courses

Courses, AY: 2022-2023

• The Aesthetics of Black Motherhood

• Doctor’s Doula’s and Midwives

• California Rare Book School: Black Feminist Memory Keeping

Past courses:

• African American Poetry

• Afro-American Literature, Black Arts Movement to Present

• Special Seminar: The Writing of Jesymn Ward

• African American Literature Survey Seminar (Graduate)

• Introduction to African American Literature

• Introduction to Hip Hop

• The African American Experience in the U.S.

• Africana Culture and Art

• Introduction to African American Studies

• Black Atlantic and the Archive, Graduate Seminar, (co-designed and co-taught)

Pedagogy

What does it mean to distrust our object of study?  How can distrust be a tool for uncovering truth, method, and privilege in the data that lay before us? In what ways is Blackness demand the status of the artifactual even in its fictional forms? My teaching, as does my research, reflects a healthy skepticism to the systems of knowledge, power, text, and access laid before us as scholars. In my excavation of “the archive” and its artistic and institutional formations, I impassion students to undo the pervasive reproduction of pedagogical norms which embrace uniformity, “hard” data, and the worship of writers and culture producers—I remind them that  their interpretations are just as important as any critics’. I believe this to be the intention of  African American writers and thinkers anyway: to invite their readers, fans, and followers, especially those who similarly identify on the basis of race, gender expression, sex expression, ability, or immigration status, to craft their own thundering voice when speaking truth to power.