sexualized. Each week of the course is organized around a type of space, including subway, school, and birthing center, nightclub, suburb, and park. Assignments include an auto-ethnography, a short critical essay, and a final assignment, a podcast or essay that asks students to propose an additional type of space in which to study the intersections of sex, gender, and the urban environment. See the course syllabus here.

Introduction to Creative Writing: Speculative Pasts and Futures (Spring 2021)

This workshop-based course considers speculation as a primary strategy for both critical exploration and creative writing. The course attends to essays and novels that investigate archival and intergenerational silences including Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother alongside speculative fiction that imagines near-futures of our planet, including Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold, Fame, Citrus. We will also read ecocritical essays, science writing, and U.S. history and historiography, as well as short critical excerpts from queer and trans theory, Black studies, urban studies, and economics, as we consider the various ends to which speculation is used.

See the course syllabus here.

Trans Method, co-taught with Ava Kim (Spring 2020)

This course aims to introduce students to “trans” as an analytic by drawing from queer studies, feminism, critical race theory, disability studies, environmental humanities, literary studies, and postcolonial critique, centering trans ways of thinking on scales from the body to the nation. As a relatively “new” field, trans studies contributes to feminist and queer theory but is uniquely engaged with social and health sciences, trans activist movements, and trans cultural production. In particular, Trans Method aims to extend trans beyond self-identified trans bodies and beyond the United States to consider the affordances of a global, polyscalar trans politics.

Queer Urbanisms (Fall 2018)

This course focuses on the entanglement of queer studies with the development, disinvestment and gentrification of American cities from the 1950s to the present. We will concentrate on the work of four important queer authors: Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Samuel Delany, and Eileen Myles, as they lived in, wrote about, and advocated for their cities. As a Junior Research Seminar, this course creates opportunities to learn and practice research strategies integral to writing about literature and culture. Assignments include constructing an annotated bibliography, tracing the history of words important to queer urban life, generating independent and collaborative close readings, and conducting research in the library archives and the public sphere.

See the course syllabus here.

The Transformation of Urban America (Spring 2018)

This course surveys the history of American cities since World War II, and contextualizes this history by reading the postwar American city on a range of scales from the personal to the global.

In this course, we will consider a number of different systems and vantage points as ways of reading American urban history. We will pay particular attention to economic injustice and racial stratification, to incarceration and surveillance, and to environmental crisis and globalization.

As it draws on a number of disciplines, this course also offers an introduction to how the disciplines it explores (including but not limited to urban history, sociology, anthropology, journalistic writing and city planning and architectural history) approach the city, and how they more broadly interact.

See the course syllabus here.