In the University of Chicago English Department, I teach courses that explore how modernist aesthetics intersect with ecology and sci-fi (“Climate Fiction, Modernism, and the Future”), the political economy of racism in America (“Black American Fiction”), critical theories of technology (“Literature vs. AI”), and psychology and art history ("Hypnotic Modernism”). I also teach the "Media Aesthetics" sequence in the University of Chicago 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:

Literature vs. AI (scheduled Winter 2026)

Was this written by a human? So what? As we enter the so-called “Age of AI,” we find ourselves asking questions like this, perhaps more than ever before. This course explores how works of fiction and film from the late nineteenth century to the present have engaged with and anticipated ideas about art, mindedness, emotion, and agency at the heart of contemporary debates about the cultural impact of generative AI. If generative AI poses a challenge to literature and art, what is this challenge? What are literature and art that AI-generated text and images are not? Moving from Edgar Allen Poe and modernist fiction to more recent sci-fi speculations about robots and mind uploading, we’ll analyze how literature has reflected on what sets its meaning apart from the products of machines, and what sets its artistry apart from mere algorithms and marketing. Readings in literary and critical theory will attune us to the relationship between abstract questions like “what is meaning?” and historical processes like capitalist automation—machines replacing human labor for profit. Fictional authors and directors include Bertrand Bonello, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Phillip K. Dick, Jennifer Egan, William Gibson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Henry James, Spike Jonze, and Edgar Allen Poe. Critical writers include Nicholas Brown, Stanley Cavell, Nan Z. Da, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Walter Benn Michaels, Matteo Pasquinelli, Hito Steyerl, Lisa Siraganian, and Jensen Suther.

Climate Fiction, Modernism, and the Future (Winter 2025, scheduled Spring 2026)

What does it mean to think of climate change as a problem for the art of storytelling? We usually understand climate change through scientific models or policy debates. But fiction writers have long explored how environmental crises also demand new ways of crafting artful narratives. Before climate change was widely recognized as a civilizational threat, early-twentieth-century writers like E. M. Forster and H.G. Wells imagined this threat in their early science fiction and linked it to the dynamics of capitalism. And as the modernist writer Virginia Woolf elevated fiction to a high art form, she developed narrative techniques that probed the growing estrangement between modern subjects and the natural world. This course reads these groundbreaking writers as forebears of contemporary “climate fiction”—fiction about climate change. Tracing a trajectory of Anglo-American climate fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present, we read Forster, Wells, and Woolf alongside contemporary writers such as Ben Lerner, Jeff VanderMeer, and Kim Stanley Robinson. As we examine how these novels render environmental crises intelligible—through stories that range from the despairing to hopeful, the surreal to realist—we consider how contemporary literary fiction and genre fiction can take up the modernist imperative to “make it new.” Readings in critical theory, modernist aesthetics, and ecocriticism humanities by thinkers like Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Perry Anderson, Amitav Ghosh, Darko Suvin, and Dipesh Chakrabarty will guide us as we investigate how climate fiction can critique capitalist modernity by imagining the environmental forces that shape its development—or end up destroying it.

Black American Fiction: Satire and Critique (Spring 2025)

This course explores the power of satire in works of fiction written by black Americans. As we read novels and essays written in the Jim Crow era and in its wake—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; Fran Ross's carnivalesque novel Oreo (1974); 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..

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 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 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 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, Charles Palermo, and Viktor Shklovsky.