Teaching Philosophy
As a scholar of media, I help students develop critical awareness about their mediated and media-consuming lives. I explore the innumerable ways in which media competency is assimilated, often subconsciously, and how these skills and literacies are crucial to successfully navigating our media-saturated world. Our everyday habits and practices with media are never neutral, but are attended by a host of unexamined assumptions, expectations, and ideologies that are embedded in both the spectacle as represented and in the network of material objects that supports this spectacle. I try not to ‘teach’ or lecture so much as to facilitate the acquisition of media literacy by encouraging and guiding class discussion of how concepts in media and cultural theory apply to concrete examples, both onscreen and in our habits of consumption. This process requires trusting and reassuring students so that they may develop confidence when sounding out and debating their ideas. It also keeps me listening and learning, as each group of students brings new topics and approaches for exploration within the digital humanities.
As a scholar of media, I help students develop critical awareness about their mediated and media-consuming lives. I explore the innumerable ways in which media competency is assimilated, often subconsciously, and how these skills and literacies are crucial to successfully navigating our media-saturated world. Our everyday habits and practices with media are never neutral, but are attended by a host of unexamined assumptions, expectations, and ideologies that are embedded in both the spectacle as represented and in the network of material objects that supports this spectacle. I try not to ‘teach’ or lecture so much as to facilitate the acquisition of media literacy by encouraging and guiding class discussion of how concepts in media and cultural theory apply to concrete examples, both onscreen and in our habits of consumption. This process requires trusting and reassuring students so that they may develop confidence when sounding out and debating their ideas. It also keeps me listening and learning, as each group of students brings new topics and approaches for exploration within the digital humanities.
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Courses Taught at Stony Brook University
Introduction to Cinema & Cultural Studies – Summer, Fall 2015; Winter, Summer 2016 Shakespeare in Cinema – Spring 2016 Digital Cultural Studies – Spring 2015 Masculinities in American Film & TV – Fall 2013 Film Genres: Horror & its Sub-genres – Spring 2013, Winter 2014, Fall 2014 Film History from Postwar-Present – Spring 2014 Film History 1895-Present – Fall 2012 Teaching Assistant Film Genres Intro to Film Studies Hollywood Cinema Canadian Cinema Silent Cinema Classical Mythology Single Lectures Cowboys & the Postmortem Western – Stony Brook University Film Club Marlon Brando in American Cinema – Gender & Genre, Stony Brook Masculinity in Taxi Driver – Violence in American Film post-1960, UBC Clint Eastwood's Reflexive Persona – Violence in American Film post-1960, UBC Guy Maddin and Queer Melodrama – Canadian Cinema, UBC |
Areas of Expertise
Media Materiality Digital Culture Television Studies Media & Masculinities Film Studies: – intro to film & media – film history – film genres Theoretical Fields Design History Media Archaeology Actor Network Theory Feminist Critical Theory Poetics of Everyday Life Apparatus Theory Sociology of Masculinity |
Sample Syllabuses, Lectures, Blogs & Wikis
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