Teaching
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Spring 2006 Literary Forms: Forms of Non-Fiction (HTML) | (PDF)
This course taught students how to read various forms of non-fiction as engaging in literary techniques to make their claims politically and culturally meaningful. Instead of castigated each form of non-fiction as “false” or “biased,” we asked how each form performs specific types of cultural work, examining in order, the photo-essay, reportage, documentary film, social survey, and the non-fiction novel. Among the writers and artists we discussed were Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, Janet Malcolm, Zara Briski, Jacob Riis, and Truman Capote.
Fall 2005 World Literature and Its Boundaries (HTML) | (PDF)
This course explored world literature as a concept that seeks to create a meaningful vision of the world in spite of the limitations of our knowledge about the world. Holding in abeyance questions of cultural relativism, we investigated how world literature came into being as a useable concept during the Enlightenment and how it continues to function for artists and critics as a way to read the “maps” that organize our world. These “maps” include those written with national borders in mind, those that are regulated by perceptions of otherness, and those that are about a particular concept of history. We took these maps (both literal and figurative) and turned them around, read them in different ways, and assessed their preoccupations in the hope that we could learn enough from them to bring about a new world literature. Among the writers we discussed were Goethe, Amitav Ghosh, Murasaki Shikibu, and Wole Soyinka.
Spring 2005 First-Year Writing Seminar (HTML) | (PDF)
The first-year writing course at Boston College is designed to teach students how to become attentive to the texture of writing in order to become skilled writers themselves. We began by differentiating genres of writing, focusing especially on the personal essay and research paper, and moved towards a model of writing based on drafting and rearticulation. The students developed these skills by engaging in a community in which they believed themselves to be a part. The three guiding principles for the semester were directed towards understanding what kind of writing the students were doing in relation to this community (voice and genre), understanding for whom they were writing (audience) and establishing what they were trying to communicate (purpose). The final question they attempted to answer in light of their work was simply, what makes a community?
Also that semester, I taught Homi Bhabha’s On The Location of Culture for Professor Robin Lydenberg’s graduate course on contemporary theory. We worked on Homi Bhabha’s seminal work on postcolonial theory: “Signs Taken for Wonders, ” “Articulating the Archaic,” and “DissemiNation”.
Fall 2004 Literary Themes: Cultural Readings of Imperialism (HTML) | (PDF)
Through a select group of Anglo-American writers, this course explored the potential of thinking about imperialism as a structure for analyzing literature over time, paying close attention to current debates about U.S. “neo-imperialism.” We familiarized ourselves with the mode of postcolonial analysis by reading short essays by Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi. We read across several forms (novel, poem, short story, film) in order to ask how imperialism is represented by those living in a colonial regime, the meaning of “resistance,” and how expression in a colonial regime is represented in literary and cinematic works. Among the authors we read were Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, R.L. Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville. Since this course was part of the Literature Core series focusing on literary themes, we concentrated on how the thematic of imperialism changes in response to different national and historical contexts.
Fall 2003 Indian Film and Fiction (Teaching Assistant for Professor Kalpana Rahita Seshadri) Boston College, Massachusetts
This course explored fiction set in South Asian countries including Burma (Myanamar) and Pakistan. We began with a discussion of the effects of British colonialism in this region and considered its impact on culture, politics, and national identity. As the teaching assistant, I lectured on the section dealing with the effects of diaspora on Bollywood and the writings of Salman Rushdie. I also managed a web-log (blog) on contemporary representations of Indian film and fiction.