Teaching

My courses in film and literature begin from the conviction that aesthetic forms are arguments — about power, history, memory, and the possibilities of collective life. Global cinema, particularly in its postcolonial and modernist traditions, has engaged these questions with a formal intelligence and ethical seriousness that rewards extended attention. Teaching these films means asking students to read them as interventions in conversations that are still ongoing: works from the Third Cinema movement, or from the postcolonial literary tradition, often articulate possibilities that the present has forgotten or foreclosed, and part of what draws me to them is precisely that quality of address across time.

Literature and film teaching, at its best, cultivates a specific set of critical competencies: the ability to recognize subtle and complex differences in how language and form operate; to situate a work within the historical and cultural conditions of its production and reception; to detect the assumptions — including one's own — that any act of interpretation brings to a text; and to compare and synthesize across works, traditions, and periods. Elaine Showalter, whose work on literary pedagogy has informed my own, identifies these as the core capacities that humanistic education can develop — and I would add that they are habits of mind with reach well beyond the classroom, toward the broader task of reading a world that is itself a site of contested representation.

Central to my pedagogy is the belief that writing is where thinking begins, not where it ends. At a time when generative AI can produce fluent prose on demand, I have become increasingly interested in making the process of thinking visible. In my courses, students write by hand before they revise — and revision is itself a structured practice, with explicit annotations explaining what they changed, why, and where. Handwritten drafting and reflective revision allow students to develop and demonstrate intellectual habits that cannot be outsourced: the capacity to form a thought, commit it to language, and then genuinely reconsider it.

Across undergraduate and graduate courses alike — and in my supervision of graduate research — I try to cultivate what I think of as intellectual agency: the capacity to trust one's own reading, to ask a genuine question of a text, and to follow that question somewhere new. This requires designing courses in which students encounter difficulty as an invitation rather than an obstacle, and in which the movement from confusion to articulation is recognized as the work itself. Learning, like the films I teach, is most interesting when it refuses premature closure.


Recent Courses