Educational Background and Pedagogic Philosophy 

I graduated from St. Olaf College, in Northfield, MN, in 1997, where I studied art history, literature, and studio art in a bygone program called the Paracollege. Active between 1969 and 2000, the Paracollege was a rigorous, interdisciplinary route to the BA that allowed students to create their own majors through Oxford-style tutorials, special-topic seminars, and regular college courses.

I still credit this program with instilling in me a belief that education is far more than the acquisition of facts and information. It should make us empathetic, critically minded, and curious about the world -- in short, more human. Moreover, the Paracollege taught me to embrace education and take ownership of it.

In this sense, I still see education as a subversive act, allowing anyone who takes it seriously to exist, mentally at least, outside the structures that attempt to control our lives.

I received my Master's degree from a humanities program at the University of Chicago, where I focused on cinema studies and English. Essentially a key to the university, MAPH allows its students to take any courses they wish, under faculty advisement, to create degrees for themselves that range from highly specialized to very broad and interdisciplinary.

As a teacher, I start each course with the same spirit of inquiry that defined my own formal education. I try to approach topics from all angles, allowing for as many discoveries as lessons along the way. I don't set out with an agenda, but rather a series of questions.

That said, in my writing courses specifically, I believe that certain tools are essential. I insist on students learning the journalistic conventions of attribution and structure, have them edit each others' work to best internalize those rules, and emphasize the necessity of justifying each and every choice you make in your writing. "Beware the unexamined thought," I tell them at the beginning, a comment I refer to repeatedly throughout the course. In other words, if you don't know why you wrote something as you did, you shouldn't keep it.

Courses

Each semester I teach an introductory journalism course at Hunter College, which focuses on writing for print magazines and newspapers. We also address the ethical, political, and corporate aspects of the field, which seem to grow more complicated each year, through essays, articles, and books by some of the field's sharpest critics.

I also teach a course each semester at NYU's School for Continuing and Professional Studies titled Cultural Criticism, which covers the bourgeoning and far-reaching field of cultural journalism and allows students to develop their own writing skills.

In 2009, I taught an intensive January course on David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway, analyzing that film from a variety of theoretical and aesthetic perspectives, placing it in context with Lynch's other work, and discussing its precedents in German Expressionism, Surrealism, the "road movie" genre, and film noir.

In my five years at Hunter, I have twice taught a course on realism in film, focusing on Lars von Trier and his "Dogma Manifesto," early documentaries, French New Wave, and direct cinema, and readings by Andre Bazin, Rudolf Arnheim, Jean Rouch, Maya Deren, and many other theorists, to analyze the various ways that filmmakers have attempted to convey "reality" to viewers over the past century.

In the spring of 2007, I designed and taught a course on cinematic space, which explored the ways in which filmmakers use the natural world to create both physical and atmospheric -- i.e., emotional -- space in their films. We focused on Gus Van Sant, Terrence Malick, Peter Greenaway, and Martin Scorsese, while touching on films by Abbas Kiarostami, Akira Kurasawa, Lech Kowalski, and others.

At Hunter, I have also taught introduction to film, which covers the history and aesthetic developments of international cinema from 1895 to the present, magazine writing, and the business of magazines. In that course we discuss the development and history of magazines in America, how they function on a daily basis, how they survive changing economies and socio-political landscapes, and the many differences between different magazine categories (trade, consumer, association, etc.).

Prior to Hunter and NYU, I taught film history at Columbia College, in Chicago, and a variety of writing and humanities courses at East-West University, also in Chicago.

For a complete list of the courses I have designed and taught, please see my curriculum vitae.