Teaching Fields:
Digital Humanities | History of the American West | History of Medicine | Disability Studies | Environmental History | American History
Classes:
ENGL 484/584: Introduction to Digital Humanities
Course Objectives:
By the end of this course students will gain a historical understanding of the Digital Humanities, in addition to learning about current topics, trends, and debates in the field. Through hands-on experience, students will become familiar with online tools for text analysis, organizing digital research materials, mining large corpora, and visualizing textual data. As a culmination of their learning experience, students will design their own DH project and create an online portfolio to display their research.
HIST 233: Disability in American Life
Course Objectives:
This course focuses on the history of disability in United States, and in doing so we will discuss how concepts of dis/ability, equality, fitness, and discrimination have changed over the past 200 years. Additionally, we’ll explore how individual and group identities are shaped by policies that affect the experience of disability.
Because this year marks the 25th anniversary of the passage of the ADA, the central project for this class will examine the impact of that legislation on American life.
HIST301: U.S. Environmental History
Course Objectives:
This course will examine the ever-changing relationship between humans and the environment in United States. We will explore how “nature” and “wilderness” factor into American identity and history, while also understanding that what these ideas mean has changed over time. Moreover, we will examine how the perceived value of certain American resources impacts preservation and conservation efforts, and also affects our everyday lives.
FFC100: The Environmental History of the American West
This all-freshman seminar offers an overview of the methods of Environmental History, using examples from the American West.
Course Objectives:
This course examines the ever-changing relationship between humans and the environment of the American West, from the frontier era to the present day. Through blog writings, projects and discussions, we’ll think more deeply about our relationship to the western environment and how it shapes our lives, as well as how it impacted the lives of those who inhabited this region in previous generations. We will consider these questions, among others:
What is the “West” and what are the unique features of its environment?
How might Native Americans, farmers, Silicon-valley executives, naturalists, Mormons, surfers, college students, or oilmen have different perspectives about the western environment and the ways that natural resources are used?
Throughout the varied landscape of the West, are there some lands that have deserved preservation more than others?
Also, are there some places or resources that should be developed, even at the expense of local wildlife?
How do westerners argue for the value of certain places, and how do they use ideas about “wilderness” and “nature” to support their claims?
HIST 529: Oral History Methods
A seminar in using technology to record oral histories for a special issue of Chapman’s History eJournal, Voces Novae. In 2010, the students in this class recorded dozens of OH interviews that were then edited and published online. This issue of the student eJournal was later awarded the Nash Journal Prize by Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honors Society.
