My teaching has developed across nine years and a wide range of institutions: the UC Berkeley seminar room, a public humanities program in Oakland, a college classroom inside San Quentin State Prison, and an independent high school in San Mateo. I am a literary modernist by training but a generalist by inclination, and my teaching reflects this broad range of interests.
Across these various classroom environments, I have taught literature, film, visual art, and philosophy ranging from ancient Greek epic to contemporary documentary film. My teaching expertise is grounded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing on a transnational archive that moves across Ireland, Russia, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States — from Samuel Beckett and Edith Wharton to Langston Hughes and Ahmed Ali, from Irish modernist drama to early Soviet cinema. The questions these texts raise about belonging, voice, error, migration, and power tend to be the ones students are already living with. My courses consistently ask students not just to interpret texts but to engage their ideas as occasions for debate and use them as frames for examining the present.
Oakland Clemente Courses in the Humanities
Literature Instructor · Oakland, CA
Fall 2024
- Making Our Voices Heard
James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?"; Langston Hughes, "I, Too"; Claude McKay, "America" and "If We Must Die"; Anna Akhmatova, Requiem; Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time; Gloria Anzaldúa, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue"; Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl"
Spring 2025
- Global Migrations: Diaspora, Displacement, Exile
Derek Walcott, "A Far Cry from Africa"; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (excerpts); Aimé Césaire, The Miraculous Arms; Mahmoud Darwish, "Who Am I, Without Exile?"; Edward Said, "Reflections on Exile"; Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees; Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
Lecturer, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Fall 2024
- Family Ties: Socialism, Sex, and the Modern State
George Eliot, Silas Marner; Dostoevsky, The Eternal Husband; Yuri Olesha, Envy; Alexandra Kollontai, selected writings; Mikhail Zoshchenko, Nervous People; Joan Didion, "On Going Home"; Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto; Films: Abram Room, Bed and Sofa; Vladimir Menshov, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
Graduate Student Instructor, Comparative Literature
Reading and Composition · Fall 2016–Spring 2024
- Ghost Stories: Literary Hauntings and Specters of the Past
Pliny the Younger; Emily Dickinson; Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol; Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Films: Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca; Jennifer Kent, The Babadook
- Being Wrong: Mistakes, Mishaps, and Errors in Judgment
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Nikolai Gogol, The Government Inspector; Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Anne Carson, "Essay on What I Think About Most"; Zadie Smith, "Fail Better"
- The Found Object: Discovery in Literature, Art, and Film
Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters; Etel Adnan, Of Cities and Women; Susan Sontag, "Melancholy Objects"
- Writing the Self: Language, Memory, Confession
Augustine, Confessions; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being; Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory; Derek Walcott, Another Life
- Histories of the Body: Modernity's Classicism and Primitivism
Sappho; Osip Mandelstam, Tristia; Arthur Schomburg, "The Negro Digs up His Past"; Alain Locke; Langston Hughes; W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
- Trivial Pursuits: Irrelevance in Literature
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov; Robert Walser, The Walk; Clarice Lispector; Edgar Allan Poe; Film: Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels
- Absurdity through the Ages
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Nikolai Gogol; Daniil Kharms; Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros; Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus