INSTRUCTOR OF RECORD
ENVS 411: Reimagining Public Lands
Winter 2025, Fall 2026
This course examines and interrogates the ideological origins and contemporary manifestations of public lands in the United States and explores alternative models to settler colonial fortress conservation. Public lands play a powerful role in American understandings of people, place, and planet. What do America’s public lands communicate about our understanding of nature and the environment? How does this understanding interact with race, Indigeneity, ability, gender, sexuality, class, borders, and “American culture” as they are filtered through the various representations, management techniques, research initiatives, and recreation and leisure opportunities in public lands? How might we reimagine public lands and their environmental ramifications in ways that reject the legacy of settler colonial fortress conservation and resist crisis epistemologies, and instead model alternative approaches to engagement with the landscape? Whose knowledges, worldviews, voices, and needs are centered in not only the “idea of public lands,” but also the way interpretive materials are presented in visitor centers, how and why research initiatives are crafted and implemented, and how people engage with these spaces? In asking these questions, we will collaboratively craft modes of engagement that are built upon decolonial, anti-colonial, and liberatory frameworks.
ENVS 345: Environmental Ethics
Summer 2022, Fall 2024
This course addresses key concepts in environmental ethics, including its applications and limitations. We will cover the various manifestations of our moral obligations to the environment, as well as the socio-cultural and political implications that accompany those obligations. How have competing stances on the valuation of the environment manifested in how we view/implement/regulate conservation, resource extraction, agriculture, animals, or the land, broadly? How do we act upon our obligations to the more-than-human world, and by whose metrics or standards? Who is the “we” in all of this anyway? This course seeks to provide an understanding of foundational approaches to environmental ethics and, more importantly, attend to those voices that are frequently and systematically marginalized in conversations on our obligations to the more-than-human world. To that end, this course will critically analyze more “mainstream” environmental ethics before turning to radical relationality and other anti-colonial and decolonial frameworks for environmental ethics by examining both theory and practice.
ENG 244: Introduction to Native American Literature
Winter 2026
Taught with Marta Lu Clifford, UO Tribal Elder-in-Residence
Drawing from oral narratives, novels, memoirs, short stories, poems, and film and visual media, this introductory survey engages an array of Indigenous literary and cultural production to offer a diverse understanding of Indigenous self-representation across multiple geographies, forms, Tribal nations, and time periods. This course is focused specifically on Native American and Indigenous environmental literatures, with attention to the complexity, and sometimes problems, of labeling Native and Indigenous literatures “environmental” in the first place. To this end, this course not only identifies and engages with Indigenous literary and cultural production that is “environmental,” but also considers how Indigenous authors, scholars, and creatives often question, negotiate, expand, and sometimes subvert the category of “environmental” in their work.
ENG 104z: Introduction to Fiction
Spring 2026
Taught with Marta Lu Clifford, UO Tribal Elder-in-Residence
The study of fiction invites us to enter imaginative narratives and confront the challenges of being human. English 104Z provides opportunities for the appreciation of fiction, including deeper awareness of craft and insight into how reading fiction can lead to self-enrichment. In this offering of ENG 104Z, students will read Indigenous horror novels and short stories to develop their skills in discussion, literary analysis, and critical thinking and gain deeper understanding of fiction as a type of cultural production.
WR121z: Composition I
Fall 2023, Winter 2024, Spring 2024
WR 121z engages students in the study and practice of critical thinking, reading, and writing. The course focuses on analyzing and composing across varied rhetorical situations and in multiple genres. Students will apply key rhetorical concepts flexibly and collaboratively throughout their writing and inquiry processes.
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DISCUSSION SECTIONS
ENVS 345: Environmental Ethics (Fall 2022)
ENVS 201: Introduction to Environmental Social Sciences (Spring 2026)
ENG 104z: Introduction to Fiction (Fall 2025)
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TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIPS
ENVS 410: Nature and Pop Culture (Winter 2023)
ENVS 455: Sustainability (Spring 2023)