SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY
Literature and the Environment: Mermaids (Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Undergrad)
The official description and goal of this course: Environmental thought and consciousness as expressed in literature, emergence of modern and contemporary environmental thought, and impacts of literature on environmental awareness.The specific class description: The mermaid is a hybrid beast, half human and half animal, a border crosser of land and sea. She is one of our most ancient monsters from global literature, and she has reemerged in the twenty-first century to share messages about climate change. Everywhere you look—from literature to film, social media to fashion, digital art to commodity kitsch—mermaids are omnipresent. These contemporary tales reflect our culture’s most pressing anxieties and concerns— about climate change, racial and social justice, global capitalism, genetic science, algorithmic culture. This class recognizes the contemporary mermaid craze as an important cultural phenomenon that can tell us something about the ongoing relationship between literature and the environment. We use the mermaid as a focal point, a metaphor and lens, for exploring cultural and historical views of the environment, through literature. In particular, we read diverse mermaid literature from across history and cultures in order to ask two central questions: 1) What does our contemporary mermaid renaissance say about our world and, especially, our understanding of the environment? 2) What does mermaid literature tell us about the role, power, and effects of literature and literary study? We explore these questions while learning about the scholarly fields of Environmental Humanities and Blue Humanities, as well as how to read, write and think in a critical and analytical manner. PDF of Spring Syllabus
Summer 2023: I joined the faculty of Harvard University’s prestigious Institute for World Literature (IWL), which trains scholars and teachers in the study of literature in a globalizing world. Meeting for four weeks each summer, in locations from Beijing to Istanbul to Harvard and beyond, the Institute meets returns to Harvard this summer (July 2023). I taught a two-week seminar titled “Global Digital Literature: Histories, Theories, Methods”
Global Contemporary Literature (Spring 2019 undergrad, Spring 2022 Grad course)
Twenty-first century literature explores and explains our contemporary global, networked world through formal experimentations on the page and screen. Such literature approaches “the global” through a perspective informed by digital technologies, specifically the concept and infrastructure of networks. Rather than a reading list organized around author nationality, this course considers texts that express, display, and critique global capitalism, the World Wide Web, terrorism, and more. Keywords include global networks, translation and born-translated, world literature, borders and exile, crisis and terrorism, new media and upgrade culture. PDF of syllabus (2019) , PDF of syllabus (2022)
Loving Books: Book as Thing, Technology, and Art (Fall 2021)
What does it mean to say, “I love books”? What does loving books look like in an age of e-readers and digital culture? Why are fake bookshelves used as Zoom backgrounds, and how did real bookshelves come to signify knowledge and privilege? This course approaches the book—our central medium for literature and literary studies—as a thing, technology, and art form: one with a long history of development. PDF of Syllabus
Modernism (Grad, Fall 2017 and 2021| Undergrad, Fall 2020)
Modernism was a phenomenon of creative activity and formal experimentation that crossed oceans, art forms, and disciplines in the early decades of the twentieth century. We are still reckoning its influence: postmodernism, digital modernism, and beyond. This course explores a constellation of texts that challenge categories of genre and nationality to collectively represent Anglo (British and American) Modernism. We consider the impact of media, technology, and speed on the art of the period and explore the complex interstices of race, gender, and class in emergent concepts of subject and self. We dive into Modernism and grapple with Ezra Pound’s poignant but contradictory dictum from it: “make it new.” PDF of Syllabus (2021)
Web 2.0 Literary Studies (Fall 2020)
This course explores how literature and literary studies change with digital tools and techniques. We experiment with new digital tools to see how format changes messages, how medium informs form and content. We study the latest in digital literary studies (from big data to critical code studies, web 2.0 review culture and born-digital literature). This course should be of particular interest to creative writers wanting to adapt texts and to budding literary critics interested in the cutting-edge of critique and publication. PDF of Syllabus
Victorian Literature (Fall 2020)
