As an instructional designer, I develop course materials (from syllabi to assignments and assessments) for various publishers and institutions. My work in instructional design benefits from my decade of teaching literature and composition in both traditional and online classrooms, where I've worked with students at middle-school, high-school, and university levels.
While a Lecturer and Teaching Associate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I designed and taught a variety of courses in English Literature and Composition, samples of which are listed below.
English 165EF: Eighteenth-Century Fiction
In Jane Austen’s Gothic parody Northanger Abbey (1817), heroine Catherine Morland explains why she prefers reading fiction over history: “I read [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me... The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs--the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.” Considering the wonderful contemporaneous novels that were available to her as an eighteenth-century reader, it’s no surprise that Catherine has a voracious appetite for fiction. Like Catherine, we will seek out “invention” that “delights” us in pages that she herself might have--or did--read, and we’ll conclude our class by reading about Catherine herself. This reading-intensive course will focus on three prominent genres from eighteenth-century fiction: the epistolary novel, the sentimental novel, and the Gothic novel. Texts will include John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Matthew Beckford’s Vathek, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, and Austen’s Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility.
English 103B: British Literature from 1789 - 1900
This course will move swiftly through British literature of the long nineteenth century, focusing on important texts from both the Romantic and Victorian periods. We will pay attention to works from a variety of genres: the novel, drama, poetry, prose, and children's short fiction. We will read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Shorter poetic works will probably include selections from William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, John Keats, P. B. Shelley, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. Shorter prose works will probably include selections by Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, Friedrich Engels, and E. Nesbit. In addition to exploring these works in their social and historical contexts, we will examine issues of gender, sexuality, race, empire, and class.
English 10: Introduction to Literary Study
Theme: Memory and Early Modern Studies
The purpose of English 10, or Introduction to Literary Study, is to familiarize you with the tools of literary interpretation, including the techniques and vocabulary of analytic discussion and critical writing, and to help you develop close reading skills. While cultivating these techniques, the class will focus on poetry, drama, and prose fiction. The theme of this particular course is Memory; we will focus on the many implications and meanings of memory and its relationship to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. We will examine mainly canonical texts and consider the differences between remembering people, remembering places, and remembering texts. How can a writer "remember" other writers' works? Why is the concept of memory so important to us? In addition to exploring these works in their historical contexts, we will also examine issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Texts will include Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Aphra Behn's The Rover, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, and a course reader.
Theme: Art and Adaptation
This course will split attention equally between three different genres: poetry, drama, and prose fiction. We will focus on different kinds of creating and defining art: we’ll consider what art is and what kind of art is created through adaptation. We’ll also consider how these literary works of art are revisioned or adapted into other media (dance, film, music, and visual art). We will read texts from a variety of periods, while emphasizing nineteenth-century literature. In addition to exploring these works in their historical contexts, we will examine issues of gender, sexuality, race, empire, and class. Texts for this class will include 19th-century poetry, Jane Austen’s Emma, G. B. Shaw’s Pgymalion, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms.
Theme: Women Writing (Women)
This course will split attention equally between three different genres: poetry, drama, and prose fiction. We will focus on women writers: we’ll consider what it meant and what it means to be a woman writer, and how woman’s writing has become increasingly, critically recognized in the twentieth-first century. How does gender influence writing, and the reception of that writing? We’ll also consider how some of the literary works of art we read are adapted into other media. We will read mainly canonical texts from nineteenth-century British literature. In addition to exploring these works in their historical contexts, we will examine issues of gender, sexuality, race, empire, and class. Texts will include Jane Austen's Emma, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Aphra Behn's The Rover, and The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms.