Teaching Statement

When I was in college, I had to take one science class, just one. Like many of my fellow English, history, and philosophy majors, I ended up in Bio 111, affectionately known as “Science for Non-Science Majors.” On the first day of class, our professor told us we would learn two things together: “First,” he said, “you need to know some fundamentals of biology and the scientific method. And second,” he added, “I want you to know why it matters, and why I love it.” That semester, Professor Warners lit up with glee at strange plants and lectured excitedly about odd features of leaves as he walked us through the basic mechanics of the scientific method. Through it all, we saw not just why it matters but how it moves people—the glory of a sort of knowledge none of us felt drawn to pursue ourselves. 

That is the model I take to teaching English. I find it vitally important to teach students not just certain fundamentals of literary scholarship—close reading, critical analysis, genres, the basics of textual evidence and the many different ways words work—but also the significance of the discipline itself.  I want my students to understand something of authors, texts, literary theory, and literary movements. But I also want them to see why literature matters, how it inspires and challenges us, what kind of knowledge it contains, and why some find it so captivating that they devote their entire lives to it. 

Early American literature fascinates me in particular because the challenges can sometimes seem even greater. Many of the authors are not well known and many of the texts are not even considered “literary,” at least as my students often define that term. In addition to novels, plays, and poems, we read plenty of historical chronicles, reports of explorers, public letters, journals, sermons, trial transcripts, captivity narratives, and many other genres. By approaching such texts through literary studies, students can begin to expand their understanding of both literature and literary training, seeing how each form of writing tries to create, convey or control knowledge, attempts to reach and change an audience, opens new worlds of possibility or tries to shut them down—doing so, almost always, through implicit and explicit narratives. 

But even as I care about early American literature in its own right, I also want to teach students how texts from the colonial period take on afterlives in American culture. Early America never goes away, and remnants, echoes, myths, and histories still shape America today. These texts resonate far beyond their historical context. 

When I teach, I keep these goals in mind: I want to train my students in literary skills, while also conveying the larger significance of literature itself. I want to treat texts on their own terms and in their own historical timeframe, while also trying to demonstrate and leave open the possibility that they speak beyond a specific context. Resonances continue long past historical periods. And many of the texts I teach formed traditions as they were read, received, and reconceived in American culture. Whatever I am teaching, whether early American literature, or religion and literature more generally, I hope I can model for students why this subject, this skill, this discipline, this ongoing study of story and poetry and text continues to matter so much to so many still today.