Teaching

My 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 Michigan, I taught and designed 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.

| 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

Teaching Highlights

History 195
Making the World a Better Place? Global Humanitarianism in the 20th and 21st Century
| University of Michigan, Fall 2019

“Making the World a Better Place? Global Humanitarianism in the 20th and 21st Century” explores the agents, ideas, morals, and practices of humanitarianism in the twentieth and twenty-first century. In this class, students study war zones, scrutinize development projects in the Global South, and investigate how celebrities shape the public imaginary of humanitarianism. Rather than taking for granted that “doing good” is a self-evident moral project, the goal of this course is to investigate critically the internal logics, unintended consequences, and moral stakes of humanitarianism.

This course introduces students to key debates in the field of humanitarianism. It asks: How is distant suffering represented and acted upon by humanitarian practitioners and a broader global public? How are power relations negotiated between donors and recipients? What role do faith-based charities and their particular world views play in the rehabilitation of victims of violence and the poor? How is moral personhood constituted through volunteer work? And how are ethical values linked to human compassion, and vice versa? Global history offers a particularly salient conceptual framework to come to grips with the different iterations, shifting meanings, and varying practices of humanitarianism across cultural and geographic space.

While this course is situated in History, it also seeks to attract students who may pursue careers in international aid, government, public policy, social work, and the broader non-profit sector. The goal of this course is to expose students to the practice of university-level writing and to familiarize them with the most relevant scholarship on humanitarianism. The course material encourages constructive classroom discussions on such topics as socialist conceptions of charity, critiques of a new Western humanitarian imperialism, and the problematic nature of "dark tourism" or “voluntourism,” among others.

To help students grapple with the varied domains of humanitarian practice, this course draws on a variety of source materials ranging from academic articles, book chapters, and novels to online newspaper articles, TED talks, podcasts, and new media such as Twitter and Instagram. In a final group project, students develop their own prescriptions for improving humanitarianism by mobilizing course material as well as external sources.