What is the best part about teaching in this graduate program?
For me, the most exciting thing about teaching LST 797, our final Portfolio project, is the diversity of research projects I encounter — projects with topics ranging from the history of fashion to various responses to the educational crisis engendered by Covid 19.
What is the one thing you hope students take away from your course(s)?
I hope students realize both the breadth and depth of knowledge they’ve acquired. LST 797 provides students an opportunity to reflect on the plan of study they developed for MALS, and to engage in a final research project as the culmination of that plan.
What kinds of coursework and capstone projects should students expect?
Students should expect to offer both reflective papers on the reasoning behind their plan of study and research papers stemming from the topic organizing that plan of study. They will put together a portfolio with samples of work from all the courses they took.
What advice would you give to a student who wants to be successful?
To craft a plan of study from the beginning that you find especially appealing and engaging, with an eye toward the topic for your final research. With so much flexibility in MALS, finding a topic and coursework you truly find interesting is highly advantageous.
What is the focus of your scholarly pursuits?
Like the MALS program, my research is highly interdisciplinary. I work on relations between the history of science and literature in early modernity. I work on topics like the history of astronomy and Shakespeare, or the relation between mechanism and literary forms like allegory.
What is the most interesting thing, to you, about the research area you’re pursuing?
I’m interested in how developments in fields we now tend to think of as rigidly distinct, like physics and literature, were profoundly related to each other in a period before the development of contemporary academic divisions.