In the Department of English at the University of Chicago, I teach broadly across the history of Anglophone literature and art from the nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on fiction. I also teach the Media Aesthetics sequence in the University of Chicago’s College Core, which explores philosophical and aesthetic debates about media, including prose, poetry, film, photography, and painting from antiquity to the present. (Here’s a recent Media Aesthetics syllabus of mine.)

Courses of my own design that I have recently taught or will soon teach include:

Black American Fiction: Satire and Critique (scheduled for Spring 2025)

This course explores the power of satire in works of fiction written by black Americans. As we read novels and essays written under the racist regime of Jim Crow and in its aftermath—works that are variably moving, funny, insightful, acerbic, and strange—we will approach satire as a flexible expressive practice that shapes critical judgment into an artistic form. Foundational to the form of the novel, satire is one of the oldest means by which literature has tried to intervene in the world. Equally entertaining and transgressive, its mode of attack against the status quo can range from undisguised vitriol to winking subtlety, from surrealism to realism. By examining the genre of satire in general and as African American writers have used it to interrogate the relationship between racism, capitalism, and cultural production in the U.S., we will examine how narrative fiction can critique the category of race and attempt to effect social change. With an attention to the political economy of racism in the US and the role of literature in anti-racist struggle, we will integrate readings in literary criticism, critical theory, and social history to inform our study of fictional works. Fictional works include George Schuyler’s Black No More(1931), an incisive work of science fiction and the first great African-American satirical novel; Ishmael Reed's carnivalesque "NeoHooDoo" novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972); and Percival Everett's experimental novel Erasure (2001) along with its recent film adaptation, American Fiction (2023). Critical writers include M.M. Bakhtin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Fields, Zora Neale Hurston, David Levering Lewis, Adolph Reed, Judith Stein, and Kenneth Warren..

Climate Fiction, Modernism, and the Future (Winter 2025)

This course explores novels about climate change alongside works of critical theory about aesthetic modernism, capitalism, and science fiction. We will investigate climate fiction in an expansive sense, attending to how it can critique capitalist modernity by imagining the ecological dimensions of its development and/or collapse. In particular, we will attend to how this literary genre can both exemplify and challenge the contentious modernist imperative to “make it new.” Thus, at the same time as we study the ways in which narrative fiction can render the causes and consequences of climate change intelligible—telling stories that range from the despairing to the hopeful, the surreal to the realistic—we will also explore modernism’s aesthetic, historical, and political specificity as an artistic movement. Moving from the early-twentieth-century moment of classical modernism to our present, we read E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jeff VanderMeer, Ben Lerner, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Readings in critical theory include Perry Anderson, Marshall Berman, Nicholas Brown, Nathan Brown, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh, Fredric Jameson, Karl Marx, Darko Suvin, and Raymond Williams.

Machine Fictions: New Media and the Art of Storytelling (Summer 2024)

This course explores how short fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present takes up new media technologies as occasions to innovate the art of storytelling. It investigates how imaginative literature can clarify, critique, and compound the ways that innovations in communication and computational technology have transformed and are currently transforming our world. Readings progress from accessible yet nuanced contemporary short stories about generative artificial intelligence and digital social media to more experimental works of twentieth-century writing about (old) new media like tape recording and radio. Authors include Jennifer Egan, Vauhini Vara, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Orson Welles, Henry James, and Bertrand Bonello.

Hypnotic Modernism: Literature, Psychology, Automatism (Winter 2023)

The idea of automatism, or action undertaken without conscious control, animates some of aesthetic modernism’s most groundbreaking works of literature and art. This course explores automatic writing and automatism across a range of media, from fiction and poetry to painting, photography, and film. We will examine how modernist writers and artists attempt to infuse these media with hypnotic qualities, beginning with late-nineteenth-century fiction about spiritualism and literary impressionism. From there, we will explore Gertrude Stein’s work, Surrealist poetry and painting, midcentury metafiction and photography, and the emergence of postmodernism and peripheral modernisms. Readings in psychology, literary criticism, and art criticism will guide us as we investigate not only the modes and meanings of automatic writing, but also, and more fundamentally, the concept of the “automatic” that underpins how we think about art, mindedness, and agency. Authors and artists include James Agee, André Breton, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, G.V. Desani, Walker Evans, Guy de Maupassant, Frank Norris, Kyoshi Kurosawa, Clarice Lispector, Joan Miró, Muriel Spark, and Gertrude Stein. Theorists and critics include Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Michael Fried, Alan Gauld, Pierre Janet, and Charles Palermo.