Teaching
My twin goals in the classroom are to develop students’ skills in close reading while helping them see the political workings of early modern cultural artifacts. Echoing how my research brings early modern culture to bear on current critical debates, my pedagogy teaches students to reflect critically upon the mutually constitutive categories of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class by engaging with Renaissance literature.
I strive to make early modern England accessible to students by emphasizing the culture’s uncanny blend of strangeness and familiarity. The dense language of Renaissance texts often troubles students, so I demonstrate how their existing knowledge of etymology, syntax, and tone can unlock these texts’ interwoven literary and political dimensions.
Selected Course Descriptions
Graduate Courses
Introduction to Queer Theory
Authors include:
Barbara Smith, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Gayle Rubin, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Susan Stryker, Jose Muñoz, Lauren Berlant, Robert McRuer, Lee Edelman, Sarah Ahmed, Riley Snorton, and more.
This course explores foundational texts in the genesis and evolution of queer theory, with special attention to the way the disciplinary history of queer theory intertwines with that of feminism, black feminist thought, and other fields of study including disability studies, trans studies, and affect studies. By the end of the course, students possess a good understanding of the historical history of the field and are able to wield queer theory to analyze literary and political dimensions of their research as well as to aid in their efforts at building a more just and equitable world.
Genealogies of Biopolitics
Readings include:
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages
Alex Weheliye, Habeas Viscus
Laura Ann Stoler, Race and Education of Desire
John Graunt, Observations on the London Bills of Mortality (1661)
Thomas Dekker, Lantern and Candlelight (1608)
Thomas Hariot, A Brief Report of the Newfoundland of Virginia
Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosegay
In an age of pandemics, quarantines, and renewed focus on public health, it is time to think about biopolitics. How did the state come to exercise power through the management of biological life? What social, political, religious, intellectual, and rhetorical factors combined to help reconceive nations as populations rather than territories? How did this switch shape important contemporary ideas about sexuality, disability, race, class, and literature? In this seminar, we examine literary and non-literary writings on topics that range from the administration of poor relief, to life under plague, to the management of soldiers, and to the settlement of the “new world.”
Disability in Early Modern Literature
Texts include:
Thomas Harman, A Caveat for Common Cursitors
Anon., An Ease for Overseers of the Poore
Henry IV, Part Two, Shakespeare
Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the Exchange
Shakespeare, Richard III
Richard Brome, The Antipodes
John Milton, Sonnets
This course introduces students to the major movements of disability theory and uses them to investigate representations of able and disabled bodies and minds in early modern literature and culture. We examine disability as a cultural phenomenon with historical and socio-economic dimensions while remaining cognizant of the body’s materiality and how it shapes these discursive realities. Throughout the course we will consider how early modern texts both reflect and challenge modern ideas about disability, the body, and the mind.
Undergraduate Courses
Shakespeare
Texts:
Sonnets
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry V
Twelfth Night
Othello
King Lear
In this course, we read a selection of Shakespeare’s texts and examine their negotiation of sexual, gendered, racial, and socio-political order. Questions we consider include: What kinds of individual and political bodies are found in Shakespeare? What do they desire and fear? How are these bodies discursively constructed through representations of gender, sexuality, race, disability, and social status? This course provides students an opportunity to study Shakespeare’s plays and the culture in which they were produced, as well as to learn critical methodologies pertaining to the study of race, religion, embodiment, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.
Introduction to the Renaissance
Texts:
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Francis Petarch, Rime Sparsa
Isotta Nogarola, Dialogue on the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron
Michel de Montaigne, Essais
Louise Labé, Sonnets
Thomas More, Utopia
Queen Elizabeth I, Speeches and Poetry
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
This course studies the major texts of the European Renaissance, with an emphasis on the literature of Italy, Spain, France, and England. We examine important themes of Renaissance literature, including, but not limited to, the rediscovery of the classical past; the place of women in public culture; Love poetry and sexuality; the literary investment in “the self;” the relationship between patronage and friendship, and much more. Along the way, students explore Renaissance art, history, religion, culture, court politics and philosophy, and learn to recognize the major trends, figures, and ideas that define the period.
Sex and Crime in Early Modern Literature
Texts:
Edward II, Christopher Marlowe
A House In Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, Cynthia Herrup
Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts, William Shakespeare
Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars, ed. Arthur Kinney
The Roaring Girl, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker
A Woman Killed with Kindness, Thomas Heywood
Sex and crime were topics of intense fascination in the Renaissance – much like they are today. Unlike today, however, they were consistently represented as conceptually linked. Criminals were thought more likely to be sexually excessive, and sexuality outside of marriage was thought to lead to legal and social disorder. In this course, we will explore the relationship between gender, sex, crime, and social order in the writings of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Heywood, and Richard Brome. In addition to dramatic literature, we will read depictions of social and sexual “deviants” in early modern popular prose literature, considering how such figures were simultaneously depicted as dreadful monsters and seductive rogues. This course will provide students an opportunity to study Renaissance poetry, prose, and plays in the culture in which they were produced, as well as to learn the history behind the demonization and pathologization of poverty, whose legacy persists to this day.