Teaching

At UCLA, I am currently developing new courses on "Distractions and Noonday Demons" and "Refugee Literature Then and Now." Previously, I have had the privilege of teaching for a wide variety of courses and students within Harvard's English Department and Program in General Education, including introductory Old English and an honors seminar on literary theory and postmodern detective fiction, which received a grant from Harvard's Paul John Balson II Enrichment Fund.

I am committed to pedagogy and have written about revivifying Old English verse for beginning students in an essay in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching. I am also a three-time winner of Harvard's Certificate of Distinction and Excellence in Teaching.

Interests

British literature, Beowulf to Milton
Old English and Anglo-Latin language and literature
Poetry and Poetics
Literary Theory and Practices of Reading
Affect Studies
Theories of Cognition
Enigmatic Literature and Detective Fiction
Medieval Drama
Southern Literature
Refugee Literature
The History of the English Language

Courses

(J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 66, fol. 56)

(Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, fol. 3)

(Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS Laud Misc. 733, fol. 18r)

(The Big Lebowski. Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Gramercy Pictures, 1998. Film.)

Distractions and Noonday Demons
Lecture Course (UCLA, Fall 2018)

It is a common assumption that we live in an increasingly—and uniquely—distracted world. As this course demonstrates, however, medieval readers, writers, and thinkers faced similar concerns. Indeed, distraction posed one of the most significant spiritual dangers of the Middle Ages. But was it an affect, a pathology, a demonic temptation, or, worse, possession? And how does distraction relate to curiosity, incredulity, and wonder—or to heresy, conversion, and dissent? Moving from The Psychomachia or “Battle within the Soul” to Titivillus, the “patron demon” of medieval scribes, we will read widely in medieval theories about cognition and concentration; demonological treatises; restorative charms; scribal curses on inattentive readers; and poems and plays about the dangers of digression, boredom, and daydreaming as we work to understand the perils (and pleasures!) of getting distracted in the Middle Ages.

Introduction to Old English: Riddles, Dreams, Wonders
Lecture Course (Harvard, Fall 2016)

In this course, you will learn to read English as it was written a thousand years ago, beginning with a grammatical overview and ultimately translating a wide array of the earliest English literature, from riddles and dream guides to monastic sign language and travel narratives. Throughout, we will examine varying assumptions about knowledge and knowledge production, literature and literary theory then and now, focusing in particular on texts that instruct their readers in how to read them—from magical incantations to manuals on how to predict the future.

Refugee Literature Then and Now
Service-Learning Course (UCLA, Spring 2019)

Over sixty-five million people are currently displaced by violence and environmental destruction. This course will focus on their stories. Throughout the semester, we will partner with UCLA’s Center for Community Learning to serve as conversation partners for recently resettled refugees in the surrounding community. We will also read contemporary stories of exile and migration alongside medieval accounts, pushing back at the notion that there has ever been an England “apart.” As we will see, medieval foundation myths depict a Britain founded by Syrian refugees and a Scandinavia descended from Turkey. When read through the lens of refugee poetics, Beowulf emerges as the child of a political asylum-seeker and King Alfred as a disabled youngest son homeless in the fens, reshaping our sense of early medieval literature as a tradition that is resolutely engaged with enduring questions of displacement and hospitality.

Suspicious Characters: Postmodern Detectives and Critics
Seminar for Honors English Majors (Harvard, Fall 2016)

Should we be suspicious of what we read? Where might we look for evidence? And, wherever we find our clues, how should we assemble them? In engaging these questions, this course will examine a key genre in postmodern fiction: the metaphysical detective novel, which asks us not just to solve the crime but also to understand the process of reading and interpretation behind any solution. The “theory of the novel” justifiably continues to spark debate, but we will turn our attention instead to what I would call “novels of theory”: experimental works that self-consciously exploit the mystery genre to interrogate textual interpretation and hermeneutics writ large, from The Big Sleep to The Big Lebowski.