Courses Taught

My composition, intensive writing, and literature courses are often inspired by my interest in depictions of women's creative labor in literature and film. Beginning with my fall 2023 Digital Projects with Marilyn Monroe course, I blog about my teaching, capturing the course design process from start to finish, as well as the insights that emerge in real time during the semester. 

Woman, Image, Myth 2.0:
The Mediated Lives & Afterlives of Marilyn Monroe

Projects in Digital Literacy & Composition
Fall 2023

This course is a new version of the Monroe course I taught in Spring 2023. The major difference is that this new version is focused explicitly on digital projects, literacy, and creativity. Throughout the semester, students work individually and collaboratively in an active learning environment to create digital projects using Adobe Creative Cloud that allow us to tell our own stories about the star. 


Woman, Image, Myth:
The Lives & Afterlives of Marilyn Monroe

Projects in Reading & Writing
Spring 2023

What are the stories we tell about America's favorite dead blonde? Despite her untimely passing sixty years ago, Marilyn Monroe's enigmatic presence endures in American popular culture. Her life has been fictionalized and mythologized, just as the circumstances surrounding her death have become conspiracy theory fodder. Search her name on Amazon and see the extent to which her image is endlessly commodified, from kitchen gear to jigsaw puzzles and everything in between. In this course, we will analyze a variety of media (including excerpts from competing biographies, podcasts, critical essays, and film reviews, as well as her own interviews and performances) to interrogate how and why Marilyn Monroe has dominated our cultural imagination. In doing so, we will examine how she has shaped our understandings of femininity, celebrity, and the body in mid-century America and beyond.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Introduction to Fiction | Intensive Writing
Spring 2023

What do Kenneth Anger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Taylor Jenkins Reid have in common? Melding fact with fiction, they ask us to think deeply about the experiences of women in twentieth-century Hollywood.  

Feminist Myth Retellings

Women Writers & the Art of Love
Intro to Fiction | Fall 2022

Literature & the Trojan War
Writing About Literature | Fall 2021 

Greek Myth & Its Retellings
 Writing About Literature | Fall 2020 

Almost annually, I teach a course focused on (or that, at least, incorporates) feminist retellings of ancient Greek mythology. These texts allow students to interrogate not just our present relationships with antiquity, but also the tension between women's creative agency and their objectification.

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Writing About Literature
Spring & Fall 2019

In 2019, I designed two first-year composition courses that centralized the woman artist question posed by Linda Nochlin in 1971. The first iteration (spring semester) was titled "Woman as Art(ist)," and the course was divided into halves. During the first half of the semester, we analyzed works of literature that positioned women as art objects. During the second half, we focused exclusively on narratives about women artists. The second iteration (fall semester) focused exclusively on woman artist narratives.

COURSES DESIGNED & TAUGHT

Indiana University Bloomington, Department of English

ENG-W171 (Projects in Digital Literacy & Composition): Woman, Image, Myth: The Mediated Lives & Afterlives of Marilyn Monroe

ENG-W170 (Projects in Reading & Writing): Woman, Image, Myth: The Lives & Afterlives of Marilyn Monroe

ENG-L204 (Intensive Writing | Intro to Fiction): Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 

ENG-L204 (Intensive Writing | Intro to Fiction): Women Writers & the Art of Love 

University of Georgia, Department of English

ENGL 8960 (Directed Reading): Assembling Anthologies
(curriculum co-developed & facilitated with Annelise Norman, supervised by Casie LeGette)

ENGL 3300 (Women and Literature): Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers & Madwomen in the Attic 

ENGL 1102 (Writing About Literature): Woman as Art(ist)

ENGL 1102: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? 

ENGL 1102 (Special Topics): Academic Writing & Research 

ENGL 1102: Greek Mythology & Its Retellings 

ENGL 1102: Fantastical Fairy Tales 

ENGL 1102: Literature & the Trojan War

ENGL 1102: Reading History: British Literature & the French Revolution

ENGL 1101 (First-Year Composition I): The Passion Project