Teaching

I think about college courses as lenses. They provide sharper ways of seeing a subject in all its dimensions. To my way of thinking, the best courses provide analytic tools that can be used again. What I hope students will take with them from the courses I teach is both new knowledge and expanded capacities for understanding the world.

A decade of teaching experience has shown me that far from being liabilities, students’ differences enrich a classroom environment. Through practices that provide a wide variety of ways to participate, I strive to create an atmosphere in which every student’s voice is heard. In addition to making a practice of equity-focused teaching, my courses attend to histories of disenfranchisement in their content. 

I enjoy working with students at all levels, and have taught at the Master’s degree and undergraduate levels. I have also served as the faculty advisor for six undergraduate honor’s theses, more than any other faculty member at the University of Michigan. In 2022-2023, I served as the faculty advisor for 5 students in the United States Department of State Diplomacy Lab. Diplomacy Lab is a public-private partnership between U.S. academic institutions and the U.S Department of State.

Courses that I have designed and taught for the Program in International and Comparative Studies (PICS) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor include the following:

• Humanitarian Dilemmas
• Climate Change and Migration
• Gender, War, and Peace
• Refugee Voices
• People, Land, and Time
• Human Trafficking and Smuggling in International Perspective
• Time, Space, and Power
• Introduction to International Studies

Some of these courses have been cross-listed with Anthropology.