Writing

“A Monstrous Course and a Course of Monsters”
The Pedagogy of Adaptation, eds. Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, James Welsh. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Inc., 2010, pp. 53-63.
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Master’s Thesis: “It’s Alive! The Gothic (Dis)Embodiment of the Logic of Networks”
Brigham Young University, 2007
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Dissertation Chapter: “William Godwin and the Anti-Sympathy Novel” (Chapter 1)
The University of South Carolina, 2015
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Presentations

Research Presentations

“William Godwin and the Anti-Sympathy Novel”
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, Boston University, August 2013

“Turning the Tables: Caleb Williams Bites Back”
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, Park City, UT, August 2011

“Monsters, Freaks, and Villains”
PCAACA Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 2009

“The Workings of the Gothic: The Rise of the Novel, Fictionality, and Gothic Conventions”
International Conference on Romanticism, Rochester, MI, October 2008

“Not a One Trick Pony: Jane Austen in Hollywood”
PCAACA Conference, San Francisco, CA, March 2008

Pedagogical Presentations

Center for Teaching Excellence Guest Lecturer
Spring 2017
Presentation to instructors and professors about effectively responding to student writing

Center for Teaching Excellence Guest Lecturer
Spring 2013
Presentation to instructors and professors about running effective classroom discussions

Athletics Department Training Session Leader
Spring 2012
Presentation to instructors about avoiding plagiarism in tutoring

Pedagogy

Teaching Philosophy

My goal in the classes I teach is to instill in my students a love of learning for its own sake. In my own experience as a student and as a scholar, literature and writing uncover for me an entire world of human experience; they give me a space to confront my beliefs and assumptions, and the encouragement (and courage) to do so. I want my own passion for learning to help my students find the same space and courage. In other words, I find that the joy of learning enables students to confront difficulty and difference and to take risks in their own ideas and writing. The decisions I make regarding topics, readings, assignments, and assessment are designed to forward that objective. I incorporate a variety of textual mediums in both my composition and literature courses such as television and film, criticism and scholarship, photographs and ads, reviews, poetry, and fiction. Exploring the ways in which these disparate texts deal with similar ideas, or how they deploy similar tactics, allows students to interrogate their assumptions and to turn that understanding on perspectives other than their own.

Exploring a rich repertoire of genres is a major focus of my literature and my composition courses. This emphasis allows students to understand ideas – their own and others – as existing in the midst of conventions and rhetorical forces full of expectations and possibilities. One of my recent freshman composition courses focused on Sherlock Holmes. We read Doyle’s tales, watched several of the new iterations of Sherlock Holmes, and compared and contrasted how these different texts and mediums functioned within Doyle’s iconic framework. We discussed the proliferation of the Sherlock-Watson dynamic in popular culture and worked together to account for the current Sherlock craze; among many conclusions, we noted that our culture is enamored with superheroes and the idea of exceptionalism. This was surprising (or not) in light of the simultaneous ennui in the fields of politics and patriotism. At the end of the semester, my students created their own versions of Sherlock Holmes, in the form of a screenplay, a short story, or an artifact. By breaking down an extremely familiar paradigm, my students had the opportunity to recognize the naturalization and history behind their own ideas and preferences.

I approached teaching the British literature survey for English majors at the University of South Carolina from a similar angle. We looked at a variety of genres across cultural periods in Great Britain that each dealt with the theme of ghosts or the supernatural. This allowed us to explore the ways in which literature and culture are mutually constitutive, and to see how genre affects what authors say and can say. Breaking down and understanding the workings of diverse genres in the context of different cultural and historical moments helped my students to recognize their own rhetorical situations and their opportunities for expression and communication.

Revision also plays key role in enriching my students’ writing and thinking experience. I give them several different exercises that render their papers unfamiliar so that they have to encounter their ideas from a different perspective. For instance, in one revision assignment I have them color code their paragraphs: we identify several components that ought to make up the paper such as topic sentences, analysis sentences, contextualizing sentences, etc. They look at each sentence and give it a color according to our code. I then use reflection questions help my students to think through the logic of their own or their peers’ writing. This particular review makes their papers actually look different: they are able to literally perceive the progression and organization of their arguments. One of my students came up to me after doing this revision exercise and asked if we would do it again on our next paper because it really helped him rethink his own writing. This focus on revision allows students to pause and see the forces at play in their own work – the conjunction and conversation of ideas, readers, and writers. Giving my students several revision assignments for each paper allows me to grade them on both effort and final product. Mastering the conventions of academic writing often takes longer than one semester, and adjusting writing styles and skills sometimes makes the overall product worse before it gets better. Thus, shifting the emphasis of assessment from producing a final product to investing time and energy in the writing process allows my students to discover success in experimentation and progress. I find that many of my students are both willing and able to tackle complex ideas and arguments as a result of this focus.

In his poem “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” William Wordsworth reflects on the simultaneous and contradictory pain and satisfaction that come with losing innocence and gaining experience: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more, / And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this / Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts / Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, / Abundant recompense” (84-89). This, for me, describes a university education. Studying at the university level brings students to a place where they must scrutinize their own beliefs and where they can no longer just sail through the barrage of ideas that surround them. This irreversible experience and knowledge can be painful and frightening. For this reason, I strive to make my classroom a place where students also recognize the delight of that change, the “abundant recompense,” and feel safe to make that journey. I love students and I love learning. I strive to model that passion so that my students can feel it too.