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At Duke, I designed and taught both introductory and upper‑level courses that engaged a wide range of literary texts, from multi‑ethnic and global anglophone literatures to works across diverse media formats in the 20th and 21st century.
In my courses, I am committed to fostering an inclusive classroom where students interact with texts actively. To expose students to the various approaches of close-reading and critical analysis, I structure classes with think‑pair‑share activities, small group discussions, and weekly paragraphs. I also strive to bring a dynamic, hands-on component to class through guest speakers, artist‑led workshops, and visits to the library archives. By the end of the semester, students conduct their own multimodal projects where they can write a traditional academic essay, engage with archival material, creatively reimagine course texts, and reflect on their affective experiences as readers.
Below are two self-designed syllabi:
Illustration of His Master’s Voice
We live in an era where media technologies like the page, screen, and smartphone are exploding and changing the ways we fundamentally read literature. How did written literature historically adapt and update itself when new kinds of media entered the picture? Did the page become stagnant with the revolution of sound and visual recording, television, and computers? Or did literary genres redefine themselves by incorporating cinematic techniques, emojis, and internet scrolling formats? How does this mixed-media hybridity in the text restructure our consciousness today?
This course explores how literature interacted and evolved with new media, including the phonograph, typewriter, radio, television, computer, and now digital and social media, in the long 20th century. The texts we examine not only depict new media, but incorporate elements of their global, media-connected environments. Discussions will include the role of the phonograph and typewriter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); the occupation of female telegraphists and the merging of reading telegrams and novels in Henry James’s In the Cage (1898); and the text’s multi-language of television in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). We will also investigate how social media informs writing and reading practices Xu Bing’s emoji experiment in Book From the Ground (2012), and the rising phenomenon of podcasts, Bookstagrams, and BookToks.
Illustration by Adam Fisher
Godzilla emerges from the radioactive currents of the Pacific Ocean. “Mecha” evangelion robots and cyborgs fight against kaiju-monsters and ghostly hackers. A giant everything bagel creates a blackhole that threatens to demolish the multiverse. This course brings together monstrous, cataclysmic disasters set in the Pacific region to understand the geographical, oceanic, and cultural ties of that space. How do we talk about global catastrophes in the Pacific? Is it possible to shift away from a Western-centered imagination of the post-apocalypse? And what exactly constitutes the Pacific area? Is it based on national borders? The Pacific Ocean itself? With existing terms like the “Asia Pacific” and the “Pacific Rim” originating from colonial histories, is it possible to imagine a transpacific solidarity, especially after world-scale destruction?
To answer these questions, we will take global Asian and Asian American literature in the broadest sense of forms and genre, from fictional narratives (monster invasions, female cyborgs, environmental disasters) to real events (the Vietnam War, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the COVID pandemic). Materials include acclaimed Hollywood films like Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and Daniel Kwan’s and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once; Japanese sci-fi anime (Neon Genesis Evangelion); a Korean film by Oscar-winner Bong Joon-ho (The Host); essays from Asian American and transpacific scholarship, as well as short and long fiction by award-winning authors Keri Hulme, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Han Kang, and Ruth Ozeki.
The concept of the “post-apocalyptic Pacific” was first coined by Professor Hyungji Park in her Spring 2019 graduate course at Yonsei University, South Korea. This syllabus draws inspiration from that course, and I gratefully acknowledge her influence.