I am currently a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Rutgers University. I have previously taught at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul as well as the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU.
I teach courses in areas including Romanticism, literary and critical theory, Core Humanities/Great Books, World Literature, and media studies.
Representative Courses
“At the Mind’s Limits: The Holocaust in History, Theory, and Literature”
(Princeton, Freshman Seminars Program), to be taught in Fall 2023.
This seminar offers a contemporary, interdisciplinary introduction to the study of the Holocaust (or “Shoah”), moving between works of history, first-person accounts, fiction, poetry, film, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and philosophy, testing the limits and powers of these divergent idioms, genres, disciplines in the face of atrocity. We will also have to ask to what extent the traditional functions of philosophy and theory – critique, speculation, and abstraction – are still valid in the wake of genocide and how they might need to be transformed to reckon with the Shoah. To what extent are poetry (and by extension, the other arts) still possible “after Auschwitz”? Is it possible to think about the Holocaust “comparatively” or indeed “intersectionally”? How does the Holocaust relate to contemporary forms of racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and fascism? Readings from Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Paul Celan, Art Spiegelman, Judith Butler, Enzo Traverso, Saul Friedländer, Marianne Hirsch, Michael Rothberg, Susan Neiman; films from Claude Lanzmann and Harun Farocki.
Masterworks of World Literature: Border-Crossing, Exile, and Diaspora
(Rutgers, Comparative Literature), offered in 2021 and 2023.
This seminar approaches the vexed notion of “World Literature” by way of a cluster of concepts bearing on the movement of peoples and individuals: exodus, exile, diaspora, migration, and fugitivity. Setting out from ancient sources and working our way up to the present of globalization, we will try to assemble a working theory of literary mobility. We will ask the same basic questions of each text we read: What compels movement? Who leaves and who stays behind? Is the destination known in advance? And how is this journey narrated and represented? We will also address broader, comparative questions: To what do extent modern narratives of migration and exile borrow from and rework ancient narratives? To what extent do these narrative modes themselves ‘migrate’ across cultures? To what extent has modern capitalist globalization fundamentally altered the ways in which human mobility occurs and can be narrated? How have slavery and its abolition as well as colonialism and decolonization altered the terms in which migration and diaspora can be understood? Readings from The Bible, Virgil, Baudelaire, Hurston, Césaire, Anna Seghers, Mahmoud Darwish, Yuri Herrera, Ling Ma, Valeria Luiselli, Solmaz Sharif.
Short Fiction: Europe and the Americas
(Rutgers, Comparative Literature), offered in 2019.
This seminar offers an introduction to modern short fiction from Europe and the Americas. The primary aim of this course is to expose students to a relatively large number of important (or ‘great’) authors in a single semester, as afforded by the brevity of the assigned texts. Our secondary aim will be to explore the short story form itself. We will be particularly concerned with the way in which the modern short story is characterized by a drive to novelty that aligns it with modern capitalism and the culture of the commodity, but also with formal experimentation and so-called ‘high literature.’ Another recurrent question will be the scale or economy of narrative – how we judge in the first place whether a story is “short” or “long” and whether such judgments are made on the basis of ‘what happens’ in a story, of how these events are narrated, or a combination of both. Finally, we will also explore the dialectical relation between national literary traditions and “world literature,” tracking how forms circulate and change across national boundaries, but also how short fictions may depict or produce “worlds” far from the national contexts in which they are written. Readings from Kleist, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Baudelaire, Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Joyce, Kafka, Mansfield, Borges, Flannery O’Connor, Baldwin, Cortazar, Lispector, Bolaño, Octavia Butler, Lydia Davis, Jemisin.
Romanticism and War
Princeton, Comparative Literature/European Cultural Studies), offered in 2016.
