Teaching

A group of mostly African American students at Howard University are sitting in a semi-circle in a room with bookshelves and purple carpet.
Justin speaking to a group of students at Howard University, 2019

I’ve carried what I’ve learned in teaching the K-12 classroom to the community college classroom to the university classroom. For me, these are places for experimentation, for trial and error, for process and confrontation with the self. These are places of excitement. The classroom goes beyond the walls of a room as learning happens continuously throughout the day. Everyone is a participant in the learning process. Everyone contributes and everyone reflects. Learning is exciting, and engages intentionally and radically with the world around us.

I have experience teaching lecture and seminar courses in literary and cultural studies for first-year students, adult learners, advanced undergraduates, and graduate students. In addition to early British Lit and African American Lit lecture classes, my more intimate seminar courses cover topics related to emotions, intersectionality, anti-racist resistance, health humanities, and disability studies.

I believe that you can do more with less, and I believe in pedagogies of radical flexibility and accessibility. This applies to course and syllabus design, textbook decisions, assignments, grading, and larger-level curriculum design.

Some of my courses include:

  • Shakespeare and Race
  • Poetry and Politics
  • Working My Nerves: Emotions in the Renaissance
  • Shakespeare: Kings, Queens, Tyrants
  • British Literature I
  • Introduction to Shakespeare
  • First-Year Writing: Ethics of Immortality