Adventures in the classroom
From my start in teaching the literature of the Western canon to my current role in Asian and Pacific studies, teaching combines big, impossible questions with respect for detail and depth.
I still remember the first students I ever taught. I was eighteen, they were twelve, and we were all together at a program called Summerbridge. I read to them Wallace Stevens’ enigmatic poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird are one. What does that mean? they asked. How can that be? That doesn’t make any sense! Jeff, whose family had recently moved from Laos to North Carolina, barely spoke above a whisper in the class. I think they are a family, he said.
Since then, I’ve shared beautiful objects and challenging ideas with hundreds of students on three continents, and I’ve continued to be amazed by what my students teach me. From the canons of the Western literary tradition to the provocations of postcolonial literature to the landscapes of power seen through the lenses of gender and culture studies, teaching has taken me across nations, disciplines, and ways of creating truth about the world. My students have written their autobiographies in the style of Indian epics, made vodcasts and documentaries, and designed working smartphone prototypes that use the approaches of gender and cultural studies to shed light on key issues in Asia and the Pacific.
Below you can find snapshots of courses I’ve taught.
Gender and Cultural Studies in Asia and the Pacific
Gender and culture illuminate everyday power in Asia and the Pacific. Using critical concepts from a range of disciplines, students uncover how gender norms and creative practices influence political debates and contemporary media. We don’t just analyse cultural forms; we make them too. Students work together to design smartphone applications that apply these concepts to real issues. Student prototypes have imagined how domestic migrant workers might claim their labor rights, created support networks for survivors of sexual violence, and exposed the dark side of the K-pop industry.
India’s Culture Wars
Battles for India’s soul are often fought through the imagination. India's vibrant modern traditions of Bollywood film, new fiction, and emerging creative industries help us understand changing visions of the world's largest democracy. Film, writing, and new media reveal a space where right-wing Hindu activism meets global neoliberal norms, where "new women" and "angry young men" critique longstanding social roles and gender inequalities, and where India defines a place for itself as a rising force in a globalising world.
Asia and the Pacific in Motion
What are the key questions that anyone interested in Asia should grapple with? This first-year foundation course, taught by a collaborative teaching team, takes students into big questions from interdisciplinary angles. For example, we think about poverty and riches from the perspective of economists concerned with growth and development, while we also approach these themes as anthropologists might, asking how big economic changes reconfigure people’s social, emotional, and moral lives. Students from this course have gone on to publish short essays in The Monsoon Project, a blog for student voices on Asia and the Pacific.
Fiction Across Borders
What does it mean to write in a globalising world? How do authors square up to new challenges, such as the ethics of imagining worlds quite different from the ones they live in? In this course, which I taught for four years at Yale, my students grappled with the big questions that animated my book, Fiction Across Borders.
South Asian Fiction in English
Is English an Indian language? The very fact that we ask this question so anxiously, I suggest, is the sign that English — for better or worse — is indubitably part of India’s cultural landscape. This course traces the evolving literary tradition of English in India from its eighteenth-century roots to its modern present. We examine how writers have worked to make English Indian, how they have developed new vocabularies for imagining India, and how English in India is changing in the 21st century.
Textual Strategies: Research Theories and Methods
This course is for Honours students pursuing their year-long independent research project in Asian and Pacific studies. Students grapple with big interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, such as postcolonial studies and the history of area studies. As part of the class, creative workshops get students thinking about their research from surprising angles.
Postcolonial Literature
This course explores fiction and film from parts of the world shaped by the British Empire. We think about the legacy of settler colonialism, the racial politics of empire, the painful growth of new nation-states, and the emerging identity of Britain as a postcolonial space.
India Imagined
This team-taught course invites us to consider the many “Indias” produced through fiction and film. We focus on the problem of national identity and draw attention to the many ways that India has been imagined globally in the twenty-first century.
Literature of the Middle Passage
I co-taught this course with its founder, the writer Caryl Phillips, as an investigation of the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade within contemporary culture. As part of the course, we took our students to Barbados. They participated in classes at the University of the West Indies, visited historical sites that ranged from plantation homes to slave burial sites located beneath parking lots, and volunteered in local schools. In an age where complex and painful racial histories are very much with us, this course encouraged students to grapple with these histories in transformative ways.
Globalization and Postcolonial Literature
This senior seminar offers a deep dive into three postcolonial writers and the key literary institutions that have shaped their legacies. We read extensively from the works of Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, and J.M. Coetzee to understand the key ways that “postcolonial literature” has become visible as “world literature.”
Literature in the Age of Globalization
This graduate seminar for Master’s and PhD students links literature from five continents to theories of globalization emerging in literary studies, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies.
Introduction to the Study of American Literature
An introductory seminar on fiction, poetry, and drama from Mark Twain to Suzan-Lori Parks. We place particular emphasis on the transnational and multiracial dimensions of modern American literature, asking the question “what does it mean to be American?”
Directed Studies: Literature
I took this course as an undergrad at Yale and I taught it as a faculty member, so it’s a class that will always be dear to my heart. We start with the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante; chart the rise of the European novel with Cervantes and Dostoevsky; and conclude with the waste lands of T.S. Eliot. Even though I never was able to persuade my colleagues that we should ditch Goethe’s Faust to make room for J.M. Coetzee, I have always felt that Homer’s Odyssey is a fabulous postcolonial text.
The European Literary Tradition: Tragedy
From Aeschylus and Sophocles to Ibsen and Pinter, we explore the grand traditions of tragedy that shape crucial foundations for European literature. From Sophocles, we learn that once we know, we can never unknow. But modern drama also teaches us the opposite truth: we un-know the tragic mistakes of our era all the time.
The European Literary Tradition: Epic and Novel
I’ll be honest: I far prefer epics and novels to tragedies! Long, winding, capacious stories are my jam. Homer sets our postcolonial world in motion with the travels of Odysseus, and George Eliot teaches us what happens when we tell an epic from the point of a woman who’s not allowed to go quite so far from home. Epics and novels make worlds around us: we enter and find ourselves happily lost.