As of the Spring Semester of the 2020-2021 academic year, I am a Visiting Fellow and Lecturer in Physics, in which context I conduct research on scientific writing and co-teach a course on the same subject.
From 2016-2021, I was the Director of the Fellowships and Writing Center at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. For six years, I taught for the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard College in in the fields of the Medieval World, the Early Modern World, European Studies, the Modern World, and American Studies. In that capacity, I taught junior tutorials on “Modes of Human Commonality in Early Modern Europe,” “Shifting Identities in Chinese-American History and Literature, 1850-Present,” as well as senior tutorials in “Law, Religion, and Narrative in Post-Multicultural Britain,” “Human Dignity and Asylum Law in Contemporary Britain,” “Law and Place in Shakespeare,” “Royal Tombs in Seventeenth-Century France,” “Medieval German Images of Intercession,” “Historiography and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century Ireland,” “Tragedy in Contemporary American Poetry,” “Peng-chun Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” and “Between China and the US: Transnational Myth and Pilgrimage.”
I have lectured in professional writing for scientists at SEAS, and taught in the History of Science, as well as in English and Comparative Literature. I have published in the fields of political philosophy, philosophy and literature, and the study of world religions.
With Dr. Jiang He, I am the author of the forthcoming novel, The Sorcerer's Rivals, which deals with growing up in rural post-Maoist China.
At Wellesley College, I was awarded The Academy of American Poets Prize, The Florence Annette Wing Prize in English, The Dorothy Wainwright Sonnet Prize, and The Marjorie Butler Sternberg Poetry Prize. At Harvard, I have been awarded the John Clive Teaching Prize and the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize. I have also been recognized multiple times for Excellence in Teaching by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. In 2013, I won The Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from the Undergraduate Council of Harvard College. In 2020, I received a Commendation for Extraordinary Teaching from the Office of Undergraduate Education at Harvard College. I currently serve on the Board of First-Year Advisers for Harvard College.
smith03 [at] fas.harvard.edu
