All my courses ask students to read early modern work “at arm’s length.” Reading at arm’s length involves analyzing a historical work critically in the context of historical arguments about identity and difference and in reference to contemporary theoretical texts. This strategy encourages students to find moments in these texts that are relevant to them while also giving them the perspective and the vocabulary to question why they find a particular character of moment in the play relevant or appealing. It asks them to consider how that appeal might be mediated by other texts and contexts that the play is in dialogue with.

My teaching creates a site of productive friction between in-class interpretations, critical perspectives, and historical context. My “Shakespeare and Race” course, for instance, includes excerpts from new theoretical work being conducted in critical whiteness studies, an emerging field in early modern studies. In plays such as The Merchant of Venice, which contain explicitly racist and antisemitic language, this approach asks students to consider how the play develops a metaphoric vocabulary for Christianity that links it with moral purity and amity. Characters ultimately propose that only Christians are capable of forming sympathetic social bonds. At the same time, students become aware that this representation of Christianity is mediated by the English and Protestant context in which the play is performed. By exposing first-year students and non-majors to scholarship in context, students have a clearer sense of where their voices fit into disciplinary conversations, not as consumers of knowledge but as interlocutors.

My teaching aims to challenge students to work within this friction to challenge and deconstruct a calcified view of identity. Instead, I invite them to think about the ever-changing relationship between bodies and institutions, and the way that institutions (then and now) shape our ability to recognize and categorize human difference. For example, in my sexuality class, students read early modern gender expression both as an identity and as an aesthetic or “genre” that, in the early modern period, was keyed to literary modes such as pastoral or romance. In addition to queer theory and history, then, this class also introduces students to transhistorical queer aesthetics through an early modern lens.

I extend my work on developing innovative pedagogy for my students in my course on “Shakespeare and Social Justice,” where I ask students to think about social justice as a structural imperative that is often focalized and intensified through smaller-scale human interactions. Modules focus on restorative vs. retributive justice, racial gaslighting in its interpersonal and structural forms, gender-based violence in social movements, and historical and contemporary ideas about citizenship. By reading literature through a presentist lens and remaining attentive to the productive frictions this lens introduces, my students both construct and learn to critique these early modern and modern genealogies.

Across my classes, my focus is always on the link between the institutional and somatic: from the history of racialized and gendered embodiment in the texts I teach, to the ways that students’ bodies can become catalysts for interpretation and critique through in-class performance.

You can access some of my class assignments below. Please use them if they would be helpful to you!

Assignment #1: Object Lessons

Assignment #2: Critical Juxtaposition

Assignment #3: Director’s Script