The Victorian Age was a period of great transformation and global impact. Under the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), Great Britain colonized much of the globe, pioneered industrialization, and experienced the effects of urbanization, Darwinism, class and gender conflicts, secularization, etc. This was a time of immense social change and contradiction, and it was captured in the literature and art of the period. In this class, we will explore the Victorian Age by reading works by Jane Austen, Emily Brontë’, Christina Rossetti, Lord Alfred Tennyson, H.G. Wells, and others. We will also consider the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris in our quest to understand this pivotal and passionate period as well as its impact on our own. PDF of Syllabus
Digital Literature (Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2020)
What happens to literature and its study when text moves from page to screen? This course examines works of digital literature (literature created on the computer to be read on the computer) to understand how this emergent literary form affects the way we read, study, and understand literature. PDF of Syllabus (2015) , PDF of syllabus (2016)
American $$ (Fall 2020)
Trump is America’s President, and $ is king, but there is a much longer back-story of greed and capitalism in American history and literature. How does American literature engage, explain, and illuminate economics and class struggles, of both the past and the present? Is there a relationship between capitalism and literary aesthetics? How and why might we look to texts from the past to understand contemporary global capitalism and networked culture? This course explores these questions and more by examining works of literature and cultural theory from the late 19th-early 20th century, the period that experienced the calcification of industrial capitalism and American consumer culture, by writers such as Edith Wharton, Eugene O’Neill, Anita Loos, and more.
Big Books (Grad, Fall 2019)
Why go big? And, why is “super-size” an American convention? This course reads famous big books— novels whose ambitions are represented in their physical heft and formal experimentalism— from American literature. We focus on big experimental novels of the 19,th 20th, and 21st –centuries that engage scale as a thematic topic and formal device, and we do so from a position of a contemporary society obsessed with big-data, scaling up, and the seemingly infinite Web. The trend towards bigness is not new, but the digital age of big data offers an opportunity to consider how and why big-ness serves as an important critical category and historical genre for American literature. We use the precious opportunity of a graduate seminar to take the time needed to read long books carefully and collectively. PDF of Syllabus
Postmodernism (Grad, Spring 2019)
“Postmodernism” is a term of startling ambiguity. It indicates a temporal period of belatedness, after modernism, but also suggests the continuation of that earlier artistic movement into the second half of the twentieth century. Postmodernism cuts across disciplines—architecture to art, literature to philosophy— and leaves it mark on contemporary literature in formal attributes (intertextuality and reflexive meta-commentary) as well as affective and attitudinal tone (skepticism, disbelief, and irony). This class provides an introduction to British and American postmodernism through a survey of key texts, both literary and theoretical. PDF of syllabus
Digital Methods for the Humanities (Fall 2018)
This new course is an experiment and pilot program for SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative that will provide students with an introduction to media studies, theory, and history as well as to a wide variety of digital methods for research, writing, and thinking. Each week will bring a different guest lecturer, a professor at SDSU and a member of SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative (dh.sdsu.edu), who will teach a different digital method from a different disciplinary perspective. PDF of syllabus
How We Read Now: Literary Criticism and Theories of Reading (Grad, Spring 2018) This course uses the opportunity posed by recent trends in self-reflection in literary criticism to study the history of our discipline and its critical reading practices. We read seminal examples of literary critical reading practices from the early 20th century up until the present—texts representative of New Criticism, New Historicism, Reader-Response Theory, Symptomatic Reading, Distant Reading, Actor-Network Theory, and more—in order to gain a foundation from which to understand and determine “how we read now.” PDF of_syllabus
Cyberfeminism (Fall 2017)
