Breidenbaugh Hall
Room 314D
300 North Washington St.
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1400
Education
PhD New York University
BA University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Academic Focus
Postcolonial and global anglophone literature, global marxisms, the novel, theories of friendship
Courses Taught
This course will grapple with the centrality of translation to the consolidation of literary canons in the global anglophone sphere. We will read novels, poetry, and other texts that have arguably entered the canons of world literature through their widespread circulation in translation. We will consider the institutional mechanisms—literary prizes, academic canons and syllabi, and popular circulation in the literary market—that contribute to the making of world literature. We will reflect on: what world literature is and how it has been defined; how works of world literature engage “otherness” in relation to objects that can be read and consumed; different models of literary cosmopolitanism; and the dominance of English as the implicit structuring condition for a global literature to emerge.
Bildungsroman as a genre defined by the novelistic development of a character, from youth to maturity, and their imbrication into a set of social relations. Its rise has been associated with modernity and the nation-state in Europe in the eighteenth century, although it has come to be a global genre. This course considers how the bildungsroman is adapted across a range of settings spanning the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, as well as postcolonial Britain, Ireland and Italy.
Overview of the concepts and material practices of empire through global anglophone literature and pop-culture texts from around the world. This course will function as an introduction to imperialism and postcolonial studies, moving from the British, French and German empires at the peak of their influence in the early twentieth century, to American imperialism during the Cold War to the post-9/11 period. Though the figure of the conscripted soldier, the course readings will trace some major wars that shape the world from the twentieth century onwards—the two world wars, the Cold war and its proxy wars in Asia fought across Vietnam and Korea, and the War on Terror.
Introduction to advanced literary study. Attention is placed on close reading, using the library and electronic resources and incorporating scholarly perspectives. Course also considers a variety of theoretical approaches to literature and their place within contemporary literary scholarship. Offered regularly.
What does Asia mean? Where are its borders? How do its people understand themselves and their relations to other peoples and places over the course of the twentieth century? This class will approach these questions by reading for the varied internationalisms, alliances and ties that Asia produces and finds itself embedded in over the twentieth century.
Why do we need to work? What counts as work? How does the work we do shape our identities and our relation to the world around us? We will read novels, poetry, artwork, and philosophical and critical texts drawn from a wide range of literary traditions how individuals and their social relations are formed by various kinds of work, including agricultural, industrial, reproductive, artisanal, and creative, labor.
The course aims to get students to think critically about their relationship to work. We will read a number of texts that portray the different attachments that people develop for the work they do—whether in the form of a job or not. The course will consider how alienated labor under capitalism produces certain kinds of workplaces and workers, allowing students to read Marxist conceptions of the evolution of labor under capitalism. We will also linger on forms of work--reproductive and emotional labor, creative work, idleness, the desire for a different relation to the material world—which appear to exceed the commodification of the capitalist workplace, while also inevitably coming under its sway. Finally, we will think about how we might theorize other categories to understand our relationship to the work we perform.