Teaching

UNC-Chapel Hill

I teach courses in Writing in the Disciplines, introduction to fiction, and popular fiction. In both my writing and literature courses, I strive to develop the agency of students as readers, writers, and researchers. My courses are grounded in innovative, creative syllabi and assignments in order to broaden student perceptions of humanities work. While at UNC, I am honored to have received two teaching awards that recognize my commitment to student success.

ENGL 105: Composition and Rhetoric

A first-year (WID) writing seminar. Students analyze writing genres, audience expectations, and rhetorical situations to complete writing projects in the natural sciences, in business, and in the humanities

Course Highlights

  • Multimodal writing (website design, graphic and visual communication, and an introduction to Adobe Creative Suite)
  • Oral communication (elevator pitches and interviews)
  • Real-world assignments (job interviews, book layout and cover design, blog posts)
  • Writing as a process (free writing, peer review, and editing/revision)
  • Transferrable skills across the disciplines
  • Campus collaboration, including class visits with UNC Special Collections and the University Career Center
  • Sample website: https://engl105006.web.unc.edu/

ENGL 105i: Writing in the Humanities

A topic-specific WID class. I structured this course around emerging fields of humanities study: students completed assignments in the Digital Humanities, Book History, and Public Humanities.

Course Highlights

  • A DH unit that considered the labor of digital preservation, and the movement toward open-access scholarship
  • Annotation of nineteenth-century texts
  • Original content produced for The Digital Woman’s World
  • Introduction to book history and archival studies
  • Public humanities grant proposals modeled after the North Carolina Humanities Council Community Engagement Grant
  • Sample website: https://writinginthehumanities.web.unc.edu/

ENGL 105i: Writing in Business

A topic-specific WID class that is geared primarily toward pre-business students at UNC. The course was structured around outreach and professionalization; market research and analysis; and developing original business ideas.

Course Highlights

  • Building a professional online presence
  • Collaboration with Carolina Women in Business
  • Collaboration with a graduate research consultant from the business school
  • A class visit from a local business owner
  • Newspapers articles on the impact of COVID-19 on local businesses
  • A “Shark Tank”-styled business proposal, including an original product idea, business plan development, and a pitch

ENGL 123: The Reader’s Role in Fiction

An introduction to fiction course concerned with the influence that readers, historically and today, have had on the reception, interpretation, and transmission of fiction. The course not only pushed students to approach fiction from the perspective of audience, it also helped students reflect on their own reading practices. Throughout, I asked my students to consider how fiction has, historically, addressed and/or effaced diverse audiences; and how changing technologies, fictional formats, and the make-up of the reading audience affect the relationship between readers and fiction.

Course Highlights

  • Texts including Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina (1725); Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince (1831); Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968); and Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” (2017), among others
  • A rich look at the changing technologies of book production, and its effect on format, audience, and reading practices
  • Student-made commonplace books, with which they preserved meaningful quotes and extracts from their reading
  • A multimodal final project, in which students adapted one of the texts into a new media format. Projects included 3D-printed board games; podcast interviews with historical authors; Twitter immersions; and artist’s books.
  • The exploration of traces of historical readers with the Book Traces project

ENGL 144: Popular Genres

A literature course that introduces the development of popular genres from the nineteenth century through today. We read texts that range across science fiction, children’s literature, Westerns, romance, and horror, and discuss the conventions, tropes, and reformulations of each. In addition, students consider the material contexts of popular fiction with a visit to UNC’s Special Collections and the the production of their own broadside ballad, a centuries-old popular genre.

Course Highlights

  • Texts including H.G. Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896); Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979); Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” (2019); Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865); Louis L’amour’s The Quick and the Dead (1973); Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813); and Jordan Peel’s Candyman (2021), among others
  • The use of Hypothesis, a digital social annotation tool, to encourage active reading and to support a variety of participation styles
  • Class visit to UNC’s Special Collections to see examples of chapbooks, broadsides, mass-market paperbacks, comic books, and serial fiction
  • The production of their own broadside ballads, creatively remixing a contemporary ballad into an historical medium of popular fiction
  • Challenging secondary source texts to deepen student understanding of the debates surrounding popular genres
  • A dynamic mix of lectures, small group activities and discussions, and class-wide conversation