I view my teaching as a natural extension of my interdisciplinary research interests. As a graduate student instructor at UC Berkeley and as a professor at Princeton, I have taught in the areas of literature, cultural studies, critical theory, and religious thought. I've taught Hebrew and Arabic literatures both separately and in conjunction. Other courses have been in Jewish studies, modern Islamic and Jewish thought, critical theory, and world literature.
In 2014 I was awarded a grant to develop a new interdisciplinary course for undergraduates titled “Introduction to Jewish Cultures,” which focuses on the cultural syncretism and the global diversity of the Jewish experience. The course includes sessions on Job, the Talmud, Kabbalah, Spinoza, the Sephardic Golden Age, Yiddish literature, and Jewish music, food, and sexuality, among other topics.
I have offered graduate seminars at Princeton in theories of language and literature; the comparative poetics of "passing" in African-American, LGBTQ, Jewish-American, and Israeli-Palestinian literature and film; modern Arabic literature from the nahda to the present; and the idea of the Arab Jew in history, literature, and culture. In June 2016 I taught a two-week session at Harvard's Institute for World Literature on "Conflict and Comparison." This seminar reconsidered world literature through multiple frames of conflict and comparison, examining notions of global war, language wars, and image wars to consider how the "world" and the word are remade through war, partition, and their aftermaths; in particular, the seminar aimed theorize discursive responses to conflict in terms of comparison and incommensurability.
In 2016, 2017, and 2021 I also taught a week-long course in the Great Jewish Books program for high school students at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA; in 2019 and 2020 I taught for the Yiddish Book Center’s program for high school literature teachers, aimed at helping them improve high school pedagogy for teaching Jewish literature.