Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, Department of English Language and Literature, The College
Affiliate Faculty, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Outside, I enjoy strolling with my dog, running along the lakeshore, and visiting state parks. Inside, I enjoy visiting the Garfield Park Conservatory and tinkering with house plants (even as they take over my apartment). When I can, I take advantage of the many excellent music and food venues around Chicago. Before moving here, I was a lawyer in Australia. I have a Ph.D. in English, with a dissertation examining how a set of early 20th century literary texts reimagine diplomacy in ways departing from its officially mandated form as an emanation of state reason - via ethics, publics, and economics. My research and teaching interests are in global Anglophone literature, postcolonial studies, the Bildungsroman, recessive action, rights and citizenship, race, and gender and sexuality.
Current MAPH Courses
The Lives of Others [Autumn 2023]
How much can you ever really know someone else? In this course, we take up the inscrutability of others through a range of narratives about - politically, socially, and geographically - distant others from the early 20th century. Texts include fiction, documentary film, and critical theory around transnationalism, contact zones and ethnography). Some of these texts meditate on the general problem of living with others. Others take on the limits of empathy, access, and friendship whether explicitly or in their formal arrangement. Specifically, we focus on works that engage with an ethics or “work on the self” as a preliminary to having knowledge of others. We will be guided by readings that likely include Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Victor Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism, Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land and J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. [MAPH/English]
Postcolonial Aesthetics [Spring 2024]
What do we mean by the “postcolonial aesthetic”? In this course, we read and think through the literary and conceptual resources that might help us reconstruct this notion – from Deepika Bahri, to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Our goal is to attend to “the aesthetic” as an experience that reshapes subjectivity in terms of our relation to ourselves and others. By engaging with twentieth-century novels, memoir, and film, we consider how this postcolonial aesthetic might function. What habituated forms of perception or common sense notions does it seek to interrupt? What ways of sensing and living does it offer? Readings will likely include Ashis Nandy, Deepika Bahri, Theodor Adorno, Derek Walcott, Frantz Fanon, Arundhati Roy, and Jean Rhys. [MAPH/English]