During my time at Princeton, I have gained varied teaching experiences through serving as an Assistant Instructor for courses on American politics, race and ethnic politics, immigration politics, the politics of crime and punishment, and Asian American History. I was awarded the George Kateb Preceptor Award, given by the Department of Politics to the best graduate student Assistant Instructors each year. I have also served as a teaching assistant for a course on U.S. History (Until 1877) as part of the Prison Teaching Initiative, which offers college-level classes to incarcerated individuals in New Jersey.

I see teaching as a core part of my role as a scholar. My objectives for students in the classroom are three-fold: to understand; to critically engage; and to apply knowledge beyond the classroom through wrestling with the ‘so what’ questions. I teach with the understanding that students come into the classroom with different learning styles and backgrounds and I integrate this understanding in both my curriculum design and class structure. I emphasize that students are themselves creators of knowledge and encourage that through centering students’ interests and curiosities in a guided way.

  • POL 344 / AAS 344 (Fall 2021)

    Instructor: Professor LaFleur Stephens Dougan

    Course Description: This course examines various political controversies that surround the role of race and ethnicity in American society. These controversies and issues affect public opinion, political institutions, political behavior, and salient public policy debates. Thus this course will assess and evaluate the role of race in each of these domains while also examining historical antecedents. The first half of the course will focus on historical antecedents such as the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. The second half of the course will focus on the role of race in the 2008-2020 presidential elections.

  • HIS 270 / AMS 370 / ASA 370 (Fall 2021)

    Instructor: Professor Beth Lew-Williams

    Course Description: This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.

  • LAO 334 / POL 334 / SOC 321 (Spring 2021)

    Instructor: Professor Ali Valenzuela

    Course Description: Founded and built by immigrants, the US has a complicated relationship with newcomers. How have politics shaped US immigration policy and the policymaking process? Do members of Congress follow their constituents' preferences? How are immigration messages used by campaigns; with what effects? Why do changing demographics affect immigration policy views? Do immigrants integrate or conform to nativist fears? In thinking about immigrants, why do most Americans think about Latino immigrants and how does this affect US Latinos? We will tackle these and other questions by examining published research and applying it to recent campaigns and debates.

  • POL 339 (Fall 2020)

    Instructor: Professor John Kastellec

    Course Description: Why has the U.S. witnessed the rapid rise in mass incarceration? What roles have politicians, judges, prosecutors, and voters played in the astonishing growth in the incarceration rate over the past 40 years? What explains the racial disparities that exist in prosecutions and sentence length? This course will examine these and other questions related to crime and punishment by introducing students to historical and current debates surrounding the politics of criminal justice, criminal law, and state punishment. The course will emphasize cutting-edge research on crime and punishment in the social sciences, particularly political science.

  • HIST 201 (Fall 2020), Prison Teaching Initiative

    Instructor: Professor Joan Sheridan

    Program Description: The Prison Teaching Initiative seeks to bridge Princeton University’s academic and service-driven missions by providing the highest-quality postsecondary education to incarcerated students in New Jersey; offering Princeton University graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff innovative, evidence-based pedagogy training and the chance to diversify their teaching portfolios through intensive classroom experience; and fostering a robust campus dialogue on mass incarceration and its relationship to systemic inequalities in access to education.

Teaching Experiences