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​Guided by the pedagogical writings of the Black and Banaban theorist Teresia Teaiwa, my teaching seeks to inculcate durable shifts in affect and perspective in my students alongside ensuring fluency in course material. Emphasizing past/present and local/global connections, I encourage students to think comparatively about politics and intellectual history – both across texts in the same tradition and across geography and context.

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In addition to my substantial experience as a teaching assistant, I have also designed and taught three separate undergraduate classes a total of eight times, including "Introductory Political Theory" and the upper-division classes "Theories of Populism" and "The Politics of Popular Aesthetics: Kitsch, Memes, and Video Games." These courses taught as instructor of record have frequently been among the most highly enrolled and highly rated Summer classes in my department at UCLA – an achievement that reflects my commitment to making political theory accessible and relevant to all students. 

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In all my classes, I seek to combine a strong foundation in the political theory canon with an attention to the particularities of modern politics and the ways they are experienced by the diverse student populations I have taught. To this end, my syllabi (particularly for my introductory classes) frequently pair canonical texts with recent political theory scholarship from a range of perspectives that show how canonical texts have been taken up, critiqued, and utilized by scholars interested in a range of current political issues. ​​Likewise, one of my goals in designing upper-division classes is to draw in students from both other political science subfields and from outside of political science as a whole. My class "Theories of Populism" enrolled a large number of American and comparative politics students, while "The Politics of Popular Aesthetics" attracted students from art history, sociology, comparative literature, and beyond. 

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My anonymous course evaluations consistently foreground not only my substantive knowledge and clarity of communication, but also my understanding and unintimidating demeanor, as well as my ability to organically relate canonical texts to current political contestations and draw global connections across geography and time. 

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