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 (“Documenting Reality,” “The Confession,” “True Crime”), 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.
In Fall 2026, I will be teaching “True Crime” and “Disability, Media, and the Art of Access” (in Fall 2026) and in Spring 2027, I am co-teaching The Power of Accent (with Anston Bosman: a 400-level course examining the assumptions we make about speakers and listeners when we “detect” accents, or when we perform them as writers, actors, and citizens), and Making an Exoneree (with Jonas Rosenbrueck: a new 1.5 credit 300-level project-based course in which students work in small teams, supported by a law student, to reinvestigate and produce documentary films in support of complex cases of likely wrongful conviction that have exhausted other legal avenues).