Teaching

I am available to teach a number of courses. Please contact me to see a full syllabus for my courses that currently include:

Introduction to Socio-Cultural Anthropology (Lecture|Undergraduate|80 students)

Ethos of Care: Reparations and Repair (Seminar|Undergraduate|15 students)

  • Propelled by an ‘ethos of care’ that orients some contemporary politics, this interdisciplinary seminar investigates political apologies, their symbolic and performative implications to understand material questions of reparations, repair, debt and redistribution. Drawing from cultural anthropology, history, international law, and human rights studies, we will ground our conceptual conversation in a number of historical and ongoing instances of racial injustices focusing in particular on North America. Instructor: Anna Schirrer

Diplomacy and Redress (Seminar|Graduate|15 students)

  • This seminar focuses on historical and contemporary bureaucracies that regulate responsibility for injury and injustice. It interrogates how the field of anthropology, ethnographers, and the figure of ‘the civil servant’ and are implicated in processes of implementing redress, policy making and diplomacy. The seminar furthermore discusses how legal and administrative processes of redress are negotiated, refused, and included in museums and state organizations, and other national and international organizational contexts.

Decolonization and Methodology (Workshop|Advanced undergraduate and graduate|15 students)

I have also recently worked as a Teaching Assistant to the courses listed below. In this role, I was generally responsible for leading up to fifteen students through course readings in compulsory sections twice a week. I furthermore held weekly office hours guiding students through writing assignments, graded weekly papers, midterms, and finals, and worked closely with the instructor evaluating students’ progress and keeping track on various forms of student requests and accommodations.

Introduction to Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Lecture|Undergraduate|60 students)

  • This course provides students with a broad overview of the ideological, legal, and applied underpinnings of human rights. Lectures focus on the philosophical, historical, legal and institutional foundations of human rights frameworks. Instructor: Widney Brown.

Whiteness, Sentiment and the Politics of Belonging (Seminar|Advanced Undergraduate| 26 students)

  • This course interrogated how “whiteness” in recent years especially, has reemerged as an explicit problem within mainstream political discourse this moment through the lens of public sentiment and its political ramifications. It explored classic and contemporary work on whiteness, affect, and emotion to examine a range of political sentiments associated with contemporary whiteness and its reformations, including anger, possessiveness, mourning, benevolence, and guilt. Instructor: Dr. Catherine Fennell.

Interpretation of Culture (Lecture|Undergraduate|80 students)

  • This course offered a framework for thinking about our social world through the lenses we might wear as cultural anthropologists, and by asking questions such as: What does it mean to have, inhabit, or be influenced by something called “culture?” What if our common sense is instead particular knowledge? Across a variety of texts the course considered the politics of representation, the ethics of fieldwork, and the construction of ethnographic authority, while critically examining the discipline’s approach to culture and society. Instructor: Dr. Vanessa Agard-Jones.

The Ethnographic Imagination (Lecture|Undergraduate|60 students)

  • This course explored the forms of understanding and representation that define the project of ethnography. Through the critical reading of various kinds of ethnographic texts, with a strong sense of the role of theory, an appreciation for the shifting problematics and politics of the discipline, and an openness to the forms and effects of writing, we will explore the possibilities and limits of ethnography. Instructor: Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod.

Introduction to Social Theory (Lecture|Undergraduate|100 students)

  • Introducing students to crucial theories of society, this course paid particular attention to classic social theory of the late 19th and 20th centuries by tracing a trajectory through writings essential for an understanding of the social: from Saussure, Durkheim, Mauss, Marx, Freud, and Weber, on to the structuralist ethnographic elaboration of Claude Levi-Strauss, the historiographic reflections on modernity of Michel Foucault, and contemporary modes of socio-cultural analysis. Instructor: Dr. John Pemberton.

Pre-Columbian Native American History (Lecture|Undergraduate|120 students)

  • This course critically considered the archaeological evidence, indigenous understandings, and the political stakes that surround  five core pre-Columbian narratives: 1. the colonization of the New World; 2. the rise of (and response to) Cahokia, North America’s first monumental urban center; 3. the rise of (and response to) a religiopolitical center at Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest; 4. the stories of Western Apache places, and 5. the emergence of a Comanche empire during the 18th century. Instructor: Dr. Severin Fowles.