Teaching

Teaching Interests

post-war European film, history and society in Polish literature and film, 20th//21st century political literature, ecocriticism and literature

Teaching Experience

Trinity College Dublin

Intermediate Polish

Advanced Polish I and II

A two-year class sequence designed for heritage speakers of Polish, mostly second-generation Irish Poles. The class combined lexical and grammatical material with a project-based approach: the students designed, scripted, and recorded Polska.ie, a Polish-language podcast about Polish life in Ireland.

Polish Area Studies

An introductory class for students taking Polish as part of their study at Trinity College Dublin. An overview of key issues in Polish culture, history, and politics. 

Contemporary Polish Society

An upper-level seminar for undegraduate students of Polish at Trinity College Dublin. An overview of recent debates, political issues, and sociological studies on Poland. Students read and discussed scholarly texts, presented on select issues in class, and wrote a final paper.

Introduction to Central and East European Area Studies (team-taught)

Comparative Literature: Moving Between Cultures (team-taught)

Comparative Literature: Theory and Methodology (team-taught)

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Comparative Literature: Brave New Worlds (4 editions)

Utopian and dystopian novels. The ability of literature to generate social critique. Readings include works by Butler, Atwood, Anyuru, and Akbar.

This course explores dystopian literature. We are going to discuss several novels, short stories, and films depicting a less-than-ideal future that gets too often eerily close to the world we live in today. Because this course deals with dystopias, it is an exploration of political literature: every dystopia, as we will see throughout the semester, makes some sort of a political claim. Describing the alternate world, or the nondescript yet dreary future, these texts also comment on the present they originate from. As we read through, we will try to examine the literary texts in connection to the political, cultural, and social context that informs them.

Comparative Literature: Good&Evil (4 editions)

What you think about evil and its place in society defines your politics to a certain degree: it affects your levels of trust in others, your attachment to concepts such as state, nation, culture, and community. What you think about evil in the long run probably also affects what you think about taxes, single-payer healthcare, or the war in Iraq. That’s why it’s important to analyze what and how we think of evil, in order to become more self-aware and to able to locate our beliefs in the long cultural and intellectual traditions that precede them. The final assignment in this class will take the form of podcasts (with the option of writing a paper). Throughout the course, we will examine podcasts as a contemporary medium of story-telling, with a goal of creating our own podcast as a final result of the class. Readings include texts by Chinua Achebe, Hannah Arendt, André Gide, and Dezső Kosztolányi.

Comparative Literature: International Short Story (3 editions)

This class offers an introduction to the short story as a literary genre and covers works from different parts of the world. The course is designed to familiarize students with the analytical tools to read, interpret, and discuss short fiction. We explore the cultural contexts and the power relations operative with each individual story, especially with reference to race, class, and gender. In one edition of the course, the class focused on Polish short fiction in particular. We read Polish short stories, as well a variety of other short media, and placed them in an international context.

Comparative Literature: Junior Year Writing. Writing and Errancy

This edition of the class focuses on the theme of errancy, which we will consider as a theoretical concept, looking at numerous literary theory approaches to texts. We will also apply the same notion to the practical dimension of our course, where I hope to encourage you to think of the writing process as an errant enterprise: we start, we draft, we abandon texts, circle back to earlier ideas, and so on. The realization that writing is not a strictly linear process will inspire some of our in-class assignments, which will include performative writing, numerous drafts, as well as a conference paper, the final assignment in the class.

This class includes an overview of a number of theoretical approaches to literature. Many of them might prove to be difficult to understand and grapple with—but try your best not to get discouraged by that. In the spirit of errant learning, we will approach these challenges together, with no guarantee that we will ever master any of the texts, but rather with the hope to learn to recognize their rhythms and the different logic that underlies them. In addition to theory, we will read a couple of literary texts, including Teju Cole’s Open City, a novel which we will read and refer to throughout the course.

Comparative Literature: Literary Animals

This course explores the various aspects of human/non-human animal relations. Drawing primarily from literary and philosophical texts, this course will address questions of eco-criticism, climate change, ethics and bio-politics. Some guiding questions for this course are: How does the animal appear in literature? Whose language is heard in the representation of animals? What are the preferred animals in literature? How does the animal provide an insight into the experience of alterity? Can the literary animal offer an alternative identity politics?

Comparative Literature: Dream, History, and Identity in Polish Film

Elementary Polish (two-semester sequence, 2 editions)

This course is an introduction to the Polish language. You will learn how to describe yourself and others, how to interact using basic Polish in everyday situations, and gain a foundation for further study of the language. In class, we will focus on all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening), with the aim of acquiring elementary linguistic competence. The class is designed to be supplemented by individual study at home, including, but not limited to homework, repetition, and vocabulary memorization.

Development of New Degree Programs

New Minor Subject in Polish Studies: Designed and implemented a curriculum for a minor in Polish Studies at Trinity College Dublin, allowing students who pursue other subjects to add Polish to their degree. 

Narrative Leadership Program: Co-designed a series of workshops and three courses, developed an innovative approach to teaching literary analysis skills to undergraduates in Finance and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.