About Me

I’m an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. I’ve had this position since the fall of 2020, when I was hired in a split appointment between English and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies. I left GWSS (long story) in July 2024 and am now 100% in the English Department. Before this job, I was Associate Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. And before that, I was a Lecturer in Rhetoric here at Iowa.

My PhD is in English, and my academic identity up until, say, 2014 was as a scholar of American literature. I did my dissertation, which became my first book, on Philip Roth. After after many thankless years drifting fearfully in the shark-infested waters of the post-crash academic job market, I found a life raft in the subject of pedagogy, which I fell in love with while teaching as an adjunct. The first Pedagogy Unbound (a website) led to the second Pedagogy Unbound (a column at The Chronicle of Higher Education), which led to a job on the instructional track, and then the book on teaching I wish I had when I was a graduate student. The Missing Course was published by Harvard University Press in 2019.

My next book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, will be published, again by HUP, this August. In it, I argue that the classroom has been neglected by universities in their attempts to achieve equitable outcomes. The book shows how implementing the right kind of pedagogy, one designed to help all students—including those marginalized by our society and our colleges’ status quo practices—is as achievable as it is necessary.