Teaching

For over a decade, I have taught courses in fiction, poetry, cinema studies, gender and sexuality studies, and creative writing across physical and virtual classrooms at the university, on Coursera, and in various public art institutions. I am an adaptive pedagogue with a specialty in leading discussion about difficult, abstract, critically maligned, or socially marginalized texts. From avant-garde poetics to underread novels, from new media to pornographic works, I have consistently found that my students make immense growth when they are brought to such texts and are asked to take them seriously and empathetically. Feel free to email me to request syllabi or materials for any of these courses.

University Courses

“Intro to Genres: Conceptual Poetry,” U of Chicago, Winter 2026

A hybrid literary seminar and generative workshop, where students study and experiment in the range of aesthetic possibilities offered by concept-driven, procedural, aleatory, constrained, and avant-garde poetry.

“Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations,” U of Chicago, Winter 2026/Winter 2025

A comparative introduction to feminist theory, queer theory, and the study of gender and sexuality, focused particularly on the relationship between personal experience and structural critique. Part of U Chicago’s core curriculum.

“Trans Literature in the United States,” U of Chicago, Fall 2025

A literary survey of the relationship between transness and the United States, focused especially on issues of coloniality, territory, race, the medical complex, and how trans authors from the US and its territories have responded in literary form to political crises.

“Intro to Porn Studies," U of Chicago, Fall 2025/Fall 2024/Spring 2023

A multi-media introduction to the Western history and study of the mode/label/genre of aesthetic production called pornography and its other appearances as “obscenity,” “erotica,” “filth,” “smut,” and “extremity.” We study how people have approached this form, how they have sought to control it, uplift it, analyze it, destroy it, take it seriously, or learn to live with it. This course is both an introduction to the academic field of “porn studies” and to its equal and opposite: the endless repository of historical and current attempts to get pornography out of the way, to keep it somewhere else out of sight, to destroy it, or to deem it unworthy of study. The goal of this course is not to make an argument for or against porn wholesale, but to give students the ability to take this contentious form and its continued life seriously, intelligently, and ethically.

“Body Genres,” U of Chicago, Winter 2025

A film seminar inspired by and challenging the bounds of Linda Williams’s term “body genres,” for film genres that attempt to produce specific bodily reactions in their viewers. We theorize Williams’s original trifecta of horror, melodrama, and pornography, but expand as well to cringe comedy, disgust films, the sensation novel, and shock sites.

“The Gay Men’s Novel,” U of Chicago, Fall 2024

A literary survey on the relationship between gayness and novelistic form, guided by the lessons of Lee Edelman’s “Homographesis” and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward. We read classic novels by gay men from all over the globe for their aesthetic deployment of sexuality, identity, and queer community, such as Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, and Samuel Delany’s The Einstein Intersection.

“Theories of Gender and Sexuality,” co-taught with Kristen Schilt, Spring 2021

An advanced seminar in gender and sexuality, focused on the history and methods of the field and key concepts of the field. This course specifically focuses on training students how to build new theories of gender and sexuality.

Online Teaching

For over a decade I have been a recurring teaching assistant of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo), a free massively-open online course on Coursera, led by Al Filreis. Clips from my years of teaching there can be found here. Join us in the Fall for our yearly session!

In Spring 2025, I hosted a mini-course on Coursera titled “Mei-mei Berssenbrugge: Between Landscape and Phenomenology” focused on the work of this important American poet.

Public Poetry Workshops and Teaching

“Writing the Unreadable,” four-week generative workshop with Small Press Traffic, 2026

+ poetry Society of New York, 2026

On the possibilities of “unreadability” as an axis for poetic creation, ranging from concretism, extremism, boredom, and digital experimentation

“Writing With and Through Panic,” four-week generative workshop with Poet’s House, 2026

+ One-Day Workshop with Poetry Society of New York, 2025

On the relationship between panic (as a form of un-thinking thought), and poetic creation, ranging between moral panics, panic attacks/mental health, and forms of catastrophizing the state of the world

Guest Writer for 826CHI Teen Writers Studio, 2022

Workshop for teen writers on craft, inspiration, and the use of form

Generative workshop on Loss Writing, with Kelly Writers House Summer Workshop for Young Writers, 2021

+ Woodland Pattern, 2019

On writing through loss and grief, concerning questions of scale, catharsis, ecology, and repair

2026 Scholarly CV Available HERE