I designed and taught this course at Quinnipiac University in Spring 2025 and at Yale University Summer 2025 as the sole-instructor. This is an introductory course on publicly oriented sociology. The class focuses on providing students with the fundamental building blocks for critical thinking in the social sciences. Each week, we cover a big topic (race and ethnicity, states and nations, gender and sexuality, power and justice) to assess sociological theories' offerings to our critical repertoires. It is designed to entice undergraduates into the practice of thinking against the grain.

Why are there so many studies involving trans brain scans? Can facial recognition technology really tell if you’re queer? Why is everyone so obsessed with gay penguins? For that matter, how did science come to be the right tool for defining and knowing sex, gender, and sexuality at all? How does that history influence our collective lives in the present, and what are some alternatives?

This course gives students a background in the development of sex science, from evolutionary arguments that racialized sexual dimorphism to the contemporary technologies that claim to be able to get at bodily truths that are supposedly more real than identity. [cs1] Then, it introduces several scholarly and political interventions that have attempted to short-circuit the idea that sex is stable and knowable by science, highlighting ways that queer and queering thinkers have challenged the stability of sexual categories[cs2] . It concludes by asking how to put those interventions into practice when so much of the fight for queer rights, autonomy, and survival has been rooted in categorical recognition by the state, and by considering whether science can be made queer. Along the way, students will engage with the tools, methods, and theories of both science and technology studies (STS) and queer studies that emphasize the constructed and political underpinnings of scientific thought and practice. 

What does it mean to say the family is a political institution? Starting with Marx, Engels, and Angela Davis, and ending with contemporary debates over reproductive politics, this course introduces students to the sociology of reproduction and feminist/queer theories of family. We will focus on the social, political, and economic forces underlying the politics of the American family, including the long histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, the nation-state, and empire that rely on the culture, language, and practices of family, fertility, kinship, and domesticity.

The Past, Present, and Future of Trans and Queer Critique

This advanced undergraduate seminar offers an in depth engagement with the growing body of scholarship in transgender studies. Part social sciences and part humanistic, this course examines theories of queer and trans pasts, presents, and futures. Bringing together core literature in feminist/queer theory, science and technology studies, trans of color critique, afro futurism and indigenous knowledges about the future, this course weighs the intellectual work done on queer and trans pessimism and optimism across disciplines.

An advanced level seminar for examining the intersecting subfields of reproduction, family studies, citizenship and border studies, and states/nations. We examine different national contexts to understand the fundamental role control over reproduction plays in histories of territorial conquest, migration, and border-creation.

This intermediate-level course offers students a rigorous foundation in qualitative research methods at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on approaches from sociology, gender studies, history, and cultural analysis, the course emphasizes the practice and politics of method across disciplines. Students will learn to design and evaluate research using interviews, archival analysis, content and discourse analysis, legal interpretation, and surveys, with attention to epistemology, ethics, and positionality. Emphasizing translation between disciplinary conventions, the course equips students to conduct grounded, creative, and analytically robust research across academic and applied contexts.