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Programing and Lesson Plans
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Programing and Lesson Plans
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"Every way of knowing,
is a way of not knowing something else"
is a way of not knowing something else"
Robert McRuer
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Queer Christianity
We live in a historical moment when the relationship between queerness and Christianity is being reconsidered and hotly debated. To better understand this debate, as well as the differences and potential common ground between members of the queer and Christian communities (including those who belong to both!), this seminar examines the history of Christianity and its relationship to queerness. Is Christianity a force for domination or liberation? Orthodoxy or creative multiplicity? Normativity or queerness? To answer these questions, we will read literature that explores how Christianity has both suppressed and in some sense created queerness, as well as how it has been reclaimed by queer communities. We will also look closely at how these historical tensions are being played out locally today. Special attention also will be given to the range of intersecting identities and communities that have responded to the meeting of faith and sexuality in various ways, drawing from diverse contexts of race, ability/disability, gender, and class. Readings include selections from the Bible, books about theology, and documentaries and memoirs attesting to the experience of LGBT Christians.
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How to Make a Monster:
Disability and Narratives of Embodiment
Why are monsters so ubiquitous in literature and art? How do they, and other literary villains and anti-heroes, reinforce cultural values and anxieties? Who or what are the monsters of our own cultural moment? In this seminar, we will explore the history and representation of monsters in western culture. Using J.J. Cohen's Monster Theory, as well as other texts from disability and post-colonial studies, we will examine monsters not merely as otherworldly creatures, but as figures that stand in for a wide range of "undesirables" and "others." Readings and films for this class will be drawn from the distant medieval past up to modern horror and fantasy films, and will feature the monsters said to live on the edge of the known world, mystical visionaries, sideshow freaks, hallucinatory apparitions, witches, and even a few vampires and werewolves. In particular, this seminar will focus on the constructions of disability. Disability is conceptualized as a material state and social state. Utilizing crip and monster theory which understands each as "cultural bodies," these premises and their subjects will be examined to determine (1) how the narratives use tropes, frames, and signs to establish certain assumptions about embodied difference, (2) what ethical problems exist within this use of cultural power, and (3) how these narratives might be resisted or changed to more ethically empower those marked as the monsters and the disabled.
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Racism and Human Diversity:
Medieval Narratives of Blackness
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were founded in 1935 by Cleveland philanthropist and poet, Edith Anisfield-Wolf. Her desire was to establish an award for books that promoted social justice and tolerance by addressing cultural and racial diversity. Since its foundation, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have honored the best fiction and non-fiction that exemplify these principals. Winners of the award include the novelist Toni Morrison, the literary critic Edward Said, and the historian David Blight. In this seminar, we will read selections of poetry and books by winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards alongside other films and texts from the Middle Ages to the modern day which offer contextual and historical insights into the wider framework of social issues, social justice and diversity that undergird the selected award books. Additionally, students will get the chance to attend the 2017 Awards ceremony and visit to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award collection at the Cleveland Public Library.
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Beyond Male and Female
Gender is personal and political. Gender is not just a set of physical or mental characteristics but an ongoing social conversation between identities, expressions, and relations that fight to order how we define bodies, how we divide bodies, and what roles or values these bodies will possess. Histories and narratives form and repeat when readers follow debates on gender in society. These narratives influence cultural imagination with tales that reflect and resist public concepts of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and class. In this seminar, we explore how rhetoric and worldviews have worked together to form diverse genres of texts and embodiment that have come to be collected under the name, “transgender,” as well as other forms of gender beyond the binary categories of “male” and “female.” By tracing a cultural genealogy that spans the western Middle Ages to today, we map how texts in the history of gender reinforce and resist mechanisms of control. This course asks: how is gender not just something you have but something you do? How does the doing of gender shape your embodiment? How do the lack or existence of disability access and gender-neutral bathrooms create and enforce divisions without active intentionality in the community that occupies the place? As part of the course, participants will engage with a variety of religious, scientific, and cultural texts, including selections from the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), films such as the Danish Girl and the Transformation, as well as the biographies of Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings.
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Introduction to English Literature 1
A Genealogy of Gender and Genre
In this course, we explore gender and genre through literature produced in and around the early British Isles, from the elegiac poetry of the Anglo Saxons to the Epic poetry of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this survey of medieval and early modern texts, we trace how forms of narrative were informed by and acted on the construction of concepts of sex and sexuality. We study how debates around nature and nurture, essential and artificial, eternal and mutable came to produce later notions of transgender, queerness, disability, race, and religious difference.
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Literature and the Financial Imagination
Transgender and Social Justice
Money is power – a symbol and a form of
social rhetoric and influence. When readers follow the money trails in society,
narratives begin to form and repeat. These narratives influence the cultural
imagination with tales that reflect and speak back to public ideologies on
gender, sexuality, race, disability, and class. In this writing intensive
course, we will explore how literature and the financial imagination have
worked together to form diverse genres of texts and embodiment that have come
to be collected under the name, “transgender.” By tracing a social genealogy
that spans the Middle Ages until today, we will map how critical texts in the
trans literature archive reinforce and resist mechanisms of political control. We
will read texts alongside some important works of criticism. Assignments
include regular blackboard posts, two short essays, and analytical essay.
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TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIPS
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Introduction to Disability Studies
The field of Disability Studies approaches disability as a social and cultural process resulting in the exclusion of some bodily variations as opposed to a body gone wrong. Disability, therefore, exists at the fraught intersection of environments, bodies, and beliefs. This course neither explores medical etiologies (pathologies of bodies) nor does it approach disability as undesirable difference in need of repair, cure, or rehabilitation (although all of these may be part of disability experiences we investigate). Rather we will analyze disability as aesthetics (the ways that some bodies make other bodies feel when sharing space), politics (social forces that threaten to devalue some bodies on behalf of other bodies), and systemic alternatives (how do disabled lives differ and, therefore, offer glimpses into other ways of being human). All these considerations involve us in wrestling with historically variable concepts of what and who counts as normal.
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Transnational Queer Film
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Introduction to Medieval Literature
This writing-intensive course explores the variety of literatures produced in and around the early British Isles, from the eerie and rousing Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf to Shakespeare’s Henry V (a story of international conflict and courtly love). In this survey of medieval and early modern texts, we will counter shifting perspectives on politics, desire, ethnic identity, and cultural exchange. Moreover, we will trace what happens when different ways of life come into conflict: Christian and non-Christian, human and animal, urban and rural, European and non-European. Readings include selections from The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), Le Morte Darthur (Malory), and Lais of Marie de France. We will also consider the transformation of early literary traditions via J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and other media (such as film and online videos).
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ASSISTANTSHIP TO THE GWU
DIGITAL HUMANITIES INSTITUTE
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The George Washington University Digital Humanities Institute (GW DHI) is a hub of research, teaching, and outreach activities around digital and new media. It is founded upon the core belief that the arts and humanities actively transform and are transformed by digital cultures. We support — through grants, workshops, symposia, and exhibitions — collaborative endeavors in scholarship and multimodal venues of teaching and learning. We seek to increase public engagement with digital humanities projects within and beyond the GW community and greater DC area.
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Assistant to the Crip/Queer Program at GWU
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In addition to my formal graduate teaching, assisting, and researching assignments, I have also worked as part of the GWU English Department to help develop and publicize events for the emerging Crip/Queer Studies area of strength. This work included helping to organize conferences, guest speakers, as well as create posters, live-tweet, and document the organization.
Additionally, I have served as webmaster for the GWU English Department for Spring and Fall semesters in 2014.
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