Teaching

As a graduate student at the University of Oregon, I taught classes in Folklore, Composition, English, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature.  Below are syllabi for a few of the courses I designed and taught.

(Women & Gender Studies 399) Feminist Science Fiction:  Monsters, Cyborgs, and Women -- Science fiction (SF) explores our hopes and fears surrounding technological development and its impact on society. From the inception of the genre, women writers have used SF to articulate their visions of scientific power and its relationship to women. Questions of science’s capabilities fill Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, arguably the first SF novel. Like many SF novels by women, Frankenstein puts issues of science, creation, monstrosity, and gender at its center. This course will explore the legacy of Frankenstein in feminist theory and literature as well as in popular culture and will examine contemporary responses to issues of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and cybernetics (among others). Although women are usually seen as marginalized in SF, this course seeks to demonstrate that the genre can give women a voice in scientific discourse and imagination. (PDF)

(Comparative Literature 360) Gender & Film:  Stargazing:  Gender & the (Hollywood) Star System -- What makes someone a star? How do stars function in our society? Why and how do stars give us pleasure?  This course will examine the history and ideology of the “star system,” the ways in which the film industry has promoted and the public has responded to certain celebrities. Paying particular attention to the ways in which stars perform gender, the course will also explore issues of sexuality, race, ethnicity, and genre. (PDF)

(Comparative Literature 103) Introduction to Comparative Literature:  Visual Cultures -- According to the French theorist Guy Debord, “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into representation.” Like many contemporary scholars, Debord contends that the image dominates our present-day culture. Recognizing the pervasiveness and power of the image, this class will provide students with analytical frameworks for understanding and interpreting visual culture through an examination of photography, film, performance, graphic novels, and digital media. (PDF)

(Comparative Literature 204) World of Fiction:  Clowns and Tricksters -- This course will survey the histories and functions of various trickster and clown figures in mythology, folktales, literature, and popular culture. Beginning with tricksters in Native American, African, and Greek mythology and moving through the Medieval European clowns of both the court and the countryside, this course will examine the roles of tricksters and clowns as characters that challenge reason, invoke chaos, and mark and transgress social conventions. Figures of tricksters and clowns remain important in many contemporary writings, oftentimes appearing as marginalized characters standing outside the mainstream, criticizing the status quo, hastening social transformation, and turning the world upside-down. (PDF)

(Comparative Literature 204) World of Fiction:  World Science Fiction:  Monsters, Aliens, Cyborgs -- Although science fiction (SF) purports to 'explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before,' the genre is decidedly earthbound, even nation-bound, usually reflecting the hopes and fears of the socio-historical context in which it’s written. Often viewed as an English-language, if not expressly American phenomenon, there does exist a significant body of non-English language SF, some imitative and some quite distinctive from well-known US writers.  (PDF)

(Comparative Literature 399) World of Film:  Gangsters in Popular Culture -- This class will explore the genre of the gangster film and will survey the changing representations of the gangster in popular culture, alongside the moral panic and cries for censorship that the gangster figure has elicited— beginning with the early sound films of the 1930s, moving through the “classic” depictions of the Mafia from the 1970s and 1980s, to present-day controversies over “gangsta rap,” and ending with the recent revisions of the gangster genre from both within and outside of Hollywood.   The class will use race, ethnicity, class, and gender as lenses through which the ideas of the gangster, gangs, and “the family”—American and un-American—are examined. (PDF)

last updated February 2010