Creating Space for Contentious Topics Due to the nature of my expertise, my courses invite students to confront some of the most harrowing topics of contemporary study: mass violence, colonization, war, genocide, and discrimination. These stories are a reality of our world that students will eventually have to confront; many have already. It is important to credit the knowledge and empathy our students are capable of bringing to such discussions, while still guiding them to further critical thought. My job as an educator is to facilitate a space with the material where students feel safe but at times uncomfortable; this is the mode in which we can best challenge and grow our perceptions. Sometimes, students will have to read stories that make them sad or upset, and I encourage them to follow these reactions to new conclusions rather than push them out of the classroom or their analysis. Following this philosophy, I always begin the semester by having students create a set of discussion guidelines together. Since these guidelines come directly from the students, they feel a sense of ownership in the classroom community and have the language to express how they best feel respected.

A World of Objects Literary studies give us tools to think about a lot more than just words on a page. Alongside novels, memoirs, and poetry, I also include films, photographs, artwork, and museums as objects for analysis in my syllabi. I strive to teach students that the way they are trained to read novels in an academic setting (including close readings, discourse analysis, etc.) can be applied broadly to the world around them. In my course Memorial Museum Fever, we learned how to “read” memorial museums by thinking about them in terms of narrative, tone, and language. By the end of the semester, students were able to understand museums not simply as historical repositories but rather as narrative spaces through which political, social, and moral goals are inscribed.

Humanities Fieldwork As a humanities scholar who participates in site-specific fieldwork around the world, I am passionate about giving my students the chance to do the same. I consciously plan my courses to incorporate field trips to local museums or memorials and whenever possible bring in practitioner-speakers from museums across the globe. It is important to me that students see their work as deeply entangled with their communities, rather than constrained to the classroom. Museums can be an easy entry point for students since they are often familiar and students are always excited to get out of the classroom. I want to change how my students view careers in the humanities to reflect the dynamic work in which we are participating.