Teaching

Spring 2024

Sex Wars: Religion and Gender in the Public Sphere

Brown University Department of Religious Studies

Position: Visiting Instructor, introductory undergraduate course of my own design

Religious traditions have always had a lot to say about sex, gender, and sexuality—be it eunuchs under Roman rule or reproductive autonomy in the US today. Many heated and long-standing public debates take place at this very intersection. While we tend to imagine religion as inherently sex negative, religious communities have diverse and diverging approaches to sex and sexuality. In this course, we turn to “Sex Wars” in the public imagination, including but not limited to: abortion, miscegenation, gay marriage, sodomy, contraception, trans life, child and sexual abuse, consent, and the AIDS crisis. Using resources from religious studies and gender studies, we will investigate the way such public debates appear and recur, deepening our understanding of the relationship between religion, racialized gender, and public discourse, and developing tools to both research on and intervene in these ongoing debates.

Angels and Monsters: Queer and Trans Religion

Brown University Department of Religious Studies 

Position: Visiting Instructor, advanced undergraduate course of my own design

Gender and sexual diversity is often described in religious terms: before “gay” became shorthand for homosexuality, German activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs proposed “Uranian” in the 1860s, based off Greek mythology; in 2023, a Florida state representative called trans people “demons.” Queers have used religious language to make sense of experiences and carve our space for gender and sexual non-normativity to flourish. At the same time, those who decry such forms of life also use religious language to make their case. In this seminar, we use religious studies and queer and trans studies to examine the relationship between queerness, transness, and religion, thinking across religious difference through fiction, film, poetry, and academic work alike. Students will undertake an independent project of their choice, building analytical and argumentative skills. What might thinking queerly about religion, or religiously about queerness, do for us?

WGS 97 Sophomore Tutorial: Dreams of a Common Language

Course Instructor: Caroline Light

Harvard College

Position: Teaching Fellow

This course provides an introduction (in no way exhaustively) to key concepts and texts in the study of women, gender, and sexuality. Together, we will develop a shared vocabulary to help prepare for advanced study in the concentration and beyond. We will practice using foundational concepts such as performativity, queerness, intersectionality, mestiza consciousness, homonationalism, neoliberalism, and gender as a category of analysis. We will learn to distinguish among various forms of feminism. We will encounter queer theory and feminist approaches to decarceration. Throughout the semester, we will practice applying these concepts to the analysis of archival texts and to issues with which we grapple on a daily basis. Finally, this course encourages everyone to think and work collaboratively, to co-create productive conversations, and to integrate these theoretical explorations with a critical analysis of the politics of our own multiple locations.

Fall 2023

WGS 97 Sophomore Tutorial: Dreams of a Common Language

Course Instructor: Linda Schlossberg

Harvard College

Position: Teaching Fellow

This course provides an introduction (in no way exhaustively) to key concepts and texts in the study of women, gender, and sexuality. Together, we will develop a shared vocabulary to help prepare for advanced study in the concentration and beyond. We will practice using foundational concepts such as performativity, queerness, intersectionality, mestiza consciousness, homonationalism, neoliberalism, and gender as a category of analysis. We will learn to distinguish among various forms of feminism. We will encounter queer theory and feminist approaches to decarceration. Throughout the semester, we will practice applying these concepts to the analysis of archival texts and to issues with which we grapple on a daily basis. Finally, this course encourages everyone to think and work collaboratively, to co-create productive conversations, and to integrate these theoretical explorations with a critical analysis of the politics of our own multiple locations.

Course Instructor: Annette Yoshiko-Reed

Harvard Divinity School

Position: Teaching Fellow

This course, required for MDiv, MTS, and MRPL students but open to all, serves as an introduction to various approaches to the academic study of religion, from the anthropological and sociological to the philosophical and theological.

HDS 3263/REL 1087/AAAS 326: Black Religion and Sexuality

Course Instructor: Professor Ahmad Greene-Hayes

Harvard Divinity School

Position: Teaching Fellow

This course examines the co-constructed histories of religion, sexuality, and race in the Americas from the vantage of the African diaspora. Drawing upon foundational and newer works in the field, we will explore how the construction of these categories, largely rooted in biological essentialism, has had immense consequences for the enslaved and their descendants, indigenous peoples, other people of color, and women, queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individuals. This course also homes in on how those marginalized by these categories have challenged and subverted them using a hermeneutics of suspicion, political organizing, and other methods of resistance and feminist and queer theologizing.

REL 97 Junior Tutorial: Religion, Violence, and Reproduction

Course Instructor: Professor Courtney Lamberth

Harvard College

Position: Teaching Fellow for a one-on-one junior tutorial, syllabus of my own design

Much has been written on religion as both a source of, and solace from, violence, suffering, and discrimination, particularly around issues of the family, reproduction, and gender. This junior tutorial looks at religion and its relation to violence and reproduction, focused predominantly on Christian and US-based conversations on these interrelated topics. We engage with theoretical arguments, ritual studies, ethnography, history, theology, ethics, and queer and feminist theory to make sense of the connections between religion, violence, and reproduction, also exposing students to key texts in the study of religion today. We will cover topics including, but not limited to: the Religious Right, abortion debates, anti-queer violence, sexuality and the Black Church, the history of birth control, ritual theory, religious sex scandals, and religious responses to sexual violence.

