My teaching is motivated by my belief that sociology courses can significantly impact students’ lives by developing their capacity to think critically about their own social worlds, cultivating the skills they need to be engaged citizens and compassionate human beings, and helping them become wiser consumers of media. My primary aim is for my students to understand sociology not as a body of information to be learned, but as a set of skills and practices that can be used to understand the social world in nuanced, complex, and historically situated ways.
I regularly teach three undergraduate courses at UAlbany: Sociology of Gender, Sociology of Race, Gender, and Class, and a senior writing seminar, Diversity in American Families. I also teach three graduate courses: Gender & Sexuality, Gender & Education, and Applied Qualitative Research Methods.
In addition to teaching these courses, I value, and thus devote a great deal of time and energy to, graduate student mentorship and professional development. I have served/am serving on multiple MA thesis and doctoral dissertation committees, including several as chair. I also regularly serve on, and chair, comprehensive exam committees in the areas of gender, sexualities, children & youth, family, and education. I am involved in the faculty/graduate student Ethnography Lab, and organize and facilitate The Gender Collective, a working group for doctoral students doing research in gender and sexualities. If you are interested in pursuing graduate work in the Department of Sociology at UAlbany, you can find more information here.