Aside from large lecture courses, my classes are discussion-based, and my classrooms are always spaces where my students and I build knowledge together.
I have taught courses on literatures of the American West and American Pacific, focusing on authors ranging from Zane Grey and Willa Cather to Carlos Bulosan and Helena María Viramontes; on 19th-century British literature and on sexuality in the Victorian period; on major aesthetic developments in English-language fiction and poetry from the turn of the 20th century to the present; and graduate-level courses in American Studies and critical theory. Most recently, I’ve designed and taught a course on world literature from the 17th century to the present, a survey of American literature from beginnings to 1865, and a combined undergraduate-graduate course on US frontier masculinities and sexualities. I’ve also taught introductory composition and literature regularly over the last decade.
Sample Course Descriptions
ENGL 4220: Frontier Masculinities and Sexualities (Spring 2023)
Why are we so obsessed with cowboy hats and chaps? And how is it possible that John Wayne and Lil Nas X can both be cowboys? In ENGL 4220: Frontier Masculinities and Sexualities, you’ll learn that the answers to these questions have much longer and stranger histories than you ever imagined.
In fact, the nineteenth century represents a key period for the formation of American masculinity and for the production of what historian Michel Foucault and other historians and theorists of sexuality mean when they use the term “sexuality.” The nineteenth century was also a key period for the production of the largely imaginative geography known as the American frontier. Among other key assumptions, this class assumes that three terms cannot be understood apart from one another in the American context: frontier, masculinity, sexuality.
We’re probably tempted to counterpose the natural and frontier spaces that captivated many nineteenth-century American authors to all matters intimate. What, after all, could these frequently masculinized spaces of solitude and unfettered freedom have to do with our commonplace understandings of emotional and sexual intimacy? Look at the work of critics like Leslie Fiedler and works by the authors that we will read this semester, however, and a picture of “frontier” spaces’ centrality to the making of masculinity and sexuality emerges. This semester, we’ll read literary as well as historical, scholarly, and theoretical texts that will get us thinking about how and why American literature of the first sixty-five or so years of the nineteenth century is very much about the making and remaking of the categories “frontier,” “masculinity,” and “sexuality.”
Ryan Tan Wander 