Philosophy
My pedagogy is grounded in the belief that literary study is both an intellectual and creative practice, one that trains students to think and write critically, engage ethically with difference, and understand how stories respond to the phenomena within our lives.
I design courses that combine rigorous close reading with interdisciplinary inquiry, collaborative learning, and multimodal experimentation. Across my teaching, I prioritize historically grounded and theory-informed reading practices, inclusive classrooms that treat diverse lived experiences as vital forms of knowledge, and assignments that prepare students for academic, creative, and public-facing communication.
My teaching spans lecture courses, writing-intensive seminars, and interdisciplinary classrooms. In undergraduate courses on literary arts and cultural studies, I bring together traditional and experimental interpretive methods—including feminist and queer theory, Black studies, and affect theory—to help students read across genres, media, and national contexts. In my course Black Literary Genres at the University of Washington, students examined gothic and speculative traditions in Black literature through novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991). Pairing primary texts with criticism by scholars of Black horror and feminist theory, we explored the genre not only as a record of racial trauma but as a site of aesthetic pleasure, speculative imagination, revenge fantasy, and experiments in power and embodiment.
By taking a multimodal, interdisciplinary approach, I ask students to examine visual art, performance, historical artifacts, and film alongside literary texts. When reading Ann Petry's The Street (1946), for instance, we consider how the novel renders the racialized and gendered subjectivities of Black women navigating mid-twentieth-century New York City, bringing those questions into conversation with contemporary work like sculptor Thomas J. Price's monumental figures of Black women installed in cityscapes like Times Square. I also have extensive experience guiding students in creating digital and multimodal work. In a Calderwood Public Writing Seminar, students responded to Cauleen Smith's experimental film Sojourner (2018) by creating zines designed to help public audiences engage with art that resists normative conventions—an assignment that reflects my broader commitment to public scholarship and community-based research.
Course List
Literary and Cultural Studies Courses
"Shadow Work: Psychoanalysis Theory and Black Literary & Visual Art" for Comparative History of Ideas 260\University of Washington (UW) (1 section)
"Black Speculative Fiction through Black Feminist and Queer Theories: The Crafting of Elsewhere" for Comparative History of Ideas 250\ UW (1 section)
"Black Horror Stories--Literature and Cinema" for African American 318\ University of Washington, UW (1 section)
Writing and Composition Courses
"Multimodal Expository Writing" for English 101: English Composition, Seattle Central College (4 sections)
"Multimodal Expository Writing" for English 131: Composition: Exposition, UW (3 sections)
"Comedy Writing Across Media" for English 281/381: Intermediate/Advance Expository Writing, UW (2 sections)
