Teaching and Research Goals

As an instructor in Emory’s English Department, I enjoy having students perform, rather than merely present, in my courses. I signify on presentations as performances because these exhibitions have the unerring quality of either enhancing or detracting from rich dialogue in the classroom. Aspiring towards the former, I’ve assigned students to work together in groups to perform skits. In another course, students gave speeches as capstone projects to exhibit their cogent and succinct writing while demonstrating their budding mastery of rhetoric. However, despite my small steps to encourage creativity, I’d like to use technology to enrich my students’ capacity to–in the words of Edwidge Danticat–“create dangerously.” Specifically, in my upcoming “Autobiography in the African Diaspora” course I’d like students to create short films in which they digitally animate their personal essays. In another course which I’ll co-teach next semester–Emory’s “Men Stopping Violence” class–I’d like students to use digital storytelling to interrogate some pertinent issue relating to male intimate partner violence through their investigation of materials from Emory’s archives. I look forward to learning innovative technological tools, in our upcoming sessions, so my students can fashion projects on the cutting edge.