As an undergraduate I majored in Philosophy. After college, I spent two years in Europe, teaching English as a Second Language in Spain; this was when I discovered how enriching and satisfying teaching could be. I came to New York, began a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and, almost simultaneously, started teaching as an adjunct at Queens College. When I was hired full-time at LaGuardia in 1990, I became involved in learning communities (thematically clustered courses) and have since designed and taught in many with colleagues in Theatre and Philosophy. Last Fall, we taught a cluster called, Identity, Performance and Poetic Justice, and this Fall we are teaching Heroes, Gods and Monsters: Classic Stories Then and Now. More than anything else I appreciate the freedom LaGuardia has given me to design courses, expand programs and to work creatively with great students and colleagues. One course that I have found especially interesting to teach over the years is LIB 200, Humanism, Science and Technology, a capstone seminar for graduating liberal arts majors. In this seminar, students research and apply knowledge from core liberal arts courses to contemporary issues (from AIDS as a global pandemic to Sex Tourism in Thailand).
Schools Attended: A.B. Bishop’s University , Quebec, Canada ; Ph.D. City University Graduate Center, Comparative Literature Program
Area of Specialization: The novel: my dissertation was based on the work of Henry James and Marcel Proust—unlikely partners; I love to teach the novel—from classic to postmodern—Emily Bronte, Haruki Murakami. Zora Neale Hurston and Garcia Marquez; I also love postcolonial novels like Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. More I recently have taught literature of the American Southwest and have been discovering and teaching Latino and Native American poets.
Favorite Quote: Re-reading E.M. Forster this Spring, I came across the following somber statement: “Death destroys a man but the idea of death saves him” (E.M. Forster, Howard’s End) and because I teach classical tragedy in many courses (Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Medea), I thought about why we are fascinated by the inevitable end of things and how Forster is right: that how we make meaning—by thinking about endings. The Chorus in Oedipus Rex, contemplating the fate of the hero, observes: “What man, what man on earth wins more of happiness than a seeming/and after that turning away.” Here is Virginia Woolf in a similar mood: “Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to eve that death ended absolutely? But somehow she survived she being part of the trees at home, part of the people she had never met, being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. . .she felt herself everywhere. . . so that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them.”
Authors I teach: Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Antigone; Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Henry James, Washington Square; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera; and the most popular poem I have taught this year, Jimmy Santiago Baca, “As Life was Five.”