Teaching

I believe instructors have an ethical imperative to teach students that no medium is ideologically “neutral” or a direct reflection of reality. In classroom environments that are interactive, creative, and sometimes experimental, together my students and I work to investigate defamiliarize the media they engage with every day by excavating their material and cultural histories. My teaching emphasizes critical thinking, media literacy and formal/visual analysis—the ability to take apart a text, broadly defined, and to mine it for its ideological implications. In this way, my pedagogy is inseparable from my background as an interdisciplinary scholar who has written about everything from Russian literature, to comics, to meditation apps, to AI colorization tools. By modeling intellectual and creative pathways that don’t always fit into clear boxes, I encourage my students to bring together multiple interests and to explore areas of overlap that are fresh and unexpected.​​

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Below you can find a selection of courses I've taught and developed at Old Dominion University, the University of Michigan, and UC Berkeley, which include freshman writing seminars, lecture-based major requirements, more experimental upper-division electives, and pedagogy courses for first-time graduate student instrucuctors. You can find a more comprehensive list of courses taught on my CV and I'm happy to provide sample syllabi and assignments by request.