Teaching

I’ve taught courses in American literature, genre studies, and cultural studies across in-person, hybrid, and fully online modalities. Over ten years at UC Santa Cruz and Mills College, I’ve supported 800+ students and received three Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards. My teaching experience spans lower-division introductory courses through upper-division seminars, with extensive work in online and hybrid delivery.

Philosophy

My approach emphasizes close reading, critical analysis, and helping students articulate how texts operate on structural, rhetorical, and ideological registers. I teach students to recognize how language works persuasively—not just in poems and novels, but in social media, advertising, and political discourse. By examining underlying patterns across literature, film, and new media, students become both more critical and experience greater pleasure in reading, building on the expertise they’ve already developed through lived experience.

Courses

Composition & Writing

I teach composition with emphasis on reading and rhetoric over grammar drills. We start with the premise that good writers are good readers: students first analyze how writers construct arguments across diverse texts, then apply those strategies to their own work. Through structured revision cycles and peer workshop, students learn that writing is a recursive process of reading, drafting, feedback, and refinement—not a one-shot performance.

Sample syllabus:

First-Year-Composition: Meditations on “The Text”

Literature

My literature courses train students in the fundamental skills of literary analysis: identifying patterns, interpreting textual evidence, and constructing persuasive arguments about how texts create meaning. Rather than presenting lectures about what a text means, I teach students to ask productive questions about form, structure, and cultural context. In American literature courses, I ask students to consider how texts both reflect and construct American identity, pairing canonical and non-canonical works with attention to how race, class, gender, and geography shape competing visions of national belonging. Students work across media—literature, film, visual culture—to understand how narratives circulate and transform.

Sample syllabi:

Introduction to Literature & Academic Writing: Spelling; or, the Practical Magic of Academic Prose
American Literature: California is a Story

Genre & Cultural Studies

My genre courses treat popular forms—horror, science fiction, fairy tales, crime narratives—as sites where cultural anxieties become visible. I teach students to take genre seriously as intellectual inquiry, analyzing how conventions produce meaning and how texts inherit, subvert, or reimagine generic expectations. Similarly, my cultural studies courses ask students to consider how seemingly trivial cultural artifacts—gossip, scandal, celebrity—reveal social structures and power dynamics that shape American identity.

Sample syllabus:

“I Heard a Rumor”: Narratives of American Gossip & Scandal

See my CV for a complete list of the courses I’ve taught.