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I am an Instructional Consultant at the Center for Research on Learning & Teaching at the University of Michigan. One of my primary interests is studying the ways in which interdisciplinarity can promote innovative teaching and research.

I began teaching in 2010 as a recitation instructor for introductory physics courses at the University of Missouri. While pursuing my doctorate at the University of Michigan, I had many opportunities to serve as a guest lecturer, to lead discussion sections, and to act as the instructor of record for composition classes. In my courses on “Writing and Academic Inquiry,” my central goal was to teach students to apply the techniques of critical reading both to the materials of the course and to their own fields of interest, while also encouraging them to bring their knowledge from other disciplines into my classroom. Helping students make these interdisciplinary connections supports their learning and stimulates student interest in course topics. Interdisciplinarity can also inspire university instructors to discover new ways of meeting their classroom learning goals by considering the teaching practices employed in other disciplines. In my work on the Rackham-CRLT Preparing Future Faculty Seminar, I had the opportunity to advise graduate students from many disciplines as they worked to develop their own courses. In my experience, considering a wide array of teaching practices — including those not usually assigned in one’s discipline — spurs innovative teaching.

My interest in interdisciplinarity has also shaped my research. In my doctoral studies in the University of Michigan’s Department of English Language & Literature, my primary research was on the intersections of literature, science, and technology in nineteenth-century British literature. My dissertation project, The Work of Playful Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain, reevaluates the function of playfulness in the sciences. The history of Victorian science is often described as a shift from science as a pastime to science as a vocation: scientific practitioners increasingly described themselves as “scientific workers” and described scientific practice as “work.” Through a combination of archival research and close and distant readings, I analyze the science writing of John Ayrton Paris, James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, and Charles Darwin to argue that nineteenth-century scientific practice could not and should not be reduced to scientific work. In these case studies, I describe popularizers teaching science through games, toys that act as experimental apparatus, ludicrous sports equipment brought into thought experiments, and scientific autobiographies that frame boyhood beetle collecting as part of scientific development. I argue that nineteenth-century scientific practitioners certainly did emphasize the idea that science was work; however, the fun activities that do not fit easily under the umbrella of scientific work also contributed to the construction of scientific knowledge and the formation of scientific communities. Our understanding of nineteenth-century British science is incomplete if we do not consider the work of scientific play in nineteenth-century Britain.