Teaching

My teaching and mentoring at Harvard—which has been recognized with a Certificate for Excellent Teaching from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, based on student evaluations—has given me experience with a variety of pedagogical contexts, from senior thesis advising to classroom seminars and small writing tutorials with only three or four students. Inspired by the pedagogical philosophies of bell hooks and Paulo Freire, I primarily employ dialogical methods and mindfulness to cultivate a sense of community and open inquiry in the classroom. Collective trust and intellectual generosity, in this context, make space for students to take more risks as thinkers, consider new ideas, and experience principled debate across difference.

I have served as a Teaching Fellow in Harvard College classes on Indigenous history, historical methods, and the history of the 1960s. I have also designed courses and syllabi on the courses listed below. Beyond this, I have co-instructed a meditation class on Zen Buddhism at Old Colony Correctional Center, lectured at Holyoke Public Library, and facilitated several workshops on the history of decolonial mass action, direct action in the civil rights movement, and other topics.

Designed Courses

Global Black Radical Traditions

Course Level: Advanced

“The overseer’s whip is now fully supplanted by the lash of hunger!” Lucy Parsons lamented in her 1886 essay, “The Negro.” Parsons, born a slave, was an active leader in U.S. socialist and anarchist movements in their heyday in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But she was just one figure in a long line of black people globally—from the continent to the many homes of the diaspora—who turned to socialism as a vehicle for racial equality. Others, including W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Angela Davis, Kwame Nkrumah, and Andrée Blouin, linked the struggle for racial equality to a universal struggle for human emancipation from economic bondage. While the term “black radical tradition” has served as a unifying descriptor for these black thinkers, this course considers the many black radical traditions, plural, and where they diverge from each other. Engaging some of the newest English translations of African anti-colonial leaders and surveying some of the most influential and forgotten theorists across regions—including Ghana, Tanzania, Brazil, Trinidad, Central African Republic, Jamaica, and the United States—this course reckons with the history of divergent black socialisms and their implications for our understanding of the global economy and the international order.

Prison Abolition and Transformative Justice

Course Level: Introductory to Intermediate

In the summer of 2020—after yet another murder of an unarmed black man by American police—cities erupted in a wave of protests that spanned across multiple countries with a unified chant: “Black Lives Matter.” This slogan, popularized in previous waves of protests beginning in 2013, was now accompanied by a demand which had previously been hidden from mainstream attention: to defund and abolish the police, and concomitantly, the prison system. This course seeks to understand this demand through three primary approaches: first, through close historical study of the figures and traditions which have articulated it—putting European and Euro-American radicals (e.g. Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Eugene Debs) in conversation with African American thinkers (e.g. Lucy Parsons, Angela Davis, and George Jackson); second, through philosophical and conceptual analysis of the merits of arguments for and against prison abolition (including through readings of contemporary Left critics of abolition, by Joy James, Tommie Shelby, and Cedric Johnson); and third, through concrete engagement with examples of experiments in restorative and transformative justice processes. How has abolitionist thought been historically linked to other ideas—including anarchism, Marxism, anti-colonialism, and feminism? How have abolitionist movements attempted to achieve their goals? And what has the transformative justice movement taught its participants about politics, life, and liberation?

Anarchism, the State, and the Law

Course Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Nation-states and the law: we need them, or else there would be chaos. Or so we are taught. Rarely do we interrogate the law or the institution of the state. Many can imagine a world without racial hierarchy, sexism, or even capitalism; few can imagine a world without the state. This course is a critical examination of anarchist theories of the law and the state, with a focus on the first century of modern anarchist activity between 1870 and 1970. In addition to reading anarchist theories of the state, we will examine the history of anarchist engagements with the law in practice—from the struggles to decriminalize anarchists’ political speech through appeals to the First Amendment, to the infamous deportation cases of prominent anarchist immigrants like Emma Goldman. Students should emerge from the course with a global, transnational understanding of anarchist theories of and engagements with the state, and the kinds of stateless societies anarchists envisioned.

Introduction to African American Political Thought

Course Level: Introductory

In the face of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racialized mass incarceration, and other indignities, African Americans have cultivated a rich intellectual tradition of political thought. This course examines some of the key figures, debates, and concepts within this tradition from the period of slavery to the protests of 2020. Surveying figures with loyalties to black nationalism, emigration, integration, capitalism, socialism, and feminism, this course asks students to reckon with the diversity and disputes found within the African American political tradition and critically engage the normative claims, premises, and logical coherence (or lack thereof) of the arguments presented by different thinkers. Emphasis will be placed on situating thinkers within their respective historical contexts.

The History of Direct Action in 20th-Century African American Life

Course Level: Intermediate

The Montgomery Bus Boycott. The sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. Freedom rides. These efforts from the classical stage of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s are burned into the retinas of American memory. But did they come out of nowhere, to create sufficient pressure for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, only to disappear? This course treats the 20th-century history of direct action protest in African American life, beginning with the streetcar boycotts organized in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson and continuing through the protests against South African apartheid and Rodney King’s assault. Drawing on a wide range of both primary and secondary sources, the course illuminates a rich tradition of direct action in African American life well beyond the classical civil rights movement—and delves into many of the philosophical and ethical questions and debates that come with direct action methods, including: violence versus nonviolence, the intended function and purpose of protest, how direct action transforms its participants, and more.

Fascism and Antifascism: A Global History

Course Level: Intermediate to Advanced

“We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action,” Langston Hughes declared at the Second International Writers Congress in Paris in 1937. “We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” Fascism: what is it? Who, historically, has theorized it, and to what ends? How, and by whom, has it been resisted? This course examines these questions from a global perspective, surveying the many historiographic debates on fascism and its defining features (whether in Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, or Jim Crow’s southern United States) and the rich and contested history of antifascism as expressed in these places and beyond. From the anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells and the anti-colonial polemics of Aimé Césaire to the writing of Hannah Arendt on “the banality of evil” and that concept’s many critics, this course treats some of the most urgent and enduring debates in studies of fascism and antifascism—with an eye toward their implications for today.

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