My teaching is shaped by interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches to race, gender, and empire. All my courses not only engage questions of diversity in terms of race, gender, and class; they also propose tools for understanding the broader conceptual questions of justice and inequality in our world today. I have developed several courses that explore the literature of slavery and freedom (Neo-Slave Narratives of the African Diaspora, Remembering Slavery, Remaking Race, and Slavery and Black Women Writers); nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature (Passing: Race, Identity, and the Color Line in African American Literature, Black Autobiography, African American Literature Since the 1960s, Black Utopia, and Contemporary African American Literature); and postcolonial literature and theory (Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures, Studies in Postcolonial Literatures, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees, Global Novel, Twenty-First Century Global Fiction, Rethinking the Refugee).
My graduate courses blend literary and theoretical approaches, including race and genre in the contemporary novel, the status of historicism in African American literature, the globalization of race and the dispersal of the Atlantic paradigm, the challenges to the study of archives in the literature of slavery, migration and narration, and comparative approaches to temporality in queer and Black diaspora studies. I advise graduate students in a range of fields – from African American satire to modern British and American literature to West African dance to queer Black modernism to Caribbean poetry – and I remain committed to all aspects of graduate training and professional development.
In 2022, I was honored to receive the Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching, from UCLA as well as the Undergraduate Research Week Faculty Mentorship Award.
Splash Art: MRS PINCKNEY AND THE EMANCIPATED BIRDS OF SOUTH CAROLINA, 2017
Fibreglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, bird cage, birds, leather and globe.
Dimensions: 246 x 115 x 134 cm
Image Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York, Co-commissioned by Yale Center for British Art and Historic Royal Palaces, Kensington Palace, Photographer: Stephen White
Art: Ellen Gallagher, Bird in Hand, 2016 (Tate)
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gallagher-bird-in-hand-t12450