Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher, my main goal is to help students become discerning interpreters of the technical systems that shape their everyday lives. To that end, my pedagogy foregrounds the value of the humanities in understanding technology, its crucial yet often imperceptible role in human culture and meaning-making practices, and how to think and live in a technologically mediated world. I invite students to pursue these questions across a variety of domains of knowledge and cultural production, including philosophy, the history of science and technology, the arts, popular culture, and digital media. Throughout these contexts, my teaching is organized around three core principles:
- analytical reading and argument reconstruction
- thinking historically and across media forms
- writing as a tool for reflection and discovery
My teaching experience includes both classroom instruction and writing center practice at NYU and Duke University, where I earned certificates in college teaching and writing pedagogy. I also designed and taught several undergraduate courses on media studies, philosophy of technology, and critical theory. My teaching received strong evaluations and a teaching award recognizing me among the top 5% of Duke instructors in the humanities. In addition to this classroom experience, I have completed specialized training in digital and distance education with a Bass Digital Education Fellowship, through which I collaborated with Duke Learning Innovation and the Center for Computational Thinking in the development of a self-paced online course in data science and R.
Writing Pedagogy
Beyond traditional coursework, my teaching is significantly indebted to my writing center experience. During my last two years at Duke, I worked as a writing consultant at the Thompson Writing Studio, where I led over 300 one-on-one consultations with graduate and undergraduate students from all majors across the university, and mentored a cohort of new consultants. Through this work, I have come to view student writing as an indispensable pedagogical tool for developing clarity and depth of thinking, which I put to use both in the classroom and in individualized student support. I teach writing above all as an inherently iterative practice through which arguments are strengthened and refined over time, and for which learning to absorb feedback and adapt to different audiences and rhetorical situations is fundamental. Conscious of the barriers academic writing can pose, I also prioritize helping students develop their authorial voice while learning and negotiating (often unspoken) scholarly norms.
Technology in the Classroom
As a media and technology scholar, I take very seriously the media environments students inhabit and how technology features in the learning experience. Following a long tradition of inquiry into how technical systems shape human culture and cognition, I am particularly attuned to the effects of AI on higher education and students’ relationship to academic work and study. My courses establish clear technology use policies and are structured around assignments that emphasize process and revision over output, while regularly asking students to reflect on the value of taking ownership of one’s intellectual growth. Ultimately, I aim to convey that studying technology as an academic subject concerns not only authors and texts and their genealogies, but equally the ways the technologies ready to hand may or may not serve us as thinkers.
Course Syllabi
W 275 Critical Perspectives on AI, Media, and Society
Duke University, Thompson Writing Program, Spring 2025
Writing-intensive course designed in collaboration with the Thompson Writing Program and Duke’s Language, Arts & Media Program. Through a combination of classic (Turing, Wiener, Dreyfus, Searle) and contemporary readings (Daston, Hayles, Crawford, Pasquinelli, Bratton, Hui), the course examined the history of AI, philosophical debates about machine intelligence, and the social ramifications of modern-day ML algorithms and large language models.
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LIT 317S Media Theory
Duke University, Global Culture and Theory Major, Fall 2024
Required core course for Global Culture and Theory undergraduates pursuing a concentration in Film & Media. Reading seminar exploring key media theoretical concepts, including medium specificity, remediation, media ecology, cultural techniques, media archaeology, and technological determinism.
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LIT 190S Philosophies of Media and Technology
Duke University (Global Culture and Theory Major), Spring 2021
Survey course on foundational philosophical theories of media and techno-cultural analysis, covering seminal authors and schools of thought from Plato, Descartes, and Heidegger through the Frankfurt School, McLuhan, Foucault, deconstruction, cybernetics, and post-humanism.
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• Teaching Award: Top 5% Undergraduate Instructor in the Humanities (Overall Quality of Course and Instructor), Trinity College of Arts and Sciences (2021).