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 (Dean’s teaching reduction)

 

  • Lecture: Transcontinental Hemingway
  • Research Colloquium

Spring 2010 (Dean’s teaching reduction)

 

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

Fall 2010 (Dean’s teaching reduction)

 

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

Spring 2011 (Dean’s teaching reduction)

 

  • 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.