teaching
My teaching spans the areas of media studies and critical theory, with a special focus on documentary culture, as it intersects with and opens onto questions of voice, listening, accent, carcerality, and disability. My classes are often organized around a central question or contradiction, such as: “Why does documentary take itself so seriously?”; “What needs to be abolished—not just canceled—in our media environment in order for us to imagine a world without prisons?”; or “What might it mean to center questions of disability in media form, technical design, and spectatorship?” I find that provocations such as these open up revealing insights regarding contemporary media forms, embodiment, and the flows of power under neoliberal capital.
I regularly teach courses on documentary media and culture (“The Documentary Impulse,” “Representing Reality,” “The Confession”), as well as courses on disability and media, abolitionist visual media, and accent and auditory culture. I regularly teach “Coming to Terms: Media” (a course introducing critical keywords and frameworks for the study of media) and co-teach integrated theory-practice courses with my colleagues in Film and Media Studies. Before coming to Amherst, I taught at the New School in New York, where, in addition to courses on confessional media and documentary, I developed classes on topics such as humanitarian media, ethnographic film, childhood and visual culture, and critical methods in cultural studies. I have reprised versions of some of these courses at Amherst.
In AY 2023-2024 I will be teaching “Coming to Terms: Media” in Fall 2023 (a course introducing foundational concepts and readings in media studies) and in Spring 2024, “True Crime: Unlearning Media” (a course introducing foundational skills of close reading, audiovisual analysis, and college writing for students through the study of the media phenomenon of true crime)