"Great Big Beautiful Tomorrows: A Century of Theme Park Utopias," Featured Speaker through a grant from Ethics Across the Curriculum, Union College, May 10-11, 2007.
Featured Panelist on Science Fiction and Film, Necronomicon, October 2004-2006.
"Making the Case Against Plagiarism," a workshop for USF Faculty which I designed and facilitated, was sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Teaching Excellence, March 2004 and September 2004.
Featured Panelist on Ethics and Popular Culture, Necronomicon, October 2003.
"Evidence of Civilization: Nature, Culture, and Walt Disney World" was presented at the MLA Annual Convention, December 2001.
Featured Panelist on Ethics & Biotechnology in Science Fiction, Necronomicon, October 2001 and 2002.
"What Lurks Behind Lovecraft's Walls" was presented at the 22nd Annual International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Conference, March 2001.
"Paul Schrader: Ethics Out of Darkness" was presented at the 26th Annual Conference on Literature and Film at Florida State University, February 2001.
For reference purposes, I have included course information from prior semesters. Many of these courses are taught in rotation, as I update them with new topics and texts.
Bad Medicine (Cultural Studies and the Popular Arts LIT 3301): Surveys regularly tell us that the most trusted profession is that of doctor. We trust medicine to tell us who is sick and who is healthy, who is crazy and who is sane, who is proper and who must be isolated. "Bad Medicine" explores the limits of medical discourse in society. What is medicine? How do we view medical practice? What role do we play as embodied subjects in medical therapy and ethics?
Before the Law (Contemporary Literature LIT 3073): We stand before the law, and the law comes before all. Social law and psychological law to govern our actions, scientific law to govern our world, moral law to govern our hearts. They are meant by their very rage for order to preclude any questioning. “It seems,” Jacques Derrida announces, “that the law as such should never give rise to any story.” And yet, the law itself is a story. “Before the Law” explores our contemporary fascination with such themes as order and chaos, gender and genre, crime and punishment justice and freedom, as they appear in recent literature from around the world. Through our examination of a variety of narratives and philosophical essays, we discover what we say about the law and what the law says about us.
Behind Enemy Lines (Modern Literature LIT 3155): As the world becomes more crowded and tense, it seems more important than ever to be able to tell our friends from our enemies. How do we distinguish others and act toward them? How do we communicate and relate to others in an ethical fashion? Can democracy survive into the 21st Century? “Behind Enemy Lines” surveys the means we use to mark one another in the world, and how complicated the line really is between “friends” and “enemies.”
The Body Politic (Cultural Studies and Popular Arts LIT 3301): We think of politics as a science of the mind. But politics in the world involves bodies: real people and real consequences. How do we view the line between mind and body? How are bodies, the "populace" of popular culture, situated in the realm of the political? "The Body Politic" explores our narratives of mind and body, and how philosophy, literature, and film attempt to account for human beings in the world. We will examine narratives which explore how we view our bodies, how we embody our minds, and the transgressions across and fusions between those boundaries we thought were so easy to distinguish.
Building Consent (Modern Literature LIT 3155): Architect Geoffrey Jellicoe once remarked that “architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.” We construct our individual and social identities by constructing the physical world around us. Prisons, asylums, churches, cities — our body politic is reflected in our buildings. To examine the landscape of our world is to examine the landscape of our culture. "Building Consent" traces our efforts to construct our social reality through the metaphor of architecture.
Crisis of Closure (Cultural Studies and Popular Arts LIT 3301): As the world enters a new millennium, we find our culture in the midst of a paradigm shift. Art, literature, philosophy, history, science: our traditional systems for establishing and enclosing meaning are breaking down. Closure is no longer certain. Even our popular culture, traditionally a major means for grounding our societal comfort-zone, reflects our uncertainty, anxiety, and for some, enthusiasm, about a future without clear boundaries. This course explores notions of closure in three major (and frequently overlapping) popular genres — mystery, horror, and science fiction — in order to examine our relationships to the past and to the future, to the world and to texts, to ourselves and to others.
The Ends of Man (Cultural Studies and Popular Arts LIT 3301): The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel likens the cycle of history to the relationship between father and son. Aristotle refers to politics itself as a fraternity. The history of narrative in western culture has largely been a history written by and for men. But what do these stories tell us about ourselves not only in terms of gender, but also our intersections of race, class, and other cultural signifiers? “The Ends of Man” examines three classic characters of male mastery — the detective, the scientist, and the hero — in order to discover how we form our identities as individuals and as a society in a constantly changing world.
Innocence Abroad (Cultural Studies and Popular Arts LIT 3301): To be abroad: to travel away from home, to wander, to fall into the unknown, to go astray. We think of childhood as a time of innocence, a golden age to be cherished and protected. Sentimentalized and misunderstood, childhood is no more an ideal time than any “golden age” in history. “Innocence Abroad” examines our ways of retelling childhood stories -- classics and contemporary interpretations, fairy tales, and even comic books -- in order to understand our own adult world.
The Key to Communication (University of Tampa Composition and Rhetoric I): Descartes began the modern search for self-identity with the assertion, "I think, therefore I am." But we only really know ourselves in relation to the outside world, a world full of other people and other places. How do I know these "others" that share the world with me? In "The Key to Communication," we examine how language allows us to understand others in the world and to understand ourselves. Through extensive writing, peer editing, and class discussion of literature and film, we develop the connection between communication and ethics.
The Learning Curve (Cultural Studies and the Popular Arts LIT 3301): According to James Baldwin, "The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated." How does a society maintain its continuity through education? How do children in modern society learn to become adults -- and what sort of adults do they become? "The Learning Curve" traces the arc of childhood experience toward adulthood in order to understand the cultural metaphors and institutions that shape our identity and our society.
The Meaning of Difference & The Difference of Meaning (Modern Literature LIT 3155): As the world enters a new millennium, traditional distinctions between literary genres, even between literature and the cultures it is meant to serve, are breaking down. This course is designed to explore the implications of this breakdown of traditional literary models and systems of meaning on contemporary literature and world culture. We divide the course into three sections, each based on a contemporary critical/philosophical approach to these cultural issues: Post-Marxist, Post-Feminist (touching on Post-Psychoanalytic theories as well), and Post-Structuralist. We then explore literary works from around the world, in conjunction with philosophical works that might help illuminate them.
Myths of America (Modern Literature LIT 3155): From the moment the Pilgrims didn’t land on Plymouth Rock (or Columbus didn’t prove the world was round), America has been as much myth as reality. Our national identity, like any society, is built around our collective acceptance of ideals which often clash with the real struggles, successes, and failures that characterize the American experience. “Myths of America” compares our stories about America to its realities, both good and bad, and how modern fiction captures those experiences.
Specters of History (Modern Literature LIT 3155): The first question we might ask of time is whether or not it is really necessary. After all, what does time do? The answer seems obvious: time provides a continuity which links events. Our intuition tells us that time operates in some sensible order, from past to present to future. We call this sensible and proper time “history.” The past haunts us, and the future beckons. History calls. But who or what is calling from outside the present? “Specters of History” explores the ghosts of the past and future, our relationship to time, and how we view our ethical relationship to history.
Wild Kingdoms (Cultural Studies and Popular Arts LIT 3301):We call Nature the Wild, the untamed, the animal, the other. We call ourselves Human, civilized. But are we not animals as well? Is culture "unnatural?" Are we in conflict with the world, or are we an integral part of it? "Wild Kingdoms" will explore the boundaries between human and animal, nature and civilization, biology and culture, body and language -- the territorial lines we draw in order to understand the outside world, our own identities, and "the better angels of our nature."