Students in LBS 2315: Re-Presenting Africa: Restoration and Restitution study an egungun masquerade at the Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase, Spring 2025.
Teaching: Decolonizing Pedagogy
My teaching is grounded in decolonial pedagogy and equity-centered practice. That means designing courses that actively decenter Western knowledge systems, centering the experiences and intellectual traditions of people who have been marginalized by those systems, and creating classrooms where students develop the critical tools to recognize and challenge structures of power — including the ones embedded in the literary canon itself.
At SUNY Purchase, I teach comparative literature courses at the intersection of postcolonial theory, race, gender, and sexuality, including Decolonizing Sex and Gender and Animals and Humans at the Crossroads. I also work one-on-one with students on independent research, senior capstone projects, and e-portfolio development, and I have developed curriculum specifically designed to support non-traditional students in navigating higher education.
My classroom is rigorous, inclusive, and built on the conviction that how we teach is inseparable from what we teach.
Interested in hearing more about decolonial pedagogy and equity-centered curriculum design? Get in talk about a talk or workshop.
Courses
Literature
Decolonizing Sex and Gender
Working through novels, short stories, and documentary film, students trace the long reach of British colonial law and social norms into contemporary queer life — and explore how writers from Nigeria, India, Uganda, and beyond are telling their own stories on their own terms. The course draws on queer theory and postcolonial studies to give students a critical vocabulary for reading at the intersection of sexuality, gender, and colonial history.
Re-Presenting Africa
A course at the intersection of African literature and cultural anthropology, examining how African peoples and cultures have been misrepresented by colonial and Western media — and how African writers, artists, and communities are reclaiming and re-presenting their own histories. Students engage with novels, artifacts, and archives to develop critical frameworks for reading across disciplines.
Global Studies
Humans & Animals
A comparative literature course that asks students to think seriously about the relationship between human societies and the natural world through literature from the Global South. Reading writers from Nigeria, India, and beyond, students examine how environmental exploitation, colonial extraction, and ecological destruction are represented — and resisted — in fiction.
Migration
Students move from a broad overview of historical migration patterns to close readings of fiction, memoir, and film organized around four themes: departures, arrivals, living in limbo, and returns. Along the way, the course takes seriously the concepts that shape migration debates — diaspora, belonging, assimilation, nativism, xenophobia — and asks students to think critically about what it means to be "a nation of immigrants" in the present political moment, when the stakes of that phrase have never been higher.
Capstone e-Portfolio
Capstone Proseminar
A senior seminar guiding students through the development of a professional e-portfolio that tells the story of their education and positions them for life after graduation. Students learn to curate their academic work, write reflectively about their growth, and present themselves as thinkers and practitioners to public audiences.
Capstone e-Portfolio
students refine and digitally publish the portfolios they have been building throughout their time at Purchase. Students learn to curate their academic work for professional audiences, write critically and reflectively about their intellectual growth, and present themselves with clarity and purpose — whether they are headed to graduate school, a career, or something in between. The result is a polished, public-facing document that tells the story of their education in their own words.