My teaching interests span across Comics Studies, Twentieth-Century & Contemporary North American Literature, African American Literature, Material Text/Book History, Translation & Multilingual Experimentation, Film, the Beats, and Popular Culture. One of my main self-imposed missions, since my arrival at Penn, has been to smuggle comics across campus through a variety of courses, special guest events, hosting 24-hour comics, and ComicsLab, a Sachs grant-supported initiative.

To learn more about my creative writing seminar co-taught with cartoonist Rob Berry, “Making Comics,” see this article and brief video feature.

At the graduate level, in addition to our required Pedagogy seminar, I regularly teach an advanced seminar on archival research methods and theory that combines literary criticism with library science. The seminar introduces students to basic archival processing training and even asks them to process small uncatalogued collections from the library’s backlog. The course is designed to give students across Humanities departments opportunities for potential future work as librarians, archivists, or curators, and other alternative paths.

For more details on my teaching at Penn, see my faculty page.

Since 2021 I’ve also been serving as the Undergraduate Chair of English—maintaining our large roster index, advising majors & minors, and overseeing our department’s transition into Penn’s Next Generation Student Services suite of new CourseLeaf platforms (Advising@Penn, Courses@Penn, Pennant Records, CourseLeaf PATH, etc).

I am currently also chairing a new Humanities and Social Sciences sectors panel for the College of Arts & Sciences—our task is to draft a set of recommendations regarding the Humanities sectors of our General Education requirements.

Nous vaincrons!