Rutgers University Undergraduate Courses
Principles of Literary Study (English 359:201)
Summer 2025 | Course designer and instructor of record
Why do we read literature? What do we want out of it when we read casually? What more do we ask of literary texts when we “study” them?
This course introduces students to the academic study of literature by beginning from such big-picture questions. To explore some answers to them, we will immerse ourselves in careful study of literary works across four major genres: poetry, the novel, the short story, and drama. We will explore what effects, styles, and ideas seem to be most natural to these genres. In other words, do novels and poems do the same things? Why would someone choose to write in rhymed or unrhymed lines of verse, rather than in prose paragraphs? This course will ask you to pay sustained attention to these forms—“close reading” them, in the terms of the discipline—which will allow us to unpack how they work and what they do. This means that a core goal of our course is to explore firsthand why literary texts can surprise, delight, frustrate, and enrich their readers.
Reading as a Printer (English 359:360)
Spring 2025 | Course designer and instructor of record
What can book history and media studies add to the study of literature? This course will explore that intersection by immersing students in the world of textual production. We will use the Scarlet Letterpress printing workshop to discover the ways that texts change because of the methods by which they’re made. Students will set metal type by hand, print sheets via letterpress, make zines, use typewriters to make carbon and spirit-duplicated copies, create digital hypertext, and experiment with audiobooks. Throughout the semester we’ll lean on this practical knowledge to bring a fresh perspective to literary texts drawn from a wide range of historical periods and media technologies: early modern English drama, antebellum American literature, poetry from the 1960s underground and the contemporary Caribbean.
Final projects will combine creative and critical approaches to interpret a text’s multiple versions.
College Writing (English 355:101)
Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 | Instructor of record
College Writing introduces students to the strategies and practices necessary to become a successful writer at the university level and beyond. As the required writing course for undergraduate students at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, College Writing challenges students to reflect upon and cultivate their strengths as readers and writers at this new stage of their educational careers. Students develop their critical reading abilities and written communication skills through meaningful writing projects of diverse genres, including multimodal composition.
Principles of Literary Study (English 359:201)
Fall 2023 | Mentored Teaching Assistantship with Professor Maurice Wallace
In this course we will become familiar with a variety of terms, methods, and critical perspectives for analyzing and interpreting narrative fiction and poetic verse across multiple genres. We will focus intensely on traditions, techniques, and literary style. With such terms and devices as voice, tradition, form, genre, plot, trope, setting, point of view, and, importantly for our course’s organization, text, context, paratext, and intertext all making up an incomplete list of the kind of terminology we shall look to for help analyzing literature, we will see how the writers we engage think. More specifically, we will learn to judge how they approach answering the complex questions of modern life and experience. As often as it is appropriate to, we will return, again and again, to one of the most enduring concerns all serious writers in the modern world: namely, the question of human progress and the future of humankind.
Expository Writing (English 355:101)
Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 | Instructor of record
In this course, students read and write about a variety of texts concerning a range of fascinating contemporary issues. By completing a series of essay assignments – each of which involves peer review and revision – students learn to read critically, analyze textual evidence, structure complex ideas, and develop independent arguments by making original claims that contribute to ongoing intellectual conversations.
While Expository Writing trains students in critical thought, particularly as it occurs in and through the practice of writing, the class does more than prepare students to compose coherent essays. The class also encourages students to imagine themselves as having a role to play in thinking through the kinds of complex, open-ended questions that characterize our public life – and to think of slow, deliberate reading; lively discussion; and careful written analysis as invaluable ways of taking up that challenge.
Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts
AP Literature: The American Dream
Spring 2019
Freshman World Literature Survey
Fall 2018