At The University of Chicago

Migration and Women’s Rights in Literature and Film, Department of English, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Human Rights Program (Spring 2014)

Graduate seminar that examines the ways in which migrant women’s rights are documented and represented in the twenty-first century film and literature. Readings include theories of legal and cultural representation by Mieke Bal, Jacques Ranicere, and Wendy Brown, among others, as well as a wide range of literary texts and films, including the documentary Maquilapolis (2006) and immigration novels such as Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2011) and Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus. Some questions considered revolve around the role of cultural works in promoting women’s rights, the politics and ethics of representation, the testimonial value of literature and cinema, as well as their potential to open up alternative understandings of migration and new forms of feminist praxis.

Reading Cultures: Exchanges (Spring 2012, 2013, 2014)

Core undergraduate class in the Humanities. This class mobilizes the concept of exchange as an analytical lens for understanding the culture and political economy of modernity and post- modernity. We look at a wide variety of political, economic, literary, and visual texts from Marx’s Capital, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” to contemporary Maroccan artist Yto Barrada’s artwork Riffs. Questions about the history and politics of exchange, as an economic and cultural concept, are central to this class.

Reading Cultures: Travels (Winter 2012, 2013, 2014)

Core undergraduate class in the Humanities focused on narratives of cross-cultural encounters (migrations, explorations, and expeditions) from the Renaissance to the present. Students read a wide range of travelogues and travel narratives, from the forced migration of Olaudah Equiano as a slave on plantations in the West Indies and Virginia to Jamaica Kincaid’s and Michelle Cliff’s stories of migration. The goal of this class is to historicize and contextualize these narratives, emphasizing the global material conditions underpinning these encounters, including the impact of gender and race on human mobility.

Reading Cultures: Collections (Fall 2011, 2012)

Core class in the Humanities that introduces undergraduate students to various ways in which national and transnational cultural identities derive meaning from collections of objects, stories, and historical archives. Includes works such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, as well as excerpts from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations.

At The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

America and Its Others: Women of Color and the American Dream, Comparative Literature (Winter 2009)

This class looks at the various ways in which immigrant women use artistic and literary media to tell their stories of migration. Texts include works by Coco Fusco, Sandra Cisneros, Michelle Cliff, and the film and activist project Maquilapolis, among others.

Writing and Literature: Immigrant Lives, Immigrant Stories (Department of English, Fall 2007; Winter 2008)

These classes introduce students to autobiographical writings by immigrants to the U.S. from the 19th to the 21st Century. These are writing seminars in the English Department that use literature to teach students writing strategies.

Victorian Novel [Teaching Assistant for Merla Wolk], Department of English, (Winter 2006)

Duties included teaching two discussion sessions per week, designing assignments, and grading written work.

American Novel [Teaching Assistant for Joshua Miller], Department of English (Fall 2006)

Duties included teaching two discussion sessions per week, designing assignments, and grading written work.

At Emporia State University, Emporia, KS

Composition 101 and 102, Department of English (2003-2005)