“Cyberfeminism” is a term from the 1990s that has been nearly forgotten, along with much of the radical born-digital art from those early, pivotal days of the Web and cyberculture. “Concerned with countering the perceived dominance of men in the use and development of information technology, the Internet, etc.” (OED), cyberfeminism is about perspective, ideology critique, and media archaeology. This course examines seminal texts of cultural theory and digital literature from the 1980s-early 2000s focused on the relationship between gender and digital culture to recover forgotten threads from digital culture’s recent but compact history to weave a web for understanding our contemporary cultural context. PDF of syllabus
New Media Theory (Spring 2017)
This course serves as an introduction to the critical and historical study of digital media and culture. Situating “new media” in technical and cultural histories that precede and inform our own, we recognize “the digital” as having a history that deserves analysis. We approach this topic through paradigms provided by literary and cultural criticism, reading central texts from the history of computing and the development of digital culture. PDF of syllabus
The American Novel, an Experimental Genre (Grad, Spring 2017)
The course examines the novel as an experimental genre and on that, because of its claim towards newness and innovation, is a typically American one. We read examples of experimental American novels from the 19th, 20th, and 21st-centuries that strive to make new the novel genre through formal innovation and that understand “making it new” as a distinctly American project.PDF of syllabus
Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (Fall 2016)
This class reads seminal works of twentieth-century literary criticism and theory from different movements– including the New Criticism, structuralism, and poststructuralism as well as psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, multicultural, and queer theory– in order to provide students with a foundation for understanding how literature is discussed in scholarly and critical discourse. PDF of syllabus
Book History (Grad, Spring 2016)
This graduate seminar examines seminal writings from the scholarship in The History of the Book. Syllabus is here: PDF of syllabus
The 21st-Century Experimental Novel (Fall 2015, Fall 2016)
This course reads novels published in the new millennium whose pages expose the influence of new media technologies. We examine these works in order to analyze what they have to say about globalism, the role of the literary, the experience of living in an age of information overload, and other topics at the center of our contemporary digital culture. Syllabus is here: PDF of syllabus
The Book in the Digital Age (Fall 2015)
This class takes the topic of the book in the digital age as an opportunity to consider the book as a medium and symbol– a technology perfected over a thousand years and a powerful cultural symbol. Part critical theory, part History of the Book, this class gives students a historical perspective on contemporary debates about reading, knowledge, and literature. Syllabus is here: PDF of syllabus
Critical Digital Literacy (Spring and Fall, 2014)
What does it mean to be “literate” in the age of digital data, screens, and hyperattention? What does “reading and writing” describe in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and mobile digital narratives? What, if any, kinds of contemporary communication practices are uniquely “digital”? And, the big one: How do digital technologies and the Internet affect the way we read, write, and think? In order to address these questions—indeed, in order to think critically about our digital culture– we need to know our media history. This class pursues digital literacy as a concept and a practice, a topic and a skill-set. Students will learn to think critically and creatively about cultural, communicative, and cognitive consequences of the digital shift. Together, we will explore, analyze, and historicize the complicated sets of literacies that the digital both promotes and demands. Syllabus is here: PDF of syllabus
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
2014, 2013: Lecturer for Sixth College’s CAT (Culture, Art, and Technology) Program, CAT 2: “The Book in the Digital Age”
This class pursues an understanding of the book medium, past and present, across a wide range of genres and medial formats: media studies criticism, fiction, bookwork sculpture, digital literature, archives, youtube animations, and more. Learning to analyze the book, we learn to also think critically about other, newer reading technologies (e-readers, computers, cell phones, etc.) and the reading practices they enable. Our goal is to better understand our contemporary digital age and the complicated rhetoric through which it operates.
YALE UNIVERSITY, Assistant Professor of English
**Recipient of the Sarai Ribicoff Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence in Yale College** 2010. This prize is awarded annually to a member of the Yale College faculty in the humanities “whose instruction and character reflect the qualities of independence, innovation, and originality.”
