My teaching encourages the creation of active and engaged learning communities marked by curiosity, intellectual generosity, and rigorous yet playful experiences. I frequently teach in informal educational settings, and I have offered a semester-long seminar on environmental humanities for teachers in the Philadelphia School District. At Penn, I have developed and teach four environmental humanities courses–all widely cross-listed. Below are details and resources for these and a selection of other courses.
GRADUATE
Environmental Humanities: Theory, Method, Practice
This course immerses participants in the rapidly evolving field of environmental humanities. It begins with the consideration of foundation texts in this new research area, and brings students in conversation with invited guests to explore several histories of futurism. The next unit consists of trainings designed to encourage research practices informed by diverse visions of worlds becoming; such trainings include public-writing, curatorial practices, and embodied and performative research methods. The work culminates in proposals for projects that promote learning with more diverse audiences (humans and others), on campus and beyond.
Image: Kate Urquhart. Launch of Gabriel Kaprelian’s Waterpods. Ecotopian Toolkit 2017 at Bartram’s Garden
Public Environmental Humanities
Public Environmental Humanities: In this humanities lab, students develop and execute publicly engaged projects. In addition to individual mentoring, they receive training in project management and grant writing, experience working in archival and museum settings, tips for developing workshops and exhibits for “smart twelve-year-olds” who might, for example, attend the Philadelphia Science Festival, where my students’ work (and mine) has been presented; and opportunities to explore the ethics and methods of collaboration, especially with community partners whose concerns often do not coincide with university-based research agendas.
UNDERGRADUATE
Sustainability and Utopianism
This course began in 2012 as an honors seminar, and it provided the spawning ground for what became the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. At that time it was the first and only class at Penn to be cross-listed across departments in the arts and sciences. Through the analysis of both classic utopian and contemporary dystopian texts, the course investigates how the humanities can contribute to discussions of sustainability. Students of many different majors explore the question implied in the class topic: Amidst ecologically unsustainable practices (including the institutionalization of sustainability on Penn’s campus), what historical and/or creative forms of world-making might inspire alternatives?
Liquid Histories and Floating Archives
How are rising waters transfiguring our heritage, history and its practice–as well as our present and future? Readings, discussions, and field work invite trans-historical dialogues with a focus on the riverscape of the tidal Schuylkill and the colonial and industrial-era infrastructure that transformed the mid-Atlantic’s vast tidal marshes and wetlands. A series of walking exercises and field note-takings prompt considerations of the research methods and modes of historic, scientific, and artistic inquiry that learning with water invites, elicits, mandates, requires, or promotes. Our final projects, collected in a digital compendium for Learning with Waters, consider how we might learn with rising waters. We ask how they might be read and investigated as archives, paying attention to what surging seas subsume and hold, whose stories they tell. We’ll consider what floats to the surface and ask how the depths are accessible.
Image: Still from Aidan Un’s promotional video for Jacob Rivikin’s Floating Archives. 2018
Trans(l)its
This course explores creative movements between languages: trans(l)its, “Quersprachigkeit.” Drawing on students’ own experiences about what it means to live and learn across languages, we consider writing by authors who have arrived at their German words via worldly itineraries. The examination of literary and artistic production in German beyond national borders will be guided too by a series of short readings and audio texts about the promise and the limits of “world literature.” Propelled by recent research into multilingual language learning, this course helps students themselves become authors of a sophisticated and worldly German. It is required of all German majors and minors and ideally is taken in the fall of the senior year. All course meetings and assignments as well as most readings in German.
Germans, Cowboys, and Indians
Since the sixteenth century, indigenous American cultures and peoples have captivated Germans’ imaginations. Every year in Germany today, children and grown-ups alike take part in festivals to learn more about Native American cultures as well as to “play Indians.” Taught in German, this advanced undergraduate seminar explores this tradition of fascination through a variety of primary and secondary materials. We attend to word and image (travel and captivity narratives, essays, and novels; maps, photographs, book illustrations, and films), exploring well-known texts by Hans Staden, Theodor de Bry, J.G.Herder, Karl May, and others; attending too to lesser-known materials by German American colonist Regina Leininger, East German comic books and films such as Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure of Silverlake), as well as contemporary photography by Marc Ohrem-Leclef. In addition to active in-class participation, students will develop their own final research project through a series of 2-3-page German writing exercises. Student work will be integrated into the international conference “Envisioning the ‘Old World,’” at the end of the fall semester.