This syllabus describes an interdisciplinary course for first-year students in the NC State University Honors program in Fall 2015. “Interpretive Machines” offers a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit our cultural inheritance and ideas. The course also…[Read more]

This syllabus describes a first-year interdisciplinary honors course undertaken in fall 2014 at NC State University. It welcomes students into a hands-on environment for thinking about and practicing with new and old platforms for reading, interpretation, and understanding. It attempts to bridge book history and digital humanities into an…[Read more]

This course, designed for a graduate program in education which focuses on leadership, explores works of literature that have had a significant cultural impact and shaped ways in which societies view social issues from the perspective of how leadership is enacted within the texts. For students from disciplines outside of literature studies, this…[Read more]

contribution to the 2016 MLA Convention Panel sponsored by “Connected Academics”

“You taught me language, and my profit on ‘t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!” (The Tempest, I.ii.362-4).

What does a home mean to you? Have you left it? How did you get there? Would you go back? Starting with the foundational travel narrative in Western literature, Homer’s The Odyssey…[Read more]

Where do we come from? Our families play an instrumental role in our development. Indeed, the idea of the individual, apart from the family, challenges notions of family as a continual process, as something permanent. How old is the idea that the individual can strike out on her own, separate from her family, and thus do as she pleases?…[Read more]

In this essay, I follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience w…[Read more]

[from pp. 151-52:]

“Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we…[Read more]

My talk at the round table on Service Learning in Literary Studies about the necessity of failure in experiential learning.

The ad hoc Committee on Diversity and Tolerance was formed in response to a motion passed by the Delegate Assembly in 1999 calling for the reconstitution of what had been the Task Force against Campus Bigotry. The new committee was to be charged with “working to establish a climate in which all students, faculty, and other college employees, no m…[Read more]

This presentation explored the implications of constraints on due process and academic freedom in light of contingent faculty hiring.