Welcome to my electronic teaching portfolio.

I've designed it both as an online version of the traditional portfolio and as a space that both gathers and re-enacts my approach to teaching in the classroom.

My pedagogical and research interests involve the experiences and textual representations of travel, with all of the materialist and metaphorical meanings that connotes. As you will see, I have designed my writing courses in recent years around students' experiences of travel (whether their own or with Study Abroad here at St John's), the literature of travel, and, most importantly, the  mechanisms and bureaucracy of travel.

My courses all focus in one way or another on travel and travel writing. For instance, inspired by Amitava Kumar's Passport Photos, I have centered a class on the document of the passport, presenting it as a rich and multi-layered interface between students and the world, as I ask them  to reclaim this document for themselves.

Together, these two documents -- the portfolio and the passport -- can better help us understand the richness and importance of writing, as we try together to get to where we are going...

PORTFOLIO. Etymology: an altered form of earlier porto folio "portfolio," from Italian portafoglio (same meaning), from portare "to carry" and foglio "leaf, sheet"; portare from Latin portare "to carry" and foglio from Latin folium "leaf" --related to FOLIAGE, PORTABLE
1 : a case for carrying papers or drawings

1722, from It. portafoglio "a case for carrying loose papers," from porta, imperative of portare "to carry" (see port (1)) + foglio "sheet, leaf," from L. folium (see folio).

PASSPORT. 1 : a government-issued document that serves to identify a citizen and allows him or her to travel to foreign countries
2 : something that allows a person to reach a desired goal