At Middlebury, I teach courses in literary studies, with an emphasis on long eighteenth-century British literature. During my time at the University at Buffalo, I taught a wide variety of college writing and literature courses. On this page, you’ll find descriptions and syllabi for recent courses I’ve taught.
ENAM 225 – Eighteenth-Century Literature: British society, politics, and culture shifted dramatically over the course of the long eighteenth century (1660 – 1830) in response to the ascendance of an empowered mercantile bourgeoisie, the expansion of empire, and increasing British involvement and investment in the transatlantic slave trade. In this course, we will consider how writers and thinkers of this period grappled with these economic, social, and political transformations by reading novels, plays, poems, and essays.
While our exploration will be ranging and adventurous, we’ll return to a cluster of core questions over the course of the semester. When, how, and why does commerce—considered as a set of mercantile practices and as a concept or ethos—emerge as an organizing framework for understanding society or its politics? How does this frame align with or interrupt more longstanding ideas about virtue, civic belonging, and liberty? How does the new commerce prompt engagements with ideas about vice or violence? How do Britons square notions of English liberty with the burgeoning economic importance and cultural salience of racial slavery? What kinds of social perspectives are enabled by “mobility” of certain kinds of people and the displacement and dispossession of others? What literary forms, modes, and genres were especially suited to taking on these questions, and why? Finally, how can addressing these questions in the context of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world help us think through related issues in our contemporary moment?
ENAM 103C – Reading Literature- Disaster: In this course we will learn how to understand literature by thinking about how literature helps us to understand the world(s) around us—even, perhaps especially, as those worlds begin to fall apart. As we familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals of literary analysis and interpretation, we will consider how representing disasters (whether real or imagined) enables writers to grapple with the complexities, contradictions, and violence of their societies, environments, histories, and futures. What do we gain, as readers and writers, from the exercise of imagining social, political, economic, or cultural collapse? How does literature enable us to grapple with the reverberations of crisis across varying time scales? What are the politics of representing violence? And how do writers negotiate these questions through aesthetic and narrative choices? These questions will frame our encounter with basic critical strategies for reading literature.