 

Spring 2021

HDS 2690A/REL 3005: Religion, Gender, and Culture Colloquium

Course Instructor: Professor Amy Hollywood

Harvard Divinity School and Committee on the Study of Religion (FAS)

Position: Teaching Fellow

The Religion, Gender, and Culture Colloquium explores the intersections of feminist theory with other theories of difference and the broader study of religion. Readings will include work by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Clare Hemmings, Robin Wiegman, Jasbir Puar, and Jennifer Nash. 

WOMGEN 1225: Leaning in, Hooking up: Visions of Feminism and Femininity in the 21st Century

Course Instructor: Professor Phyllis Thompson

Harvard College

Position: Teaching Fellow

What does it mean to do feminism, or to be a feminist in the 21st-century United States? What can we make of the dominant social expectations for a woman's life? This course explores contemporary ideals of feminine success, including their physical, familial, professional, and political manifestations. We will engage with highly-contested topics: including sexual violence and Title IX; work-life balance; the imperatives of self-care and presentation; and new models for sexuality, reproduction, family, motherhood, and domestic life using the tools of theory and cultural studies to interrogate their framing within popular discourse. Throughout, we will critique ideological formations of gender, particularly as bounded by race, class, and sexuality.

 

Fall 2020

WOMGEN 1310: Transgender Rights and the Law: Assumptions and Critiques

Course Instructor: Professor Kendra Albert

Harvard College

Position: Teaching Fellow and Research Assistant

How does American law treat transgender, genderfluid, nonbinary, agender, and gender‐nonconforming people? What assumptions about gender operate in legal doctrines, and how do these assumptions interact with the lives of transgender people, especially those at the intersection of multiple axes of oppression?This seminar will discuss contemporary cases involving transgender rights, as well as historical cases where the rights of transgender people were directly or indirectly contested. Readings will incorporate case law, sociological perspectives, critical race studies, feminist theory, and direct first‐person narratives. By looking at law through the lens of transgender experiences, the class will critique legal assumptions about gender and reflect upon how law as a whole could be made less cis‐normative. No prior legal experience or education is required.

HDS 2690A/REL 3005: Religion, Gender, and Culture Colloquium

Course Instructor: Professor Amy Hollywood

Harvard Divinity School and Committee on the Study of Religion (FAS)

Position: Teaching Fellow

The Religion, Gender, and Culture Colloquium explores the intersections of feminist theory with other theories of difference and the broader study of religion. Readings will include work by Mayanthi L. Fernando, Kirsten Wesselhoeft, Solimar Otero, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Bruno Perreau, Judith Butler, and Kadji Amin, as well as student works in progress. 

HDS 2063/REL 2993: A Poetics of Difficulty

Course Instructor: Professor Amy Hollywood

Harvard Divinity School and Committee on the Study of Religion (FAS)

Position: Teaching Fellow

Through the careful reading of and exploratory writing about selected works of contemporary poetry, together with some key pieces of criticism and philosophy, the seminar will explore different modalities of difficulty. The hypothesis driving the course is that in difficult times, reading difficult writing can be a vital and affectively powerful task. Readings will likely include work by Susan Howe, Dan Beachy-Quick, Myung Mi Kim, Dawn Lundy Martin, Lisa Robertson, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and others. 

WOMGEN99A: Tutorial- Senior Year

Course Instructor: Professor Linda Schlossberg

Harvard College

Position: Thesis Advisor for a project entitled “Return to Rehabilitation: Care, Carcerality, & the Discourses of Repair"

 

 

Spring 2020 

HDS 2693/REL 1573: Sex, Gender, Sexuality II

Course Instructor: Professor Amy Hollywood

Harvard Divinity School and Committee on the Study of Religion (FAS)

Position: Teaching Fellow

The second of two parts, the course will continue to explore the theoretical articulation of sex, gender, and sexuality in feminist, queer and trans theory, with attention to the role of other differences–racial, ethnic, religious, and differences in physical ability–in contemporary work. Readings will include texts by Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Anne Anlin Cheng, Paul Preciado, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Jasbir Puar, and others. 

WOMGEN 1225: Leaning in, Hooking up: Visions of Feminism and Femininity in the 21st Century

Course Instructor: Professor Phyllis Thompson

Harvard College

Position: Teaching Fellow

What does it mean to do feminism, or to be a feminist in the 21st-century United States? What can we make of the dominant social expectations for a woman's life? This course explores contemporary ideals of feminine success, including their physical, familial, professional, and political manifestations. We will engage with highly-contested topics: including sexual violence and Title IX; work-life balance; the imperatives of self-care and presentation; and new models for sexuality, reproduction, family, motherhood, and domestic life using the tools of theory and cultural studies to interrogate their framing within popular discourse. Throughout, we will critique ideological formations of gender, particularly as bounded by race, class, and sexuality.

 

Fall 2019

HDS 2692/REL 1572: Sex, Gender, Sexuality I

Course Instructor: Professor Amy Hollywood

Harvard Divinity School and Committee on the Study of Religion (FAS)

Position: Teaching Fellow

This course explores the theoretical articulation of sex, gender, and sexuality in twentieth-century theory, particularly in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and feminist and queer theory. Readings will include texts by Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Hortense Spillers.