Associate Teaching Professor
Barrett the Honors College
arizona State University
Teaching recognition
I’ve been honored with several awards and fellowships for my teaching excellence and student mentorship. I received the Alberto Álvaro Ríos Sangre de Arte Award, which recognized my contributions mentoring and educating Latino students, exemplifying leadership within ASU, and creatively affecting my community through the performing arts. I’ve received an ASU Social Transformation Lab Fellowship for exhibiting pedagogy in service of social justice, intersectional anti-racist practices, and multicultural awareness, which advanced the university’s charter toward inclusive scholarship of public value. I was also awarded with a Faculty Fellowship from the Center for the Study of Race & Democracy for developing community programs that utilized film and the performing arts to engage the public in critical dialogues about race and social justice.
Additionally, I’ve worked to expand the Honors program in Downtown Phoenix. I’ve created new learning opportunities for students and helped them find careers, internships, and graduate school programs. My efforts have helped make Barrett the “Gold Standard” in Honors education, and ensured that ASU remains #1 in innovation.
Courses
My primary responsibility at Barrett is teaching the signature course THE HUMAN EVENT. This year-long global humanities seminar provides a sweeping survey of human expression and ideas from a wide variety of cultures. We take an intellectual adventure that travels from the ancient human past to the current historical moment. We journey from Mesopotamia to Mexico, Japan to Jakarta, Nigeria to New York, India to Ireland, and soooooooo much more. In this discussion-based seminar we cover everything from literature to theatre to cinema to music to dance to comics to philosophy to politics to world religion…and more! It’s the class you’ve waited for your whole life. And it’s the class that reshapes your whole life. It’s dope!
I also teach several upper-division courses related to my scholarship on culture, performance, race, art, and activism. I’ve pioneered partnerships with local cultural institutions in order to embed my students’ learning in the community and instill a sense of civic engagement. I’ve also developed a number of summer travel programs that give students the opportunity to study culture & performance in locations all over the world — Spain, Morocco, New York, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil.
