TEACHING

Teaching Experience – University of Fribourg (2006-2025)

Fall 2006

  • Lecture: American Literature, 1865-1914
  • Seminar: Realism and Naturalism
  • Proseminar: The Western

Spring 2007

  • Lecture: American Literature, 1914-1945
  • Seminar: American Expatriate Writers
  • Proseminar: Modernist Identities in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Fall 2007

  • Lecture: American Literature, 1945-Present
  • Seminar: Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop
  • Proseminar: Louise Erdrich

Spring 2008

  • Lecture: Early American Literature through 1836
  • Seminar: The Nation and the Self: Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin
  • Proseminar: Arthur Miller, Selected Plays

Fall 2008

  • Lecture: American Renaissance, 1836-1861
  • Seminar: Wicked Books and Wicked Witches: Melville and Hawthorne
  • Proseminar: Nature, Nation, Self: Emerson’s Essays
  • Research Colloquium

Spring 2009

  • Lecture: Machines, Gardens, Factories: American Literature in the late 19th Century
  • Seminar: Studies in Determinism: Crane, Dreiser, Norris
  • Proseminar: Willa Cather, Selected Novels
  • Research Colloquium

Fall 2009

  • Lecture: Transcontinental Hemingway
  • Research Colloquium

Spring 2010

  • Seminar: San Francisco in History, Literature, and Politics (co-taught with Dr. Catherine Bosshart)
  • Research Colloquium

Fall 2010

  • Lecture: American Poetry since the Age of Lowell
  • Seminar: Derek Walcott: Periphery and Center

Spring 2011

  • Lecture: American Fiction since 1960
  • Seminar: John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy as Social History of the United States

Fall 2011

  • Research Sabbatical 

Spring 2012

  • First-Year Module Lecture: An Overview of American Literary History
  • Proseminar: Introduction to Literary Studies
  • Proseminar: The Western
  • Research Colloquium

Fall 2012

  •  First-Year Module Lecture: An Overview of American Literary History
  • Proseminar: American Essays from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Joan Didion
  • Seminar: 20th-century American Poetry, Part One: from Masters & Robinson to Lowell & Bishop

Spring 2013

  • Lecture: American Literature 1836 – 1914
  • Proseminar: American Memoirs and Life Writing since 1989
  • Seminar: Visions of the West: Wallace Stegner to Sherman Alexie
  • Research Colloquium

Fall 2013

  • Lecture: American Literature 1914 – 1945
  • Proseminar: Literary Theory
  • Seminar: 20th-century American Poetry, Part Two: From the mid-sixties to 
    the present

Spring 2014

  • Research Sabbatical (Dean’s compensation)

Fall 2014

  • First-Year Module Lecture: Introduction to Literary Studies
  • Proseminar: Introduction to Literary Studies
  • Seminar: The American South

Spring 2015

  •  First-Year Module Lecture: An Overview of American Literary History . Tradition and Innovation in American Drama (World Literature Part IV)
  • Proseminar : Introduction to Literary Studies
  • Seminar : Expatriate Autobiographie

Fall 2015

  • Lecture: American Prose Fiction in the Third Millennium
  • Proseminar: The Art of the Essay
  • Seminar: Women’s Lives in Turn-of-the-Century Novels: Crane, Chopin, Dreiser, Wharton, Cather

Spring 2016

  • Lecture: History of American Poetry: Whitman’s Legacy
  • Proseminar: Freedom and Form in American Modernist Poems
  • Seminar: Writing New York

Fall 2016

  • Pre-semester:  BA/MA seminar and excursion. 
    Creative Writing New York
  • Lecture: Nineteenth-Century Prose Fiction: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Twain
  • Proseminar:  Fictions of Communities: Cisneros, Morrison, Boyden

Spring 2017

  • Lecture: History of American Poetry: Dickinson’s Legacy 
  • Proseminar: Southern Literature and Poverty: Theroux, Faulkner, Ward  
  • Seminar: Robert Lowell – The Centennial Seminar

Fall 2017

  • Research Sabbatical

Spring 2018

  • Lecture: A Survey of American Literature, Part II (Intro class)
  • Proseminar: Introduction to Literary Study
  • Seminar: Foundational Documents of American Democracy
  • [University of Berne] Lecture: American Poetry and Culture

Fall 2018

  • Lecture: Social Justice Debates in American Literature
  • Proseminar: Becoming a Reader and Scholar of American Literature I
  • Seminar: Pathos and the American Tradition

Spring 2019

  • Seminar: Women’s Lives in Naturalist Fiction: Crane, Chopin, Dreiser, Wharton, Cather
  • Lecture: American AutobiographiesProseminar: Becoming a Reader and Scholar of American Literature II
  • [University of Berne] Lecture: American Realism and Naturalism 

Fall 2019

  • Lecture: Three American Epics: Song of Myself, The Waste Land, Omeros
  • Proseminar: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Writer and Activist
  • Seminar:  Walt Whitman at 200: Leaves of Grass and Prose Works

Spring 2020

  • Lecture: Fiction since 2015
  • Proseminar: San Francisco and its literature
  • Seminar:  Visions of the American West

Fall 2020

  • Lecture: American Drama
  • Proseminar: Becoming a Reader and Scholar of American Literature I
  • Seminar: African American Women Poets
  • [University of Berne] Lecture: American Drama

Spring 2021

  • Lecture: Survey of American Literature (Intro module class)
  • Proseminar: Becoming a Reader and Scholar of American Literature II
  • Seminar: Music and the American Novel

Fall 2021

  • Lecture: The Forgotten Nineteen-Thirties  
  • Proseminar:  Democracy in America? 
  • Seminar: American Memoirs and Life Writing since 2000   

Spring 2022

  • Lecture: Survey of American Literature (Intro module class)
  • Proseminar: Rhetoric and Narrative in American Fiction
  • Seminar: (with Prof. Julia Straub) Modernism Centennial: Poetry 

Fall 2022

  • Lecture: Six Great Debates in 19th-century America: Expansion, 
    Indigeneity, Slavery, Gender, War, Industrialization
  • Proseminar: Contemporary North American Drama
  • Seminar: American Modernism in Prose

Spring 2023

  • Lecture: Survey of American Literature (Intro module class)
  • Proseminar:  Scorn not the Sonnet!
  • Seminar: Who Tells Your Story? Narrative, Authorship, Authority

Fall 2023

  • Lecture: History of American Poetry
  • Proseminar: American Essays—Art and Voice, Part One: Beginnings to 1950
  • Seminar: Regionalism—the West and the South [with Dr. Aurélie Zurbrügg] 

Spring 2024

  • Lecture: Short Stories: A National Art Form
  • Proseminar: American Essays—Art and Voice, Part Two: 1950 to the Present
  • Seminar: Milton in America

Fall 2024

  • Lecture: Survey of American Literature (Intro module class)
  • Proseminar: Violence and the American Novel
  • Seminar: How to read American Poems  (with Journée d’études with Prof. Ralph Müller)

Spring 2025

  • Lecture: American Self-Deception and Self-Renewal
  • Proseminar: Louise Erdrich
  • Seminar: One Poem—One Novel—One Play

Teaching details from 1986-2006 not listed here.