Teaching

How and Why I Teach. My teaching practice is committed to global historiographies, environmental exploration, engaged field-based curricula, literacy of material culture and built and unbuilt landscapes, and writing through innovative narrative non-fiction methods. My teaching centers the urgency of today— to understand structural and overlapping crises (environmental injustices, climate crisis, extinction, ecosystem collapse, etc.)—through theoretical, analytical, and interpretive ways to synthesize, respond, and act. In my teaching, I stress how to ask questions, find moments of intellectual risk, and commit to convergence studies. Finally, I encourage students to learn deeply about the past and present to build intellectual communities instead of investing in claims or arguments.

As a student from a working-class, rural background, I make careful pedagogical choices to promote inclusive and accessible learning and strive to improve at every turn. My courses emphasize learning critical historical methodologies through hands-on assignments. I currently teach courses exploring environmental history, visual and material culture, landscape histories, community archiving/community engagement, and health/STS (including toxics, environmental injustice, & urban/rural history).

Graduate students can study the historiography of environmental history in the Americas and its transnational connections with me. I also mentor and teach graduate students in any field or period interested in the knowledge and pedagogy of global material cultures and built and unbuilt landscapes. Students need to take a course with me before undergraduate/graduate mentorship.

Courses Taught

These are courses I developed and have been the instructor of record for. Full descriptions and syllabi are available upon request.

CITY, An Environmental History—(undergraduate/graduate, global urban environmental history )

At the start of William Cronon's "Nature's Metropolis," Chicago is met and portrayed as an environmental system, not simply a city. "Wherever the network of rails extended, the frontier became hinterland to the cities where rural products entered the marketplace. Areas with limited experience of capitalist exchange suddenly found themselves much more palpably within an economic and social hierarchy created by the geography of capital." Taking up Cronon's task—to understand the city as an environment with its own history where "cities," "rural," "economic," and "social" geographies meet—we will work together to learn about and expand our historical understanding of cities as environmental places. From Chicago to Calcutta, we see how cities persist under or resist the pressures of binary concepts: rural/urban, city/environment, nature/culture, humans/animals, or humans/society. Writing, reading about, and spending time in cities will challenge our prior conceptions of what makes a city, what it means to be human, and, ultimately, what it means to be an environment. This class includes a trip to New York City.

Architecture/Art/Landscape, Not Oil

Recent examples of artistic activisms in the U.S. and globally—Art Not Oil, Just Stop Oil, etc.— ask us to reckon with our relationship to fossil fuels. In this collaborative, environmental humanities-forward seminar, we find moments where oil, architecture, art, and design meet. The course explores the built environment, landscapes, material culture, and artworks closely, critically, and contextually through readings about patronage, materialism(s), land relations, aesthetics, activisms, and more in the 20th century. The historical moment, with the rising threat of climate change and the constant state of environmental decay, requires a complete rethinking of architectural and art history and its fossil fuel industry collaborations. Centering works that envision worlds beyond coal, oil, and gas—through aesthetic choices, political commitments, economic changes, environmental and social justice, and more—we question and test the ability to imagine a just transition beyond oil and a way of life in a post-toxic world. By the end of the course, students better understand how modernity and extractive fossil fuels are coeval and that no history of the built environment, landscape, material culture, or art can be written without acknowledging its intrinsic relationships to fossil fuels.

Home:
The Interior America(s) and Environmental Justice

A survey of movements, transnational solidarities, and the role of home in Indigenous, North, and South American (s) environmental justice histories (extending engagement in the environmental humanities, public health, environmental history, and environmental studies).

Unbuilding Modern(s)—(undergraduate/graduate, survey course)

Buildings, environments, landscapes, and related representations shape our understanding of our world, others, and ourselves. Within a global frame, this course offers diverse case studies, not one modern or one canon, to “unbuild” histories from the 1800s to the present. Through a chronology of examples, we will explore concepts of gender and race, conservation and preservation, cultural synchronic and diachronic meanings, political representation, materials and technologies, ownership and property, weathering and decay, and other historical issues relevant to the current state of the built environment. Over the semester, students will learn to look closely, research, and analyze what they find in the built world. Site visits and assignments will engage with the rich architectural, landscape, and object resources on campus, including its neighboring lands.