Teaching

I am an experienced teacher of European history, intellectual history, and gender, sexuality, and queer history across regions and time periods. I am especially committed to incorporating queer and trans content and methods into standard courses in modern British and European history; to teaching academic research and writing skills within history classes; and to improving access to historical research, graduate school, and the academic profession for those from underrepresented backgrounds.

At Oxford, I teach widely across the largely team-taught undergraduate curriculum, including survey courses/core modules on British history 1688–present, European and world history in the long nineteenth century, and historical methods; as well as more specialized courses on gender and sexuality. My graduate seminar, “Approaches to Queer and Trans Histories,” which I first taught in winter 2022, was the first course in LGBTQ+ histories ever to have been offered in the Oxford History Faculty. I advise undergraduate and master’s theses on topics ranging from facial hair in early modern Europe to lesbian activism in 1980s Britain.

At Columbia I taught Contemporary Civilization, a discussion-based course in philosophy and the history of political thought that is part of Columbia’s mandatory Core Curriculum. My syllabuses for CC are available here and here. I was also a teaching assistant for courses in modern European history, modern British history, and US intellectual history, and advised honors theses in British and European history.

I am especially committed to improving the representation of queer history and the history of sexuality in British and European history courses. To this end, I have developed a handout identifying best practices for addressing classical Athenian pederasty in Western Civilization and similar classes. At Oxford, I have contributed extensively to initiatives to improve coverage of the history of women, gender, and sexuality across the undergraduate curriculum.

My interest in teaching primary-source research skills in the undergraduate classroom prompted me to write an article, “Researching and Teaching with British Newsreels,” that was published in Twentieth Century British History in September 2021.