Teaching Philosophy

As a scholar and teacher of English literature and language, I aim to build a narrative in each class meeting and over the course of the semester. To accomplish this, I set aside 5-10 minutes at the beginning of class to revisit conversations, observations, discoveries, and questions from our last meeting. This approach reinforces learning and builds connections between our past readings and debates with each new week's materials and conversations. These 5-10 minutes also enable students who may not have fully engaged with previous material to ask follow-up questions and empower quiet students to address established ideas, which creates a more diverse and inclusive classroom environment. 

Ultimately, I view the classroom as a place where students can develop ideas, test them, and collaborate with others to deepen their critical thinking, communication, and writing skills. Our engagement with English literature and language will teach students over the course of a semester how to identify, contemplate, and resolve many of the complex situations, challenges, and questions we encounter in our professional and personal lives. I intend to help students understand the perspectives, narratives, and nuances that are woven throughout all of our lives, not to teach them what to think or why to think. In every teaching encounter, I practice inclusive pedagogy and cultivate a collaborative and equitable learning environment that allows my students to think and learn about themselves, the world, and the literature that we study together.

Teaching Experience

Spring 2024

Harvard University, ENGL 98r: Environmental Disasters and Resilience, Cambridge, MA

Course Designer and Instructor

Course Description:


Disasters are inherently linked to the natural world through the etymology of the word, which means “ill-fated star.” This course focuses on narratives of natural, apocalyptic, and industrial disasters and their representations in literature and media. However, we will also consider the surprisingly positive effects of some disasters. For example, while many of the characters that we will encounter experience significant loss and hardship, in most of their narratives, glimmers of hope emerge, whether through the renewal of friendship or a bounty of apples that keeps them alive. During and after disasters, people must figure out how to recover and cope. Therefore, this course is fundamentally interested in the duality of disasters: their devastation and their possibilities. Guiding questions for this course include: How do people react amid eco-disasters? How do humans and the environment recover? What are the productive literary critical methods that can help scholars better understand narratives about disaster? What can we learn from disaster?

Fall 2022

Harvard University, ENGL 10: Literature Today, Cambridge, MA

Head Teaching Fellow

Course Description:


What does it mean to be a writer today? Who writes? For whom and why? And how do we read today? What does contemporary literature reflect about the state of our world? Literature Today is a course that focuses on works written since 2000. We will look at the entire span of literary production, from novels, short stories, and poems, to plays, memoirs, and even some texts that resist generic classification altogether. We will think together about how literature engages our minds and our bodies, the world of politics and the world of art, the historical past, and the mythical past, above all the history of collective imagination stored up within literature itself. The course offers a unique blend of literary study, criticism, and creative writing, a reflection of our own commitments and practice as contemporary writers. This approach is designed to create an immersive and dynamic conversation that we invite you to join. 

Spring 2022

Harvard University, ENGL 151AN: The Age of the Novel

Teaching Fellow

Course Description:


What does the novel still have to offer? As newer genres—movies, television, Youtube, TikTok—compete for our attention, why do people still immerse themselves long works of prose fiction? And why do certain nineteenth-century British novels continue to captivate so many readers to this day? In this course, we will read four nineteenth-century novels by four authors that many consider to be the greatest writers that have ever lived: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. We will pay close attention to technique: how do these novels work? And we will also explore social and political themes: what are these novels about? At every stage, we will consider the unique capacities of narrative fiction: what can the novel do that other genres can’t? Implicitly and explicitly, this course will argue first, that these superlative nineteenth-century novels let us see the world (not only then but also now) in new ways, and second, that the novel is a tool for thinking that beats all others. Alongside these texts, we will watch film, television and theatre adaptations as well as read contemporary criticism to better understand the enduring legacy of these canonical works.  

Fall 2021

Harvard University, ENGL 10: Literature Today, Cambridge, MA

Teaching Fellow

Course Description:


All literature was contemporary at some point, but the literature that is contemporary now provides us with special opportunities for enjoying, questioning, and understanding the world. Literature Today focuses on works written since 2000: in other words, from the lifetime of most of you. The course explores how writers from around the world speak from and to their personal and cultural situations. We will think about how literature engages with urgent problems such as climate crisis, economic inequality, technological change, structural prejudices, and catastrophic failures of governing systems. In our study, we will encounter a range of genres, media, histories, and sites of artistic production, and we will think of literature as part of a living and evolving system. The course offers a unique blend of literary study and creative writing—as students in this class, you will analyze literature and make literature. The idea that these practices are complementary will shape the course assignments, which will be sometimes analytical and sometimes creative.