In my classes I teach and cultivate the following essential academic skills: Essay writing and creative writing; reading comprehension and critical thinking; literary background and history of ideas in the Western tradition. We read, discuss, interpret, write about, and occasionally imitate our classical literary sources.
Biographical Brief
I received my PhD in English, from the University of British Columbia in 2017. Imbued with a tenacious and somewhat unbridled love of learning, I’ve enjoyed some seventeen years of university education, attending eight universities in five countries and completing graduate degrees in English and French. My academic working languages are English, French and German and I have done introductory university coursework in Latin, Greek, and Arabic. I completed my Master’s degree in France through the History department of the University of Paris 1 and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes—a graduate school specializing in History of Religions and Philological Studies. My Bachelor of Arts, is a joint degree in English Literature and Humanities, which was completed at Simon Fraser University.
Overview: Teaching and Studies
In terms of teaching, I have a PhD in English. I have taught two years of undergraduate English courses through Corpus Christi College (Vancouver), four years of undergraduate English courses at UBC, and two years of English Writing/Composition, English Literature, and American History courses at the University of Paris IV. While tutoring privately, I continue to pursue my own independent course of studies in rhetoric (the art of persuasion) and hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) in the context of Renaissance Humanism.
The students I work with are primarily high school students, though I have continued to work with some of my students through both their undergraduate and graduate university studies.
Through our work together, students are introduced to and develop a productive working understanding of Western literary tradition, together with its historical and cultural context while reading great works of ancient Greek and Roman literature, Biblical and patristic literature, literature of the Renaissance and Reformation period, the modernist novel tradition from Cervantes and Rabelais to Lawrence, Orwell and Woolf, and much much more beside.
The classes I lead have little, if any, crossover with my students’ high school and university curriculum material. Instead, they cultivate an understanding—through the traditional study of bonae litterae or good letters—of the essential literary foundations of the liberal arts. In our classes, my students develop a coherent framework or context in which to understand their school studies, a framework or context that helps them reflect upon their institutional academic trajectory as well as upon their own personal educational project as individuals striving towards full-flourishing human excellence.