I regularly offer graduate seminars in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Critical Theory. Here are some of my recent course offerings:
ENGLISH 482: Theories of Literature and Social Justice (Spring 2024–co-taught with Dr. Emily Weissbourd)
This course introduces students to theories of literature and social justice. How does the study of literature offer distinctive ways of grappling with questions of social justice? How do literary works reinforce or challenge dominant ideologies? In what ways do literary works provide tools to map exploitative or oppressive social and political formations? How do literary works enable us to imagine freer modes of life and more just and equitable societies? Most of our attention will be focused on theoretical and critical works that provide conceptual tools for thinking about these matters. We will also read some literary texts, from varied historical contexts, in order to provide opportunities to experiment with these interpretive paradigms. Major units will focus on intersectional approaches to: race; class; gender and sexuality; and postcolonial and decolonial thought.
ENGLISH 496: Public Humanities: Public Collaborations Through Documentary Storytelling (Spring 2022)
As graduate students in the humanities, we learn to value textual study, write carefully, and research with specific purpose. We find meaning in a variety of cultural texts and experiences, no doubt. For the vast majority of us who study a discipline within the humanities, we complete most of the activities listed above alone, often in solitude. Public humanities as a methodology arises out of a desire to extend, share, and democratize humanities-based practices with diverse communities. In this iteration of the seminar, we will introduce ourselves to theories of public humanities and focus specifically on the method of documentary storytelling as practice for building public collaborations. Students will work in pairs to collaborate with designated community partners, develop a professional website, and build a portfolio of public-facing work, including a photographic project, a podcast, and a short documentary film.
ENGLISH 447: Making Public the Victorian Legacy of Race, Racism and Racialization (Spring 2021)
Like many who studied Nineteenth-Century British Literature in their undergraduate or graduate programs throughout the 1990s, I learned about the Victorian legacy of race, racism, and racialization through Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I learned the story of Bertha Mason in the attic; I was taught of her violent, insane, even “demonic” actions that haunted the narrative and ultimately impeded the domestic happiness of Jane and Rochester. And I learned of the enduring legacy of this story in the discipline of Victorian Literature—in the courses we teach, in the scholarship we write, in the students we train. This was and is a racist legacy; it is also a severely limited legacy that impedes how we imagine the work, impact, and reach of what could be Victorian Literature. In their June 2020 manifesto, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alice Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong “challenge[d] the racism that undergirds Victorian Studies and maintains it;” they instructed us to develop “more agile methodologies that understand ‘the Victorian’ outside the bounded years of a queen’s reign.” In this seminar, we will attempt to respond to these directives by making public a different legacy: Victorian culture’s understanding race, its persistent racism, and its strategic processes of racialization whose impacts have endured. And instead of writing a traditional research paper, seminar participants will construct a portfolio of public writings that seek to make relevant—to make immediate—Victorian literary ideas to our contemporary struggles for and with racial justice. Due to the many challenges of the pandemic, we will focus on five primary texts: Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste (1851), Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure (1887), Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (1890), and Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Pool in the Desert (1903). Scholars have written extensively about the history and culture of the Victorian imperialism, nineteenth-century conceptions of race, and deployment of racist practices, and we will supplement our primary texts with selections from such work. We will also draw on important work in the field of Critical Race Theory, Victorian writings on such issues as degeneration, eugenics, and criminology, and look specifically at examples of public writing that successfully connect literary issues and concerns of the past to our present—and vice versa. Finally, we will devote at least five days of the semester to workshopping our writing. As many of us will be learning the craft of public writing, we will practice—and support each other as we navigate the difficulties of the pandemic together.
ENGLISH 447: Victorian Masculinity (Spring 2020)
In Characteristics (1831), Thomas Carlyle famously recounts how “the old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is still invisible to us, and we grope after it in darkness, one clutching this phantom, another that.” Carlyle points to Victorian men’s experience of transition as well as their desperation, as they anxiously seek new models of masculinity in the wake of the French Revolution and Romanticism and their uncertain forays into modern imperialism and massive industrialization. This seminar explores both the rhetorics of “crisis” that surround representations of nineteenth-century masculinity and diverse attempts to craft new modes of maleness; we will specifically consider how strategic deployments of a “crisis of masculinity” within Victorian culture curtain alternative kinds of maleness and reaffirm patriarchy. The course will draw on critical discussions of hegemonic masculinity, compulsory heteronormativity, nationalism, eugenics, and biopower in our attempts to read literary and cultural treatments of gender. In lieu of a traditional seminar paper, each seminar participant will complete a Scalar digital anthology project (https://scalar.lehigh.edu/); each member of the seminar will choose a topic related to Victorian Masculinity around which to develop an anthology of primary readings. Students will have the opportunity to work with a partner or individually on this project.