Pedagogy and Courses Taught

Courses Taught

Studies in African American Literature: Toni Morrison and her New York Circle

Columbia University (Summer 2011)

 

This course focuses on the circles of artistic affiliation that surrounded Toni Morrison’s work during her years as an editor at Random House. Studying the African American literary community in 1970s New York, we will read Morrison’s early work alongside works by Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Morris Levitt and Middleton A. Harris – authors with whom she collaborated.  A rich comparative analysis of this literature will begin with a re-evaluation of the ways race, gender and sexuality impact collaborative relationships.  Assignments and discussions will engage the following questions:  What is the role of literature in creating an historical archive of Black life? How did the politics of Black Nationalism and feminism impact authorial identity and the reading audience of the early 1970s? If we take seriously the role of artistic collaboration in the writing of literature, how does the practice of textual interpretation change?

20^th Century American Literature: Re-Reading the 1960s: Sex, Love and Gender

Columbia University (Summer 2009)

The 1960s and early 70s witnessed a political and intellectual paradigm shift – a shift the nation still reckons with today.  Being attentive to the varied and often competing representations of “the long 1960s,” this course will experiment with critical methods of re-reading the past.  By pairing canonical texts published in the 1960s and early 70s with novels from the end of the 20^th century, students will discover what plots and images endure and what this can tell us about our conception of gender and sexuality today. Specifically focusing on how gender, sex, and love relationships are imagined in contemporary America, we will look at the 1960s’ fascination with love as a site of political enmity, national reconciliation, and individual repair.  In support of this goal, the six-week course is divided into three thematic clusters.  Each cluster will include two novels and supplementary material centered upon a common historical theme, including one novel published in the 1960s and one historical novel published in the 1990s or after.  These will include: Race and Interracial Reconciliation; the Sex Wars (the Vietnam War and Sexual Revolution); and Black/Queer Adoptive Families.

Contemporary U.S. Literature:  Sex and Intimacy in the 1960s

SUNY-Purchase College (Spring 2009)

This course will focus on the post-1960 novel in North America.  Together we will explore representations of intimacy and the family as we discover what fiction can tell us about our conception of gender and sexuality before, during, and after the sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 70s.  We will be looking at texts that offer discerning depictions of the everyday intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, paying specific attention to the period’s interest in new forms of love relationships (e.g. interracial love and friendship, queer adoptive families, divorce and group marriage). Additionally, as we think about how these novels offer new ways to perceive the past, this course will necessarily consider postmodernism’s experimentation with history and temporality.