General Teaching Philosophy
Gustave Flaubert wrote: “Writing is the art of figuring out what you believe.” I base my pedagogical practices on the concept that the process of reading, writing, and discussion generates new ideas and perspectives. I challenge students to reframe learning as a lifelong pursuit through which we continually question and refine what we believe. To that end, I strive to create a process-driven environment: students are active participants and contributors in classroom and community-based activities. I ultimately privilege learning by doing in three distinct ways: introducing a variety of new analytical modes, establishing links between humanistic study and society, and requiring public-facing components of scholarship.
Courses Designed and Taught
Speculative Fiction, Race, and Conceptions of the Human/non human
From historical representations of dehumanization in Octavia Butler’s time-travel novel Kindred to an exploration of the humanity of clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to comparisons between zombies and humans in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, the science fiction novels, films, and plays in this course examine the ways we conceive of what is human and what is not. Students come to understand the real-life processes and repercussions of dehumanization—particularly the ways that race in America has followed a similar trajectory of deciding who is worthy of being considered human with full human rights and who is not. Students gain a deeper understanding of the science fiction genre, critical race theory, social justice, and posthumanism.
Apocalyptic Literature as Social Criticism
This course involves a study of contemporary apocalyptic narratives using a range of media including literature, drama, and film. We explore the scope and development of apocalyptic narratives as social criticism—particularly the various ways that apocalyptic narratives in the late 20thand early 21stcentury utilize the trope of apocalypse as both criticism and as a radical attempt to explore (sometimes limiting) notions of futurity and change. Students become familiar with the SF genre, contemporary theories of the Anthropocene, reproductive futurity, critical race theory, and post-humanism.
Rhetoric and Composition
In this workshop format class, students learn to analyze the rhetorical and stylistic conventions that govern professional and academic writing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Students study how genres function in each of these disciplines and learn how to adapt genres to fulfill the specific rhetorical situation of any writing project. Through a series of research-based projects, this course aims to pave the way for student entry into a variety of discourse communities.
Select Courses Assisted
Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice
According to the US Census Bureau, in the year 2020 “more than half of the nation’s children are expected to be part of a minority race or ethnic group. All Americans under the age of 18 are now at the front of a trend that will see the overall population follow suit some 20 years later” (NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang). In essence, we are in a time of a dynamic racial shift, and yet our country seems to be divided or confused about what “race” is, how to talk about it, and how it might intersect with other identity formations such as gender, class, or sexuality. The goal of this super-course is to give students real tools for how to address multiple modes of difference.
2017 Student Final Project Website
2018 Student Final Project Website
Literature, Medicine, and Culture
From Dr. Frankenstein and his famous monster, to the confessional comedy of Tig Notaro, tales of complex patients and brilliant practitioners have captivated audiences. What do the stories we create about health and medicine tell us about our culture, our history, and the experience of being human? In this introductory course in medical humanities, students read novels, screen films, learn about illnesses and treatments, and hear expert speakers as we investigate the close affinities among literary representation, the health sciences, and clinical practice. This course examines show ideas about sickness have changed over time and across cultures.
Literature, Medicine, and Culture minor
Courses Designed
Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures
In this 20th/21st century Ethnic American literature course, students will first be introduced to the social construction of racial identity—and an exploration of the lived consequences of the stories we tell about race and literature. Students will explore the long history of erasure of said racial oppression and will learn the methodologies and tropes by which contemporary ethnic American literature engages in the continued uncovering of that erasure. The sequence of texts and theory has been chosen to highlight the importance of considering particularity, hybridity, and difference in intersectional ethnic identities. The course will culminate with the creation of an interactive class website designed to share information about these concepts with the greater university community.
African American Literature: The Past, Present, and Future
In this survey course of African American Literature, we will read and study various African American cultural productions spanning from the last nineteenth century into the twenty-first century. In part, students will grapple with the question: what is African American Literature and Culture? The texts in this course will not be studied chronologically, but will instead explore the connections between African American cultural production and attitudes about race in the past, present, and future. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the history of African American literature and culture through a study of first-person slave narratives, neo-slave narratives, afrofuturism, afropessimism, and the cultural construction(s) of African American identity.
Asian American Literature Grad Seminar
This seminar will rely on works of literature, film, critical race theory and cultural studies to provide a theoretical, historical, and social knowledge of Asian American identity in its many different contemporary cultural forms. We will explore various modes of cultural production that reflect the way that Asian American identity is explored in the U.S., especially the concept of racial hybridity, panethnicity, and intersectionality. Texts and class conversations will range from explorations of historical events and their literary representations, to comparative visual media texts, to popular representations of Asian Americans in film and literature.
Intro to Latinx Literature and Culture
In this contemporary Latinx Literature and Culture course, students will attend to a variety of texts—novels, theory, short stories, poetry, film, and drama—that explore and further our understanding of Latinx stories and culture. In the context of canonicity, we will explore what it means to be “Latinx Literature.” Students will discover and develop awareness of different themes and tropes common to what we call Latinx Literature: diaspora, trauma, and futurity. Students will gain an appreciation for inter-ethnic/racial coalition building—especially from an intersectional perspective—while also remaining attuned to differences based on nationality, race, gender, and sexuality. In short, students will confront the hybrid, shifting “borderland” of Latinx identity—both valorizing and complicating the efficacy, benefits, and consequences of the moniker in the context of twenty-first-century literature, political, and cultural studies.
Global Literary Modernisms
Generally dated from 1900 to 1945, modernism was a global artistic movement that developed and furthered marked transformations in both content and form. As global wars, events, and innovations drastically altered people’s lives, writers and other artists experimented with radically new modes of representation and expression. We will study a wide-range of modernist literary texts—including poetry, fiction, essays, and plays—written or translated in English during this period. While modernism is sometimes conceptualized solely as a European and American phenomenon, we will instead consider the transnational and global nature of the development of literary modernism. Furthermore, knowing that modernism had both antecedents and successors, we will examine world literatures both pre-1900 and post-1945 that demonstrated and further developed the tenets of modernism. While all of the writers we study can be described as “innovative” and “groundbreaking,” the character of their innovations and interventions often widely varies. Beyond thinking globally, we will consider the existence of not just one monolithic Modernist movement, but the circulation of various modernisms. In addition to grappling with these different types of modernist thought and representation, we seek to cultivate modes of reading that further our understanding of the shifting challenges these global authors present.
Dwight Tanner 