TEACHING

 

I've now been teaching for half a decade. This is a repository of the syllabi of the courses I have taught, and the evaluations I have received during this time.

2017-18

This was the last year in which I taught as a Harper Fellow in the University of Chicago's Society of Fellows. I taught the core three quarter social science sequence, 'Power, Identity, Resistance.'

In Fall 2017, we began the sequence with a class that featured Hobbes' Leviathan, Rousseau's Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality, as well as texts by Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Mill, amongst others. My syllabus is here. I taught two sections; the unedited teaching evaluations for these classes are here and here.

In the Winter 2018 Quarter, I taught the second part of the Power, Identity, Resistance social science core sequence. It featured the by-now classic pairing of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx's Capital: Volume I, along with some more recent additions: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread and Friedrich Hayek's essay, 'Individualism True and False.' My syllabus is here. Unedited student evaluations from the two sections I taught are here and here.

In Spring Quarter 2018, I taught an exciting syllabus including texts by Kant, Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, and Foucault. The syllabus for this class is here. Evaluations for the section I taught that spring are available here.

2016-17

In Fall 2016, I was on sabbatical from the University of Chicago Society of Fellows. I returned in Winter 2017 to teach the second installment of the core social science sequence, 'Power, Identity, Resistance.' It featured Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Marx's Capital Volume I, alongside Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics and Polanyi's The Great Transformation. My syllabus is here. You can read teaching evaluations of the two sections that I taught here and here.

In Spring 2017, I taught the third installment of the core social science sequence, 'Power, Identity, Resistance.' It featured Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Foucault's The History of Sexuality, amongst other texts. My syllabus is here. You can read teaching evaluations of the two sections that I taught here and here.

In the summer 2017, I taught a course called 'The Experience of Urbanization in the Modern World' as part of the University of Chicago's Summer Sessions, aimed at 16-18 year olds. We read philosophical and sociological accounts of the city (from Aristotle to Georg Simmel), and interrogated them alongside films by Jian Zhangke, fiction by Ben Okri, and paintings by Braque. You can read the syllabus here.

The teaching evaluations for the class are here

2015-16

In this academic year, I taught the three-quarter core social science sequence Power, Identity, Resistance, as a Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Fall 2015: Syllabus (Rousseau, Smith, Marx), teaching evaluations: section one, section two.

Winter 2016: Syllabus (Marx, Burke, Hobbes, Locke), teaching evaluations: section one, section two.

Spring 2016Syllabus (Fanon, Malcolm X, de Beauvoir), teaching evaluations: section one, section two.

 

2014-15

This was my first year teaching in the University of Chicago's Society of Fellows. For the next four years, I was to teach in the core social science sequence, 'Power, Identity, Resistance,' which introduces undergraduates to a rigorous set of readings in some of the most fundamental concepts in political theory and social science. 

Fall 2014Syllabus (Smith, Marx, Durkheim), teaching evaluations: section one, section two.

Winter 2015Syllabus (de Tocqueville, Schmitt, Marx), teaching evaluations: section one, section two.

Spring 2015Syllabus (Kant, Freud, Nietzsche), teaching evaluations: section one, section two.

 

2013-14

From 2013-14 I was finishing my Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. In the Fall 2013 semester, I taught a course with my supervisor, Paul Rabinow, called 'From bio-power to bio-design.' We focused on developing a series of concepts that the students could use to inquire into some of the ways that the question of life is at stake in the contemporary world, looking at texts from Michel Foucault and Bertolt Brecht, amongst others, before we divided the class into working groups, that began focused investigations into thematic areas around biopower and biosociality. The syllabus for the course is here (as the course was exploratory, it is only correct that the syllabus was written after the fact; we literally didn't know how the course would unfold).

In the Spring 2014 semester, I taught a course of my own, on the history of the essay-form, from Montaigne to Adorno. The syllabus is available here.