Current Courses

Fall 2024

  • HONOR 2102-002
    IT: The Middle Ages
  • HONOR 2810-003
    Honors Core Thematic IT
  • HONOR 2810-009
    Honors Core Thematic IT

Spring 2024

Teaching Philosophy

I have always been deeply interested in a vareity of artistic mediums.  In my studies and practice I have sought to grapple with the specific capacities and limitations of individual mediums, and to find ways to combine them without losing sight of their specificity. Simultaneously, I have tried to find ways to reinterpret apparent chaos, messiness and accident as alternative forms of order.

As a teacher, I endeavor to work along similar lines.  My aim is to read creatively, and to help students to do the same.  I see texts - whether literary, philosophical, or scientific - as works of art produced in frequently unfamiliar, initially unreadable styles. Such works can occasion a range of subjective responses - bewilderment, frustration, boredom.  The challenge I accept is to identify the unique capacities and incapacities, the insights and oversights, of individual texts, and make reading the unfamiliar a bracing, rewarding, and empowering activity.  

I greatly enjoy meeting and working with students.  Consequently, my classes are discussion-intensive, ideally functioning more as seminars than lectures. Without losing contact with the syllabus, I try to allow the particularity of each group to determine the direction of our conversations.  I hope students will enjoy the casual and lively atmosphere I try to foster within the classroom, and find it an important part of their total university experience.

Courses I Teach

  • Honor 2101 - Intellectual Traditions 1 - The Ancient World
    A survey of literary and philosophical texts, accompanied by modern scholarly studies, of archaic and classical antiquity.
  • Honor 2102 - Intellectual Traditions II
    A survey of the literature and philosophy of the late Roman and early Christian worlds; an exploration of medieval thought, culture and spirituality; a final foray into key Renaissance authors.
  • Honor 2103 - Intellectual Traditions III
    An investigation into the rise of modern science, literature and philosophy; with a special emphasis on the social study of science and technology.
  • Honor 2108 - Intellectual Traditions IIX
    A survey of the 20th century, using art objects and criticism as a vehicle through which to explore aesthetic, philosophical and political issues. This course emphasizes the emergence of new technologies of production and reproduction (photography, sound recording, radio, film, television, etc.), and explores the role they play in conditioning new forms of consciousness and society.
  • Honors 2211 - Writing in The Research University
    My hope is to teach research and writing in a way that is eminently pragmatic. Rather than focusing on either lofty ideas, national issues, or the bare mechanics of composition, my course aims at helping students engage in deliberative discourse and policy debate regarding the university and the present curriculum. Assignments and discussions take a selection of contemporary novels as the occasion for crafting personal statements and engaged arguments about matters which directly concern student life and university studies.