My primary goal as a teacher is to help foster my students’ intellectual development. The respectful, open exchange of ideas forms the foundation of my classroom, and through collaborative activities and class discussions, I create a space for diverse perspectives, critical discernment, and principled disagreement. I want students to understand the responsibilities of intellectual life and the uses and importance of logical and ethical reasoning. With their emphasis on reflective inquiry, my seminars provide an ideal setting for this kind of work. I invite students to grapple with challenging texts, to practice critically engaged and inventive responses to the works we read and, ultimately, to offer sophisticated written analyses that will contribute to their development as active and engaged thinkers.
In the day-to-day work of the seminar, we approach these goals by situating close textual readings within broader historical and cultural discourses. Making student writing the centerpiece of the seminar has been crucial to this approach. I ask my students to view interpretation as a practice that develops through diverse reading strategies and through written responses to the work of other writers. This means my students are constantly responding to a variety of written texts: literary works, scholarly articles and, perhaps most importantly, the work-in-progress of their colleagues in the seminar. By placing the focus on student writing, my courses model the kind of active engagement we expect of intellectual readers and writers. Moreover, this practice underscores that students have a real stake in the conversation and a “public” voice to enter in the discussion.
The Writing Program at Duke University has played a crucial role in my approach to teaching. The “Writing 20” seminars, my primary teaching focus, are innovative, discipline-specific courses that introduce students to the goals and practices of intellectual writing. Building on my own interests and strengths as a scholar, I have designed seminars on: suburbia and the American Dream; contemporary “re-visions” of 1950s U.S. culture in literature and film; the social life of "things" in consumer culture; the body as a commodity; and the indeterminacy of sex and gender as categories of identity and discourse. In the latter course, students read Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex alongside selections from Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Alice Dreger’s work on gender identity disorder. These works provided a context for students as they prepared to enter the contentious debates surrounding definitions of normalcy, medical ethics, and intersexuality in their own writing projects. In fall 2008, I also taught a closely related seminar in the English Department, “Sexuality, Censorship & U.S. Culture,” in which students explored how discursive representations of sexuality give voice to, and silence, particular bodies, desires, and practices. My current course addresses different theoretical approaches to adaptation, inviting students to read, reflect on, and respond to scholarly and artistic debates surrounding the the nature of authorship, the creative process, originality, textuality, cultural transmission, and intellectual property.
I'm thrilled to share some of my student writers' success stories with you. Two students in my "American Dreams, Gothic Landscapes" course had their essays on suburban culture and The Virgin Suicides published inThe Norton Pocket Book of Writing by Students (Norton & Co., 2010). To read a particularly exceptional piece of writing that emerged from my "Writing Sex & Gender" seminar, click here. The essay was published in the Fall 2009 issue of Deliberations, Duke's highly selective journal of first-year student writing.The Fall 2010 issue of Deliberations will feature an essay on the commodification of intelligence written by a student in my "Writing About Real Things" course. And my students' archival work and "visual annotation" projects on 1950s culture are featured on the Duke Libraries Instruction Services page.
I have also designed and taught General Education Literature and Rhetoric courses, as well as numerous upper-level seminars on such topics as: sexuality and postwar fiction; U.S. literature and suburban culture; representations of community in the American short story; and the literature or U.S. urban centers. You can find links to the syllabi for the courses described here on the right-hand side of this page.