Since my time as an undergraduate, I’ve been drawn to subjects at the intersection of the humanities and sciences. This has led me to explore the edges of the human experience, especially encounters with the alien, where humans confront the unfamiliar and unsettling: invasions, pandemics, artificial intelligences, and non-human animals.
I bring my passion for these subjects to courses I teach in postcolonial studies, medical humanities, and science fiction. For instance, through the lens of medical history and plague literature, students in my current course, ENG 334O: Plagues, Riots, and Revolutions, gain new perspectives on how pandemics have shaped human history around the globe from the Black Death to the COVID outbreak.
This summer I will be working on an article analyzing how epidemics trigger social unrest, fueling conspiracy theories, scapegoating and mistrust of state and medical authorities. My goal is to draw on literary history to shed light on contemporary political upheavals.
I will also be traveling this summer to compete in the sport of dog agility with my Shetland Sheepdog, Jasiri. Training with dogs helps me to think about how to live cooperatively and play ethically across species lines, a topic that informs both my writings and teaching.
When I return in the fall, I will have several exciting online asynchronous courses on offer. ENG 2305: Literature and Culture will introduce students to representations of artificial intelligence in fiction and film. My upper-level course, ENG 3323: Literature and Technology, will also tackle this subject, examining longstanding cultural preoccupations with artificial beings, robots, cyborgs and AIs, from Frankenstein to the present. These courses will explore how technology shapes cultural expression. We will evaluate the opportunities and challenges AI generates for writing, the arts and education.
What makes these courses especially engaging is that students won’t just study AI — they will use it. By integrating AI into assignments, we will learn to think both critically about these tools and creatively with them. Class exercises will help us ponder essential questions, like whether AI can have moral reasoning, and how we can align AI, the alien in our midst, with our own values and goals.
I will also be teaching ENG 3341 in the fall, a course on postcolonial studies that examines how European imperialism has shaped regions such as Africa and the Caribbean and continues to inform global inequalities today.
Drawing on fiction and film, students will engage with histories of servitude and rebellion, independence movements and contemporary challenges including resource scarcity, political corruption, radicalization and genocide. At its core, this course asks what happens when alien cultures meet under conditions of unequal power.
