Teaching

I have taught courses that bridge history, American studies, anthropology, cultural geography, and public policy. I believe that leading students to more critically analyze and historicize the landscapes, cities, and people around them is crucial to helping them understand the systems of inequality and opportunity that define contemporary life.

I have taught American studies as a Mellon Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University and history at Lake Forest College.

Courses taught:

• American Cities (a survey of U.S. urban history from the seventeenth century to the present with a focus on contested spaces in the city). See the class's final project, a digital guidebook to Chicago, here.
• History of Housing in America (a survey of U.S. housing policy and reform since the nineteenth century with an emphasis on structures of class, race, and gender).
  
• Inequality and Reform: U.S. 1865-1920 (a U.S. history survey focused on labor, immigration, imperialism, and urban reform, among other issues).
  
• American Wastelands and Political Ecology (an upper-level seminar exploring the cultural and political meanings embedded in postindustrial landscapes and redevelopment schemes).
• Planning Chicago (an upper-level seminar placing historical and contemporary urban plans for Chicago in broader cultural, social, political, and economic contexts). Check out the class's guide to "site interventions" across the city.
• Anthropology of Inequality in America (an upper-level seminar that uses an ethnographic lens to explore contemporary inequality in America).