What does this winning this award mean to you?

I’m truly honored and humbled to be the recipient of the Thomas F. Herman Award for Specialized Pedagogy. Let me say first that I have the good fortune and privilege to work with the incredible faculty and staff of the Clark Honors College: this is a community devoted to specialized pedagogy, and every day I learn by the example of my colleagues’ generosity, creativity, and disciplinary range. I owe all of them a debt of gratitude for the way they’ve allowed me to continue being their student.

The award is meaningful to me for two additional reasons: first, my mother taught first-graders to read for over thirty years in the public school system. Whatever passion for reading that I continue to profess today started with a book by her side, and she’s the first person I called when I received this news. It is an honor to continue her legacy as a public school teacher. Second, it’s especially meaningful to receive this award as a career faculty member. The larger realities of the academic job market mean that many non-tenure track faculty folks labor in relative obscurity, albeit with undiminished passion, professionalism, and dedication to their work. I’m so heartened that the UO sees and recognizes the value in this labor.

If you received this award on stage at a ceremony like the Oscars or the Grammys, what would you say?

Over the years I’ve heard countless times about how ostentatiously impractical my career choice has been—"literature will not save the world, much less secure you a high-paying job”—and yet as I continue to think with my students about the problems we face together, from entrenched racism to global warming, it has become clear to me that the capacity to imagine a world otherwise is an eminently practical career, not to say an urgently necessary one. The resources of the literary imagination alone may not save us, but they can tell us who we’ve been, who we are, and who we might be.

How would you describe what you do (i.e. teaching, research, etc.) to someone outside of the UO?

I’m trained primarily as a specialist in North American literature and film. Literature is, among many other things, the powerful means by which we can access other minds, other experiences, other worlds. It is a technology, and one of the oldest we have, for comprehending cultural difference. At the same time, artistic forms have the potential to estrange us from our own normative habits and conventions so that we can see our own present anew by the light of the historical imagination. 

At the CHC, however, my approach to teaching over the years has become radically interdisciplinary. In my classes I try to constellate texts, ideas, and discourses from a range of disciplines to give my students multiple points of entry and approach to the subjects and problems they care about. The representational demands of thinking about climate change or inhabiting the lives of non-human animals pose significant challenges to the resources of the literary imagination. These subjects compel us to integrate contemporary scholarship in environmental and physical sciences, comparative biology and ethology, along with methods in literary and cultural theory. The CHC is the place where this kind of innovative cross-fertilization is truly at home.

What was your favorite class or subject in high school? College?

I took a class in my first year of college called “Marx, Nietzsche, Freud” offered in the German department. This course knocked my world out of kilter in the best sense; suddenly, words, everyday objects, and even my conscious mind looked very different to me.

What’s the most inspiring classroom moment you’ve experienced, either as a student or a teacher?

In this year of the pandemic, the first thing that comes to mind is how  inspired I was by those first-year students in the fall who were ready and willing to make their first-year experience memorable in spite of the formidable challenges. They had no basis for comparison about what a college course was supposed to be, and yet they made our time together urgent and necessary. They were so bright, so enthusiastic, and so eager for community that the class provided—I had to run with them or get out of the way.

What are you listening to right now OR what is your favorite music to put on?

For me, there’s nothing like the Pixies’ peerless album Doolittle when I need to get out of my head and jump around the room. Otherwise, it’s Sam Cooke and Nina Simone and Bobby Womack and so many soul artists that, well, fly me to the moon. Obviously, this has been especially important as we’ve all been stuck indoors during the pandemic.

As you have transitioned to teaching remotely, what has been your guiding principle to ensure your students get the most out of your instruction?

Well, the primary imperative in this extraordinary time has been for everyone in my class to lead with compassion in our interactions with each other. Beyond that, I think the challenge of the online transition has been to figure out how to use the resources this new medium and mode of interaction effectively. Using the breakout rooms, using the white board, using the chat function, using Google Docs so that students can edit each other in real time, using Google Slides so that students actively produce content in their breakout rooms—all of these site-specific functions seem banal but can actually create dynamic engagement rather than the moribund mood of distraction that online learning so often invites. I’ve been surprised by the sudden, unbidden, impromptu community that arises. The guiding principle, I suppose, is to stay active while we all sit here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ready to be back in the classroom this fall!

Where can you be found when you’re not in the classroom (or in front of your computer on Zoom!)?

You can find me getting lost on foot in big cities, in a dusty bookstore, or sitting in an old movie theater.