Teaching
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My undergraduate and graduate teaching encompasses a global, transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary breadth similar to my research. Trained as Global and World historian at the University of Michigan, my courses introduce students to conceptualizations of history as the product of interrelated world regions shaped by the movement of humans, ideas, and goods. In the classroom, my students explore causal roots for historical change and elucidate key historical developments, sometimes at the largest scale, without losing sight of local complexity, human agency, and a sense for the uneven, and indeed violent, power relations that lie at the core of these histories. My classes regularly become explorations of grand narratives that anchor the present in broader temporal and spatial frameworks through such concepts as capitalism, globalization, modernization, or human rights, among others.
At the University of Michigan, I taught undergraduate classes in global economic and political history through the regional lens of Eastern Europe (Poland in the Modern World) and environmental history (Garbage in the Modern World). My goal was to familiarize students from different academic backgrounds with a wide range of historical concepts, help sharpen their critical thinking skills, and nourish a culture of informed debate in the classroom. To facilitate classroom education, I incorporated pedagogical methods ranging from interactive learning, peer reviews, project-based activities to "traditional" writing assignments with extensive instructor feedback. An essential part of my training at Michigan involved teaching the History Department’s survey course Modern World History since 1450. This class explored how capitalism integrated the world’s various regions culturally, economically, and politically over the course of 500 years. Students learned to see the world as interrelated, develop causal explanations for historical events, and identify distinct time periods as well as the changes and continuities between them. Exploring forms of cultural exchange, political organization, technology, and global trade, this course challenged my students’ assumptions about the West’s timeless and self-evident global dominance. |
In Fall 2019, I designed and taught a class on global humanitarianism (Making the World a Better Place? Global Humanitarianism in the 20th and 21st Centur) that introduced first-year undergraduates to academic writing. In this course, I assigned the most relevant and interesting studies shaping recent debates on humanitarianism from History, Anthropology, Political Science, Behavioral Economics, Moral Philosophy, and Psychology to challenge students to scrutinize the logics, paradoxes, and unexpected outcomes of humanitarianism. In the first part of the semester, the class examined emergency aid to disaster-ridden places like Haiti. Students also examined relief campaigns to post-conflict zones such as Bosnia and analyzed how charity fundraisers create new visions of consumer citizenship in the United States. In the final part of the semester, the class shifted to group projects, where student teams developed actionable proposals for practical, lasting, and meaningful improvements in the humanitarian arena.
At the University of Washington, my most recent teaching engagement included a graduate-level micro-seminar in Winter 2021, titled Comparative Humanitarianisms. I taught this course in conjunction with yearlong Mellon Sawyer Seminar Humanitarianisms: Migrations and Care through the Global South at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. This course explored non-Western ideologies, movements, values, or beliefs that underlie a concern with the suffering of distant others. Students engaged a genealogical study of humanitarianism rooted in non-Western practices of service, hospitality, gift-giving, and mercy. | Teaching Keywords Borders, Bodies, Class, Culture, Democracy, Disaster, Economic Life, Empire, Environment, Ethics, Equality and Justice, Gender, Glocalism, Humanitarianism, Human Rights, Materiality, Migration, Nations, Networks, Politics, Race, Sexuality, State, Society |