Counter to received wisdom, it is in the Romantic period, not the 20th century, that war assumes its modern form as “total war.” In this seminar, we will thus examine how literary, philosophical, and artistic Romanticisms grapple with this new phenomenon. Subtopics include: war, media, and technology; landscape, spectatorship, and the sublime; the eventful and the ordinary; cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the concept of Europe. Readings from Kant, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, de Quincey, Clausewitz, Kleist, Stendhal, Austen, Freud, Butler.
“Marx in the 21st Century”
(Princeton, Freshman Seminars Program) offered in 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
What would a Marxism for the 21st century look like? Our seminar will examine the contemporary viability of Marx’s fundamental concepts – such as labor, exploitation, ideology, and revolution. How must these concepts be reimagined to account for the specific shape of contemporary capitalism? What can Marxism learn from forms of critical thought that have emerged more recently, especially those concerned with race and gender? Subtopics include student-debt, social media and communicative capitalism, eco-Marxism, #Blacklivesmatter, Occupy Wall Street. Readings from Marx & Engels, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Cedric Robinson, Jackie Wang, Nancy Fraser, Andreas Malm, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Crary; guest-sessions with Anna Kornbluh, Anahid Nersessian, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Joshua Clover, Cinzia Arruzza, M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi.
Masterworks of Western Literature
(Rutgers, Comparative Literature), offered in 2019, 2020, and 2022.
“Masterworks of Western Literature” offers a critical introduction to the “Western” (specifically, European and American) literary tradition, presenting a chronological series of exemplary works in a variety of genres. In addition to learning and working with the fundamental terms and concepts of literary study (narrative, genre, figurative language, etc.), we will pay special attention to the relation of literary questions to political and social ones. Specifically, this will entail investigating how literary texts interact with political forms (polis, empire, nation-state), ratify the viewpoints of certain characters at the expense of others in the construction of “reality,” depict and embellish the language of various social groups, and respond to the upheavals of modernity (capitalism and the industrial revolution, mass democracy, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, feminism). Readings from Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Schiller, Austen, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Woolf, Hurston, and Baldwin.
The Way We Watch Now: ‘Quality Television,’ Contemporary culture, and Critical Theory
(Princeton, Freshman Seminars Program), offered in 2017.
In the last fifteen years, the status of television within the broader cultural landscape has undergone a radical shift. Contemporary television (at least in its ‘quality’ incarnation) is now grasped not only as “art,” but as the very form of art to which we turn in order to understand best the present in which we live. In this freshman seminar, we will thus examine the rise of ‘quality television,’ beginning with its signature programs – The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad – all of which use the multi-season serial form to bring about an arguably unprecedented degree of conceptual complexity and dramatic intensity. To help us develop an analytical language to discuss these programs, we will sample the fast-growing and highly diverse body of scholarship dedicated to these shows. We will be particularly concerned with the analysis each of these shows sketches out of contemporary capitalism and its characteristic institutions and forms of life. Gender will also be an ongoing concern, given the persistent suspicion that the label ‘quality television’ may have something masculinist about it, insofar as the term first emerges in relation to a series of so-called ‘male anti-hero shows.’ We’ll thus turn to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a program that arguably performs a feminist deconstruction of the very concept of ‘quality television.’ Finally, we’ll conclude the semester by taking up a slew of contemporary programs all of which in some way engage with feminism, queer gender-politics, and/or a critique of traditional masculinity – Girls, Transparent, and Broad City. Readings from Linda Williams, Adam Kotsko, Dana Polan, Caroline Levine, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Anthony Adler, Judith Butler, Sianne Ngai.
Crises of European Subjectivity, 1945-1961
(Princeton, Comparative Literature/European Cultural Studies), offered in 2016.
This course examines the crisis of European subjectivity in the wake of WWII and the Holocaust. Such a crisis implicates not merely the concepts of Europe and the subject, but the very concept of the concept and thus entails a transformation of thought itself. Topics include crises of the subject and the human; the question of technology; the Franco-German relation; the Cold War; decolonization; exile and emigration; essay, aphorism, and lecture as anti-systematic modes. Readings from Adorno, Heidegger, Arendt, Lacan, Celan, and Fanon.