Writing Samples

As a digital humanities tool, corpus analysis allows students to visually map language use. Adopted as a tool for anti-racist pedagogy, corpus analysis allows us to recognize from a distance the role race plays in a given text, visualizing its prominences, patterns, and even silences. Because the tools used in corpus analysis strip context and subjectivity from these texts, the following activity allows students to think about documents from a distance. Presented with decontextualized language, students can predict how the texts engage with and represent matters of race. In making their predictions, students may uncover biases and assumptions about race, historical periods, and narrative voice that require further investigation. While this activity can be adapted to visualize any text representing particular racial or ethnic groups, we have employed corpus analysis as a means of introducing students to narratives about mixed-raced heroines in the nineteenth century. We have paired The Woman of Colour (1808) with Dinah Craik’s The Half-Caste (1897) as a means of juxtaposing attitudes towards racial identity at the beginning and end of the nineteenth century. This activity asks students to engage with such questions as what are the experiences of mixed-race women in nineteenth-century British society? What institutional intricacies remain when narrative techniques and subjectivity are stripped away? Are issues of identity and legitimacy reflected in the words themselves, or in an author’s configurations of these ideas? More broadly, students are encouraged to think about how race is being spoken and written about and how those language patterns contribute to biases and stereotypes, both historically and currently.

The following publications are under review or forthcoming in the venues specified below. Links will be posted here when they become available.

"Communities of Correspondence: Compassionate Peer Review in a Post-Pandemic World"

Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning During and After COVID-19
Book chapter; co-written with Gabrielle Stecher

During the last school year, our first full academic year in the pandemic, motivating students to engage with each other’s writing proved challenging. Social distancing and the shift to mostly online instruction made forging relationships with classmates all the more difficult. It was one thing to motivate students to write given the state of the world and the challenges of grappling with “Zoom University”; it was another to ask them to enter into the especially vulnerable state that peer review puts us in when we are tasked with sharing half-baked or otherwise unfinished writing with a jury of our peers.

While we have always viewed peer review as an opportunity for community building, the shift to an online, often asynchronous, learning environment made rethinking our approach to peer review a necessity. When students were no longer building rapport and trust through in-person discussion and casual classroom banter, there was an ever-increasing amount of distance between writers. Peer review was seen as a box to check, completion points to collect and less as a generative writing and community building activity, something we felt like we were more successful communicating to students before COVID hit. We have since found a way to emphasize the importance of peer review, but we do not stop at simply acknowledging its role in the writing process. Now, we see peer review as a means of equipping students with the tools to listen deeply, respond compassionately, and engage with peers in a meaningful and productive way. In this chapter, we propose a two-pronged, hybrid peer review strategy that both establishes and reifies the classroom as a compassionate learning environment.

“Unsettling Versiprose; or, Teaching Students to Read Poems in Novels"

Unsettling Poetry Pedagogy (SUNY Press)
2000 words; co-written with Gabrielle Stecher

How do we read poems embedded in novels, and how do we convince students that this generic navigation is a labor worth undertaking? Poems in novels, or versiprose, constitute verse as a form of shared knowledge between reader and author. Yet, this narrative intention can never be fully realized if the reader does not slow down to truly read the poem or excerpt. Not enough attention has been paid to this generic hybridity, despite how frequently verse was included in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels that continue to be taught in literature classes. In addition, students’ tendencies to disregard the moments in verse that, to the untrained eye or ear, interrupt the momentum of the prose narrative result in a need to unsettle how we teach students to actively engage with poems in all their containers.

In this chapter, we unsettle the novel as a container of poems by putting versiprose in dialogue with the period’s anthologization practices that often dictate what poems we teach and how we teach them. By putting anthologies and novels in dialogue with each other, we can articulate how any novelist who excerpts and introduces poetry into their prose assumes a similar editorial position. As a brief case study, we compare the anthologization of Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) to its appearance in Bianca, or, the Spanish Maiden, the posthumous novel of Bengali poet and novelist Toru Dutt serialized in the Bengal Magazine in 1878. This example allows us to think critically about the ways Tennyson speaks for, over, and through Bianca. Ultimately, this approach will allow students to think about voice in ways that also invite broader critical discussions of canonization, anthologization, erasure, and identity.

"Genre"

Constructing the Threshold: A Reference Work of Concepts between Teaching for Transfer and Teaching Writing (WAC Clearinghouse)
Co-written with Gabrielle Stecher

Encyclopedic reference entry for the threshold concept of genre for writing.