Teaching
At Georgia Tech, I teach writing and communication courses to first-year undergraduate students. The curriculum places an emphasis on multimodal communication, in which students are challenged to practice and perfect their communication skills across a variety of genres and modes, including written, oral, visual, and digital communication.
USU, I taught the introductory course for English majors, “Literary Analysis,” survey courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary history, and upper-level courses in Romantic and Victorian literature, poetry, and health humanities methods.
In my classroom, students can expect to hone their skills in literary and rhetorical analysis and to produce original research on topics that excite them. Verbal expression is a major component of my course objectives, and students can expect to write in oral genres: podcasts, discussion leadership, research presentations, class conference panels, and graded discussions.
My upper-level courses model interdisciplinary inquiry and encourage students to explore the way writers and artists have co-created knowledge about gender, race, disability, psychology, war, politics, and the historical and contemporary experience of health. In their course evaluations, students have noted my special knack for teaching poetry analysis to newcomers, and they often talk about how their confidence in their ability to read and write about poetry grew over the semester. My mission is to produce undergraduate scholars of literature who are just as excited to crack open a sequence of sonnets as they are to read a Jane Austen novel.
Recent student research topics:
- Redefining disability and ability in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and Stoker’s Dracula
- Suicidal contagion in English and German Romanticism
- Victorian women’s rituals of mourning as proto-feminist expression
- Figuring disabled, homeless veterans in Wordsworth’s poetry
- Adapting the Gothic in contemporary children’s literature: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
- Wordsworth, National Parks, and the privatization of public lands
What I’m Teaching This Semester: Fall 2025
English Composition I – “Experimentation and the Ethical Imagination” This course provides opportunities for you to become a more effective communicator as you refine your thinking, writing, speaking, designing, collaborating, and reflecting. In this section, we will consider the following question: What are the ethical responsibilities of the scientist, and what ideas, events, and texts have shaped our understanding of ethical research? This course explores the murky history of scientific experimentation and the way writers across a range of genres have written biomedical research ethics into being. We’ll analyze literary texts, nonfiction writing, and visual media alongside medical writing, legal documents, and science journalism. Beginning with the novel Frankenstein, we’ll progress through medical history, encountering known abusers of scientific methods and the ethicists, activists, and artists who envisioned a more humane future for biomedical innovation. We’ll consider the impact of systemic forces like racism, sexism, and homophobia on the creation of scientific knowledge and the protocols of biomedical research. Readings will examine perspectives from literature, history, medicine, public health, sociology, bioethics, and journalism. In your writing, you will explore how different writers grapple with the ethics of experimentation. Topics may include vivisection, Nazi experimentation, the Tuskegee syphilis study, HIV/AIDS, and blood testing.
What I Taught Last Semester: Spring 2025
Eighteenth Century British Literary History:
The Gothic Imagination
Tyrannical fathers, haunted castles, deranged monks, ancient prophecies, and things that go bump in the night. These are familiar features of the Gothic novel, a genre that flooded the literary landscape during the eighteenth century and captivated the imaginations of British readers. In this class, we will discover the origins of Gothic literature. From Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), this course will examine the evolution of the gothic over the course of the long eighteenth century, and its iterations across genres. The main focus of the course will be the rise and early influence of the Gothic novel, but we will also read poetry and plays that experimented with Gothic conventions. Additional readings in eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and politics will inform our understanding of the Gothic’s impact on the national imagination during times of global conflict, religious tension, and colonial expansion. We’ll discuss the way the genre reflected anxieties about gender, religion, revolution, and race. Course readings will include works by Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Jane Austen.
Literary Analysis
Becoming an English major means mastering your powers of interpretation, and literary analysis is at the heart of every English major’s interpretive practice. This course will introduce you to methods of literary analysis, or “close reading.” Specifically, we will focus on analyzing three main forms of literature—poetry, drama, and prose fiction—and course readings will include poems, short stories, a novel, and a play. As we explore these different genres, we’ll also consider what it means for a text to be considered “literary.” You will learn to notice the nuanced construction of a text, become familiar with literary concepts and terms, and understand the relationship between form and meaning. Readings will include works by James Baldwin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Octavia Butler, Mary Shelley, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Joy Harjo, Rita Dove, Ada Limon, William Shakespeare, and others. Writing assignments will develop your powers of analysis as you make arguments about how to interpret literary texts. You will form compelling arguments, support your ideas with evidence, and show the implications of your analysis
Recent Literature Courses:
Romanticism and the health humanities
At the turn of the end of the eighteenth century, the objectives of poetry and medicine seemed to converge. As doctors and scientists sought to accurately describe the structures and functions of the human body, so, too, did poetry turn inward, taking an interest in the “inner life” of the self. In this class, we will endeavor to see the body in Romantic poetry. Romantic poets concerned themselves with the material, the visceral, the sensory, the bawdy, and the anatomical; they exalted and celebrated these physical aspects of the human condition; and they resisted them. Throughout the semester, we’ll explore the intersections of poetry and health in the Romantic period, and we’ll consider the body as a salient feature of the Romantic lyric. As we read selections of poetry by canonical and non-canonical British and Anglophone Romantic writers, we’ll discuss a variety of themes, including illness, disability, race, gender, war, and the environment. We will also explore the field of health humanities and learn how Romanticist scholars unite their skills in poetry analysis with research on the history of health, medicine, and disability. Major texts include Lyrical Ballads, Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Percy Shelley’s Alastor, Keats’s Hyperion poems, and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Nineteenth-Century british literary history
Bookended by political upheaval and war, the long nineteenth century represents a period of massive social, political, scientific, and philosophical change. From the French Revolution to the First World War, the events of the nineteenth century represent repeated challenges to the status quo. The period also lends us some of our most beloved writers: William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, and others. The poets, novelists, and creative thinkers of the nineteenth century imagined and reimagined the human experience in times of revolution and radical reform, experimenting with their art forms and developing new modes of expression. In this course, we will explore the period in British literary history from 1789 to 1914 across a variety of genres: poetry, the novel, drama, essays, political documents, and autobiography. Students’ reading, writing, and research will engage several different themes: art and aesthetics, race and abolition, gender and sexuality, politics and imperialism, industrialization and science, etc. We will ask: What is the relationship between literature and society? What kinds of knowledge does the literary imagination possess and create? What can the histories of the past tell us about our own present moment?
Literary analysis
Becoming an English major means mastering your powers of interpretation, and literary analysis is at the heart of every English major’s interpretive practice. This course will introduce you to methods of literary analysis, or “close reading.” Specifically, we will focus on analyzing three main forms of literature—poetry, drama, and prose fiction—and course readings will include poems, short stories, a novel, and a play. As we explore these different genres, we’ll also consider what it means for a text to be considered “literary.” You will learn to notice the nuanced construction of a text, become familiar with literary concepts and terms, and understand the relationship between form and meaning. Writing assignments will develop your powers of analysis and synthesis. You will form compelling arguments, support your ideas with evidence, integrate the ideas of others into your writing, and contribute to a scholarly conversation. Major texts include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rita Dove’s poetry collection Mother Love, and Shakespeare’s King Lear. Readings will also include select poems and short stories.
PAST TEACHING
Mary Taylor Mann 