2011-2012 Research sabbatical, Morse Junior Fellowship Recipient
New Media Theory
This lecture course serves as an introduction to the critical study of digital media and culture. Situating new media in technical and cultural histories that precede and inform our contemporary engagement, we recognize new media as a topic with a history that deserves to be theorized. Specifically, we approach new media through paradigms provided by literary and cultural criticism. The course provides a foundation for digital culture and media studies more generally by close reading their central texts and discursive acts.
Digital Literature (Fall 2010) and (Fall 2008)
What happens to literature and its study when text moves from page to screen? This course examines works of digital literature (literature created on the computer to be read on the computer) to understand how this emergent literary form affects the way we read, study, and understand literature.
Readings in American Literature
An introduction to major works of the American literary tradition in a variety of poetic and narrative forms and in diverse historical contexts. Readings include: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and other texts.
Medieval Manuscripts to New Media: Studies in the History of the Book
Co-taught with Professor Jessica Brantley
The course approached the book as a reading technology that shapes literary study by focusing on issues raised at the intersection of medieval manuscript culture and contemporary digital culture. In particular, what do we mean when we speak of “an author,” “reading,” and “the book”? This course was a collaboration between English faculty, Yale’s ITG (Instruction Technology Group) and the Yale Libraries. It met in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and students were given more recent reading machines, Amazon Kindles, for the term. Midterm and final projects were web-based and were displayed in Sterling Memorial Library. The class made the frontpage of Yale College website on January 25, 2010 and received coverage in the Yale Daily News on February 2, 2010
Writing Seminar, Topic “New Media”
A composition course structured around the claim that digital technologies are not only tools that we use to access information; they also shape our interactions with content, how we read, write, and think.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
Lecturer in the English Department, 2007-2008
Technotexts and Technoculture (Lecture course, Eng 178, Spring 2008)
This course examines how new media technologies affect literature and reading practices. The first half of the quarter is dedicated to exploring how new media technotexts and their influence on the culture of reading; the second half examines how contemporary print novels respond to the threat and/or inspiration of new media in the reading technology of the bound book.
The 21st Century Novel (Seminar, Eng 180, Spring 2008)
This seminar reads print novels published in the new millennium whose pages expose the influence of new media technologies. We examine these works and their shared interest in and engagement with new media in order to analyze what they have to say about globalism, the role of the literary, the experience of living in a culture of terror, and other topics at the center of our contemporary digital culture.
Remix: Literature and Media (Lecture course, Eng 109, Winter 2008)
Media critic Lev Manovich calls ours a “remix culture” and the DJ as the exemplary artist of our time. How do we understand the concept of “remix” and reconcile it with the study of literature, an art form traditionally aligned with originality of authorship and intimacy between reader and text? What is literature in the age of remix? We read a variety of print and digital literature as well as cultural criticism to explore remix as a cultural concept, aesthetic practice, and political maneuver currently shaping our culture and its literature.
BROWN UNIVERSITY
Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, Spring 2007
Media Archaeology: Info, Discourse, Networks
This course examined the historical emergence of “media” and “media studies” as a methodology of cultural discourse through the theoretical concepts of “information,” “discourse” and “networks.” We pursued media archeology from the standpoint of contemporary new media and culture, tracing not only the medial and material origins of actual technologies but also the theoretical paradigms through which emerge these media forms and our engagement with them.
UCLA, Instructor
**Departmental Nominee for the Distinguished TA Award, a campus-wide UCLA award, 2003-2004 school year
*Departmental Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching, Dec. 2004
War, Literature, and its Representation
Eng 4W: Introduction to Critical Reading and Writing, UCLA (Spring 2006)
Digital Literature
Eng 88: Special Topics Seminar (Winter 2005)
Literature and Technology
Eng 4W: Critical Reading and Writing, UCLA (Fall 2005)
L(oo)king AT L[it]er@ture
Eng 4W: Critical Reading and Writing, UCLA (Winter 2004, Fall 2003)
Literary Equations: Approaching Literature Through Science
Eng 4W: Critical Reading and Writing, UCLA (Summer 2003)