I designed and created this course to teach at Quinnipiac University in Spring 2025 as a visiting 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.

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.

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.