Storytelling and Mythmaking: Modern Odysseys (English 133B) is a hybrid course in literature and creative writing for Stanford English, in which students discuss twentieth-century adaptations of Homer’s Odyssey, read essays on narrative theory and craft, meet with contemporary authors, and write their own myth-inspired fictions. Readings include selections from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Junot Díaz’s Drown, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and Louise Glück’s Meadowlands. Previous course guests include Leila Mottley and Elias Rodriques. (More details here.)

Structured Liberal Education (SLE) is a year-long, residential, great-books humanities course for first-year students at Stanford. The SLE curriculum covers literature, philosophy, and art history from the ancient world to the contemporary, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Beloved. As a Lecturer, I give talks on modernism and the avant-garde, run a quarterly seminar, and teach writing one-on-one. (I also talk about the program in the video to the right!)

Learn more about SLE on the program website.

Shell Shock: Art and Literature of the World Wars is a lecture course in Continuing Studies that serves as a gateway to Stanford’s Masters in Liberal Arts. Starting with Britain’s war poets and ending with the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, this course looks at how total war and totalitarianism intersected with revolutions in modernist art and literature. Readings include Hemingway, Eliot, Mirrlees, Mayakovsky, Woolf, Orwell, Auden, Chang, Vonnegut, and Levi. Additional lectures and discussions on Eisenstein, Riefenstahl, Benjamin, and Picasso.

• Syllabus on the Continuing Studies website

J(oyce)-Term introduces students to James Joyce’s modernist epic, Ulysses, in a one-week intensive format. Students read 5-6 key chapters from across the work, as well as a few related materials (excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, some contemporary reviews, and a legal decision concerning Ulysses’ censorship). Video lectures provide short overviews on Joyce, modernism, Irish history, and the text as a whole, while class-time is focused on discussion, with topics including the novel as a genre, experiencing the modern city, empire and rebellion, literary experimentation, and the uses of myth.

• J(oyce)-Term video lectures

• Harvard Crimson article about J(oyce)-Term

Global Modernism, Short Form is a small honors seminar designed to direct English concentrators through a research paper by looking in depth at an array of interconnected modernist texts, critical and theoretical readings, and library resources on campus. Looking at manifestos, short stories, fragmentary poetry, and essays, we consider how modernist writers around the world got their starts, established their styles, prepared for longer tomes, and entered international exchanges in shorter forms. Authors include Conrad, Woolf, Mansfield, Joyce, Anand, James, Faulkner, Toomer, Hemingway, Rhys, Kafka, Chang, and Borges. Before starting the paper, students practice the skills of close-reading, creative pastiche, primary and secondary research, and pitching a prospectus.

• Manifesto: the board game that came out of this class

Ancient and Modern Masterpieces of World Literature are  open online courses hosted by edX / HarvardX. My task was to condense and re-theme material from an earlier, longer online survey course (taught by David Damrosch and Martin Puchner) by adding new content in the form of short introductory essays for each course and text, as well as three filmed framing dialogues. "Ancient Masterpieces" goes from The Epic of Gilgamesh to The Lusiads, focusing on epic (and other long narrative forms); and "Modern Masterpieces" goes from the 1001 Nights to My Name is Red, focusing on short fictions or story cycles. Since designing the two short courses, I've taught them for several years (along with the long course, which still runs as well).