2024 Winner (Inaugural Year)
“Anya Bernstein Bassett Award for Excellence in Teaching”
Recognizing Outstanding Teaching by Non-Tenure Track Faculty
Harvard University Office of Undergraduate Education

The Harvard Gazette: “OUE Bestows New Teaching Award on 11 Faculty Members”

Current Course
Expos Studio 10

Expos Studio 10 is designed to help students make the transition from the writing they’ve done before college to the writing that will be expected of them at Harvard. One of the most important goals of Expos Studio 10 is to help students approach their writing with confidence, both about what they have to say as well as about how best to communicate those ideas.

Good writing is a skill we develop by practicing it regularly, not just by putting thoughts on paper, but also by listening carefully to the reactions of our readers and opening ourselves to the suggestions and insights of dedicated teachers. These are capacities that themselves take practice to develop, and there is no better place to do so than in the “studio” writing course—one that uses a hands-on and intensive approach to writing and that emphasizes both individual and collaborative work. In the studio course, students try out their ideas in many short pieces of writing as well as in lively discussions. Each week they work in teams and on their own to generate and test their positions in debates and their interpretations of evidence, and to imagine alternative ways of understanding an issue. Every step of the way, preceptors are there to coach students in their development as thinkers and writers. They offer abundant feedback in one-on-one conferences and in paper comments. And they lead students through innovative exercises and assignments that draw on a variety of media and the diverse thinking found in disciplines like psychology, philosophy, sociology, political theory, anthropology, and art.

In Expos Studio 10, students engage in three discrete units. The first asks them to look closely at and analyze a location on Harvard’s campus, drawing on both their own thinking and their engagement with a scholarly lens. The second asks them to respond to the Harvard University Dining Service’s (HUDS) approach to sustainability and enter into current scholarly debates about the subject. The third asks them to address Professor Michael Sandel’s essay on the morality of gene editing “The Case Against Perfection.”

2023-2024
Everyday Feminisms:
Literature, Theory, Popular Culture

These days, scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser notes in her 2018 study Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, “it feels as if everywhere you turn there is an expression of feminism – on a T-shirt, in a movie, in the lyrics of a pop song, in an inspirational Instagram post, in an award ceremony” (1). Yet if its ubiquity has grown in the last half decade or so, bolstered by activist movements that have gained traction on and offline, feminism is neither a new phenomenon nor a singular one. Indeed, the idea of feminism continues to evolve as activists, academics, and regular women alike contemplate and debate what it means, what it does, and where it meets its limits. In this course, you’ll study a small but illustrative range of responses to these lines of inquiry, encountering modes of feminist expression that extend across various genres and considering how they might relate to your everyday lives. In doing so, you’ll probe ideas and ask questions about intersectionality, objectification, embodiment, and power that have long been central to, and often contested within, feminist thinking. We’ll start the course with literature. Next, you’ll engage critical feminist theory. Finally, you’ll pursue research essays and related group capstone projects that return to Banet-Weiser’s discussion of “popular feminism” (and its detractors) to interrogate how pop culture – including film, television, music, and even social media – markets and communicates feminism to a public audience.

2018-2022
Telling Her Story:
Narrative, Media, & #MeToo

MEDIA
“The #MeToo Movement Makes Its Way Into Harvard Courses”

Pedagogue Episode 128

AWARDS
6x Certificate of Teaching Excellence (Office of Undergraduate Education) [composite evaluations 4.5/5.0 or greater]
5.0/5.0 Evals - Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 2023

Special Commendation: Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times (OUE) Student nominated for excellent teaching during Covid-19 (Spring 2020)

In a powerful essay, the late feminist and activist Audre Lorde suggested: “where the words of women are crying to be heard we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.” Lorde is not alone in asking us to pay attention to and take responsibility for women’s stories; for centuries scholars and activists alike have championed the words of women, including women of color and queer women, whose stories have routinely gone untold or unheard. Yet if this issue has always been pressing, the call to heed women’s stories seems especially urgent at a moment when such stories have come to dominate the cultural landscape and public consciousness from news accounts to popular shows, literature to social media . This course responds by examining how women’s stories are narrated across a variety of media and  what impact the sharing of them can have.