Teaching

Past Courses

Introduction to Composition

Bradley University

This course provides students early in their college careers with an opportunity to practice and refine foundational writing skills that are useful in all professional and academic contexts. It focuses primarily on revision techniques, so that students can direct their efforts wherever they feel it is needed to make their writing focused and purposeful as well as a pleasure to read.

The course is divided into five units, each of which requires a short- to medium-length paper that students write quickly, even hastily (by design), and then spend most of the unit revising. Each unit is designed to practice particular skills:

• to explain complex concepts clearly and concisely, keeping the purpose of the explanation always in sight

• to conduct and present research using a wide range of source types that fulfill different purposes, including

  • providing background information
  • establishing basic terminology and conceptual frameworks
  • relating the argument to and distinguishing it from prior research
  • supporting claims with factual evidence
  • illustrating and clarifying key points with examples
• to write attentive, vivid, and detail-driven evaluations
• to analyze writing by others in terms of its real-world aims and the techniques used to achieve them
• to use story-telling techniques to make their nonfiction writing more concrete and compelling

Modern Masterpieces of Western Culture

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A survey of European and American literature and culture from the Enlightenment through the present, Modern Masterpieces of Western Culture encourages critical reflection on each of its titular keywords: Modern, Masterpiece, Western, and Culture.

The course tells an overarching story about how the “West” has used literature to reflect on and create various images of itself as “modern” and, often, distinct from the rest of the world. In practical terms, this means acquainting students by turns with each of the major aesthetic movements since the 18^th century, such as Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. By reading classic texts from each period against the backdrop of Europe’s evolving colonial and capitalist projects, the course allows students to appreciate the big picture of how texts relate to their historical context. At the same time, it reveals that literature itself is an ever-changing entity with shifting ambitions. With this high-level overview, students can begin to see the complex, fraught histories woven into the cultural works that they consume today.

Literatures of Asia & Africa I

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This course introduces students to the challenges and pleasures of world literature. Gathering premodern texts from a range of traditions, Literatures of Asia & Africa I invites students to think carefully what literature is and what it reveals about the cultures that produce it. As they do so, students gain access to broad categories — like folk tales, courtly literature, liturgical texts — that they can use to begin to draw productive comparisons and connections between cultures and periods that might once have seemed unbridgeably different.

Since all readings are presented in translation, the course equips students with the basic vocabulary of translation theory. This vocabulary enables students to talk meaningfully about the choices translators make even when they may lack access to the source text. The goal throughout the course is to give students tools that they can use to find their way in unfamiliar genres and aesthetic contexts, rather than simply giving up or waiting on expert advice. The course thus provides a general foundation for further literary study.

World Religions

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Through a series of units on each of the world’s major religious traditions —including Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, and Confucianism — this team-taught course introduces students to the academic study of religion. It emphasizes the value of analyzing and historicizing religious traditions in terms of multiple dimensions: ritual, mythical, doctrinal, institutional, ethical, etc. Students can expect to leave the course with a firm foundation for further study as well as a clearer sense of the social, geographical, and historical trends that shape the world’s religions today and how those religions in turn shape the culture we live in.

Asian Mythologies

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Asian Mythologies follows a handful of mythological traditions as they migrate around and across Asia, adapting to local contexts. Drawing on my own disciplinary rootedness in South Asia, the course repeatedly begins there and then spreads outwards, following stories as they make their way into East and Southeast Asia. For example, we might follow stories from the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as they travel into Indonesia. Or we might follow stories of the Buddha’s birth and life as they arrive in China, Korea, and Japan.

Regardless of what we are reading, however, we are doing it with an eye toward reception, circulation, and adaptation. We consider how mythic story-telling shapes and is shaped by the social needs of the culture doing the telling. The Buddha’s life recounted by Buddhists in India sounds different from the same life recounted in China, and not simply in ways that can be accounted for by trying to “get the facts straight.” Students can expect to learn about the relationship between “myths” and other forms of literature, the local religious and philosophical traditions of each receiving culture, and about the cultural and economic circuits that allowed these myths to travel such vast distances in eras long before trains, planes, and automobiles.

Elementary Sanskrit I & II

University of Illnois at Urbana-Champaign

A yearlong introduction to the Sanskrit language, Elementary Sanskrit covers not only the fundamentals of grammar from the epic and classical period but also cultural and literary background that can help us to contextualize and appreciate the texts we are learning to read. Elementary Sanskrit focuses primarily on the skills needed to read historical texts, but it also includes spoken exercises and contemporary readings to encourage fluency and to give a sense of how the language lives on today in India and beyond. Sanskrit is not just a “dead” language – at least not in way we typically think of that term.

The year culminates in a reading taken directly from the Ramayana, one of Sanskrit’s great epics. Students can expect to leave the course able to read simple texts with a dictionary as well as more challenging texts with the added help of a parallel translation.

Literatures of Asia & Africa II

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This course offers a high-level survey of non-Western literatures during the modern period. The second part of a two-part sequence, it nonetheless stands on its own and makes no presuppositions about prior knowledge.

Perhaps the most obvious and overarching trend in modern history, literary or otherwise, has been the process of “globalization.” Literatures of Asia and Africa II therefore focuses on this phenomena in its many guises and periods, from early networks of exchange within the Islamicate world through the extreme imbalances of European colonialism to today’s constant flow of information and people around the globe. The course covers how literature responded differently to these changing times in various regions across Asia and Africa.

Global Consciousness and Literature

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Global Consciousness and Literature explores the cultural and historical roots of globalization, tracing foundational myths and images as they develop across time. We begin in ancient Greece and progress to the modern period, using stories, art, maps, diaries, religious tracts, and other media to see how the “world” has been imagined and reimagined to fit changing circumstances and experiences.

By learning the history that underpins the world we inhabit today, we can see more clearly what is new and what is not. And we can begin to make sense of how our imaginations shape the globe as much as the globe shapes our imaginations.

Indian Cinema in Context

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

As its title suggests, Indian Cinema in Context introduces students to the Indian film industry, emphasizing how the movies it produces fit in the broad cultural and political landscape of South Asia. The course spans the full history of the industry, from the arrival of film technology to British India in the silent-film era to the surge of international interest in a shiny, globalized “Bollywood.”

Along the way, students will learn the basic terminology and techniques of film studies, as well as get a general introduction to South Asian history in the 20^th century. By the end of the course, students will have a grasp of the general organization of the many Indian film industries, and will understand the major phases and movements of the Hindi film industry in particular. Particular attention will be paid to how films have been used as a way to project, cultivate, and reconcile various competing images of the Indian nation.