In my courses, I emphasize the ways in which historical formations around sexuality, race, gender, and nationality contextualize how we understand social, legal, and literary movements in the present. By tracing historical evolutions in queerness and by looking at literature alongside period documents in U.S. politics and the law, my courses encourage students to build reading practices that apply literary methods to other contexts and genres in ways that they can carry into their post-academic careers.
Below are select courses I have designed and taught.
SFSU Department of English
English 742 (Graduate Seminar) | “Literature and Queer Theory: Origins and Themes of a Discipline”.
By focusing on touchstone texts in queer literary studies and theory and pairing these with key literary texts, the course investigates major movements that established queer theory in literary studies. We explore the diagnostic lens that shaped queer theory in the 1990s that was aimed at both documenting the historicity of queer people as well as contemporary trends in the discipline.
English 602 (Literature & Society | “Violent Law: Literature and the Shaping of U.S. Rights.”
This course investigates how literature responds to and creates rhetoric around the legal rights that shape and limit the lives of people in the U.S. along the lines of sexuality, gender, race, and nationality. We contrast landmark court cases and laws, on immigration, racial segregation, and marriage equality with fiction reflecting on those issues in their time.
English 602 (Literature & Society) | “What’s Queer about Gay Marriage? Contemporary Queer Literature and Film 2008-2018”
Focusing on fiction after 2010, we explore the forms and generic conventions that queer authors use to understand histories of marginalization and the modern ways that trauma shape queer art and activism in the present.
English 526 (Age of American Renaissance) | “Democracy, Limited: Uncovering Voices of Protest in America’s Literary Renaissance”
The American Renaissance is one of the foundational periods that placed U.S. literature on the global stage. This class re-examines the period with a focus on the socially and politically marginalized voices that critiqued exclusion in the U.S. political system, working both beside and against mainstream figures like Thoreau and Emerson to imagine the conditions that could produce racial and gendered equity before the Civil War.
English 250 (Topics in Literature and Culture) | “Minority Citizens: Literature and (Non)Belonging in the 20th Century.”
In this class, we will explore literary texts that imagine what it looks like to belong in or to a nation that limits the rights of minority figures that sit at the intersection of racial, gender, or sexual exclusion. As an introduction to literary studies, we explore the forms through which literary texts convey, support, or critique the modes of identification and belonging that circulate in the public sphere, and the inclusive spaces of social being and belonging that these texts imagine.
William & Mary, English and American Studies
English 207 (American Lit: Themes and Issues) | “U.S. Literature After the Sexual Binary.”
This course investigates how sex, race, and gender provide a lens for understanding broader U.S. literary, political, and historical themes. The class incorporates readings about sexuality across 100 years to historicize how texts interacted with contemporaneous discourses around sexual expression and deviance.
American Studies 290 | “Equality Limited: American Studies Approaches to Race and Sexuality in U.S. Law and Culture.”
Constellating around case studies like Plessy v Ferguson, Loving v Virginia, and Obergefell v Hodges, this course explores how cultural production fostered community even while the law consolidated privileges around heterosexuality and whiteness. The course emphasizes interdisciplinary practices for understanding activist strategies of marginalized.
UCLA Department of English
English 110B (Writing in the English Major)
Adjuncted to English 174C, this course builds on critical methods and writing practices for the English Major and for writing in the public humanities, with a specific focus on gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and queer of color critique.
English 170B (American Literature 1900-1945) | “20th Century Formations: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Law in American Literature, 1900-1945.”
This class investigates how racial and sexual minorities were shaped by public life—but also how they shaped the public around them. We discover moments of resistance that literature made possible during a time of upheaval and isolationism at the beginning of the 20th century.
English 170C (American Literature after 1945) | “Literature and Queer Activism after 1945”.
Investigating relations between literature, landmark legal cases and legislation, this course contextualizes how literary texts inform the extra-literary world through the 60s sexual revolution, the AIDS crisis, and the post-AIDS contemporary moment.
English 174C (Contemporary American Literature) | “New Traumas: Queer U.S. Literature since 2010”
Focusing exclusively on fiction after 2010, this course explores the forms and generic conventions that queer authors use to understand continuing histories of marginalization and the modern ways that trauma shape queer world building.
Will Clark 