Teaching is an art of connection

Teaching

Teaching is more than the transmission of knowledge; it is an art of connection. Students learn best when they feel connected - to the course content, to me as their instructor, and to one another. In my practice of teaching as connecting, I cultivate three core values: critical thinking, creativity, and care - essential qualities students can carry into any profession.My current teaching areas include Chinese literature and culture, Russian literature, environmental humanities, comparative literature, and gender studies. A strong advocate for language proficiency and multilingualism, I have also developed curricula for college writing and Chinese language instruction.Click below to see my course offerings:

Sample syllabi are shared for reference and inspiration only. Please do not reproduce substantial portions.
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literature | modernity | nonhuman

Researching

My scholarship asks how literature responds to and shapes the condition of "modernity"—a question now urgently demands transnational and ecocritical lenses. My first book project, Ecologizing Modernism: Writing with the Nonhuman in Manchuria, substantiates this inquiry through Sinophone and Russophone connections. It examines early twentieth-century Manchuria, a critical borderland in modern East Asia where imperial competitions intersected with rapid modernization, transforming a perceived wilderness into a hub of human–nonhuman confluences. During this transformative period, literary modernism emerged as a powerful means of grappling with the upheavals of modernity, formally, politically, and transnationally.I propose that modernist experimentation is not only a response to human crises but is also deeply ecological in nature. Through close readings of works by Xiao Hong, Duanmu Hongliang, Yi Chi, Nikolai Baikov, Vladimir Arsenyev, and Mikhail Prishvin, I show how their writings bring nonhuman actors (goats, foxes, tomatoes, ginseng, rivers, forests) into the center of narrative structure and ethical reflection.Despite their differing cultural and political positions, Chinese native-soil writers of the Northeast and Russian émigré and colonial authors were equally immersed in Manchuria’s natural landscape. Both groups engaged in interrelated ecocritical efforts to modernize literary form as a way to explore, express, and forge ethical relations with the nonhuman world. Their works register and reimagine the ecological consequences of capitalist development, war, and empire through sustained attention to animals, plants, and natural spaces. By examining motifs such as human–animal solidarity, embodied care, and aesthetic experiments grounded in natural knowledge, I demonstrate how these authors write with nonhuman nature, not merely about it. In doing so, they challenged dominant paradigms—nationalist realism and colonial natural history—by crafting an ecocritical modernism grounded in multispecies entanglement.I am developing a second book project that brings my current focus on nonhuman into dialogue with gender. Through an ecofeminist lens, I examine a body of transnational literature from East Asia, post-Soviet Russia, and Central Asia to explore the convergences of gendered experience, nonhuman relationality, and modernity.

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communicating | collaborating | co-being

Connecting

I warmly welcome new connections for collaboration, publication, teaching, and mentoring. I am happy to provide an up-to-date CV, teaching portfolio, or reference contacts upon request.If you'd like to get in touch, the best way to reach me is at [email protected].If you are a CC student interested in taking my courses or seeking guidance on research projects, I invite you to book my office hours.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little corner of the internet. I look forward to getting to know you, too.
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