Courses taught independently:
Native American Politics and Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Fall 2022
From the protests at Standing Rock, the renaming of various sports teams, and a Supreme Court decision regarding much of eastern Oklahoma, the political concerns of Native Americans have come to the fore in recent years. What is the relationship between Native North Americans and the United States (and Canada)? We begin this class with an overview of Native American political history, from the earliest colonial contact to today, understanding how exactly Native nations and colonial settlements and state have conflicted. Then, we will try to understand the worldviews that lie behind these political conflicts by reading a variety of Western and Indigenous North American thinkers. We will discuss the role of nature, spirituality, authority, and political community in Native American traditions. We will study the work of Indigenous scholars including Vine Deloria, Jr., Viola Cordova, John Borrows, Taiaiake Alfred, and Leanne Simpson. We will also examine how philosophic disagreements between Native American philosophy and Western philosophies can produce political conflict, or, potentially, agreement. Students will leave this class with a strong grasp of Native American philosophy and political concerns, as well as a good framework of Western political philosophy.
Journalism as Political Theory, University of Notre Dame, Fall 2021
In this course, we study the relationship between political theory and journalism. Rather than reading solely canonical political theory texts, we read selections of important works from the history of political thought alongside journalistic writings. The class is separated by important concepts in political thought, such as power, judgement, community, revolution, and freedom. For each concept, we read both theoretical accounts and journalistic studies. In doing this, we examine how philosophic concepts help us understand real-life happenings. We also address how journalists use philosophic ideas to provide accounts that are more than mere documentation, in effect acting as political educators. Philosophic readings include work from Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Karl Marx, Mary Wollstonecraft, Michel Foucault, Andrea Dworkin, and Franz Fanon. Journalistic readings include selections from Thucydides, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, James Baldwin, Gay Talese, Janet Malcolm, and Robert Caro. In their own work, students address the class’ questions both via scholarly study and their own projects of journalistic political theory.
Courses taught as a teaching assistant:
Introduction to World Politics, University of Notre Dame, Fall 2019.
Two weekly discussion sections
Introduction to International Relations, University of Notre Dame, Spring 2020
Two weekly discussion sections
Samuel Piccolo 