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:

The African American Novel: Satire and Critique (scheduled for Spring 2025)

This course explores the centrality of satire to African American literature. As we examine fiction written by African Americans under the racist regime of Jim Crow and in its aftermath, 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 in a set of African American novels and short stories, we will attend to how narrative fiction can critique the category of race and attempt to effect social change. Focusing on the relationship between racism and capitalism in the U.S., we will integrate readings in literary criticism, critical theory, and social history to inform our study of fictional works. Fiction writers include Percival Everett, George Schuyler, Ishmael Reed, and Ralph Ellison. Critical writers include Barbara Fields, Karen Fields, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, M.M. Bakhtin, Langston Hughes, David Levering Lewis, Adolph Reed Jr., Judith Stein, Kenneth Warren, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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

This course explores novels about climate change alongside works of criticism and theory about aesthetic modernism, capitalism, and science fiction. The course investigates how climate fiction can critique capitalist modernity by imagining the ecological dimensions of its future persistence or supersession. In particular, it attends to how this literary genre can both exemplify and challenge the contentious modernist imperative to “make it new.” Thus, at the same time as it attends to the ways in which science fiction can render intelligible the causes and consequences of climate change, it also surveys debates about modernism’s aesthetic, historical, and political specificity as an artistic movement. Readings in fiction include Jeff VanderMeer, Kim Stanley Robinson, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Bern Lerner, and Jessie Greengrass. Readings in critical theory include Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Perry Anderson, Nathan Brown, Nicholas Brown, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Amitav Ghosh, Andrew Milner, McKenzie Wark, Darko Suvin, and Matthew Huber.

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 automatic writing, or writing undertaken without conscious control, animates some of literary modernism’s most groundbreaking works. This course traces a history of automatic writing from late nineteenth-century hypnotism and literary impressionism, through Cubism and Surrealism, to midcentury photography and the emergence of postmodernism and peripheral modernisms. Readings in psychology and art criticism guide investigations into not only the modes and meanings of automatic writing but also, 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.