About my teaching.
As a teacher and scholar of media studies, I equip students with the critical tools needed to analyze the popular texts, icons, and moving images that they may take for granted in their everyday lives. My approach to teaching and mentoring is what I call passionate inquiry, that is, letting one’s passions and organic interests guide one’s research. This begins for me in the selection of topics and media texts covered in class. I routinely populate my syllabi with films, media texts, and contemporary topics that I’ve never taught before. I like to learn alongside my students, so that we can explore together and teach one another.
The substantial benefit of this approach is that I model passionate inquiry for the students. They witness in real time how I look closely at a piece of media, bring a set of questions to it, and find answers through discussion and weighing of ideas. This approach also keeps the material fresh and allows students to share their own expertise, whether it be with media technologies like video games and social networks or with knowledge gained in other classes or extracurricular activities.
I aim to be a facilitator of the students’ inquiry rather than an authoritative dispenser of information. This serves them well in their lives beyond the university, particularly given the ever shifting nature of modern media. Instead of just providing training in technologies or techniques that are likely to be outdated within a few years, I give students the terminology, historical frameworks, and methods of analysis that they can bring to any media object—from the past, present, or future—in order to critically engage with it and understand it more deeply.
The substantial benefit of this approach is that I model passionate inquiry for the students. They witness in real time how I look closely at a piece of media, bring a set of questions to it, and find answers through discussion and weighing of ideas. This approach also keeps the material fresh and allows students to share their own expertise, whether it be with media technologies like video games and social networks or with knowledge gained in other classes or extracurricular activities.
I aim to be a facilitator of the students’ inquiry rather than an authoritative dispenser of information. This serves them well in their lives beyond the university, particularly given the ever shifting nature of modern media. Instead of just providing training in technologies or techniques that are likely to be outdated within a few years, I give students the terminology, historical frameworks, and methods of analysis that they can bring to any media object—from the past, present, or future—in order to critically engage with it and understand it more deeply.
Tools for students
New courses created at Emory
Introduction to Television and Digital Media
Designed in conjunction with Dr. Michele Schreiber and Dr. Beretta Smith-Shomade. This course introduces the analysis of television and digital media. Readings and assignments identify and evaluate the aesthetic principles, narrative strategies, and cultural significances of these media forms. Although not a history course, it explores some technological developments that shift how media are produced, distributed, consumed, and monetized from the origins of television in the early 20th century to the social media, streaming video, and video games of today.
Black Mirror
This course closely examines the Netflix/Channel 4 series Black Mirror (2011-2019), a science-fiction anthology series that explores the implications of digital technology on our society. The class pairs screenings of the show with readings on the relationships between digital media and politics, social relationships, privacy, identity, trolling, etc. Students then work on their own ideas for Black Mirror episodes.
Video Games
The “Video Games” course serves as an introduction to the history, theory, form, function, and culture of video games. The first half of the syllabus focuses on broad formal and ontological questions: What makes a video game distinctive as a medium? How do video games use narrative, and how is that use different from film or literature? How does the industrial context of gaming shape its form? The second half of the course concentrates on issues of culture: the representation of gender, race, class, and sexuality; video game violence and its effects on player culture; the rise of professional gaming and eSports; the changing cultural status of video games; and the use of video games for advocacy and social change. In a two-hour weekly lab session, the students play video games together.
Honors Methods Seminar
This seminar was developed to help undergraduate honors students in Film and Media Studies learn the research, writing, and production methodologies that will allow them to complete their honors thesis projects in a timely fashion. Faculty mentors visit the class to discuss their own writing and creative strategies, and the students share and workshop their work-in-progress. Giving them the opportunity to communicate their ongoing research findings to their peers encourages the students to learn from one another and creates an atmosphere of support and collaboration.
Designed in conjunction with Dr. Michele Schreiber and Dr. Beretta Smith-Shomade. This course introduces the analysis of television and digital media. Readings and assignments identify and evaluate the aesthetic principles, narrative strategies, and cultural significances of these media forms. Although not a history course, it explores some technological developments that shift how media are produced, distributed, consumed, and monetized from the origins of television in the early 20th century to the social media, streaming video, and video games of today.
Black Mirror
This course closely examines the Netflix/Channel 4 series Black Mirror (2011-2019), a science-fiction anthology series that explores the implications of digital technology on our society. The class pairs screenings of the show with readings on the relationships between digital media and politics, social relationships, privacy, identity, trolling, etc. Students then work on their own ideas for Black Mirror episodes.
Video Games
The “Video Games” course serves as an introduction to the history, theory, form, function, and culture of video games. The first half of the syllabus focuses on broad formal and ontological questions: What makes a video game distinctive as a medium? How do video games use narrative, and how is that use different from film or literature? How does the industrial context of gaming shape its form? The second half of the course concentrates on issues of culture: the representation of gender, race, class, and sexuality; video game violence and its effects on player culture; the rise of professional gaming and eSports; the changing cultural status of video games; and the use of video games for advocacy and social change. In a two-hour weekly lab session, the students play video games together.
Honors Methods Seminar
This seminar was developed to help undergraduate honors students in Film and Media Studies learn the research, writing, and production methodologies that will allow them to complete their honors thesis projects in a timely fashion. Faculty mentors visit the class to discuss their own writing and creative strategies, and the students share and workshop their work-in-progress. Giving them the opportunity to communicate their ongoing research findings to their peers encourages the students to learn from one another and creates an atmosphere of support and collaboration.
Courses taught at Emory
Undergraduate
- FILM 101: Introduction to Film
- FILM 102: Introduction to Television and Digital Media
- FILM 190: Introduction to Film (Freshman Seminar)
- FILM 208: Digital Media and Culture (no longer taught)
- FILM 280: Video Games
- FILM 285: Black Mirror
- FILM 396: South Korean Cinema
- FILM 406: War in Film and Media (Senior Seminar)
- FILM 490: Honors Methods Seminar
- FILM 500: Introduction to Graduate Film and Media Studies
- FILM 502: The War Film
