Rochelle L. Johnson

My teaching includes interdisciplinary courses in Environmental Studies at the introductory and senior-capstone levels,  as well as courses on environmental literature, the literatures of slavery, the American Renaissance, and early American literature.  I also teach First-Year Seminars that engage in interdisciplinary material-cultural studies and include a digital-humanities component. I believe in the powers of deep and democratic discussion, close reading, and faculty-student research. Some of my courses have involved travelling with students abroad or domestically, and others have included project-based and community-engaged pedagogies. Such courses have focused on dirt and regional soil fertility, on environmental justice in the community, and on the production of a collaboratively-written natural history of our region, titled Rediscovering Indian Creek. My main goal in the classroom is to foster rigorous, compassionate, and vibrant analyses of human experience. I teach in order to help students be engaged, informed citizens who realize their individual abilities to challenge injustice and thoughtfully shape society and the planet.

 

Select courses I have taught:

 

ENV 200: Nature and Culture: An Introduction to Environmental Studies

ENV 402: Senior Capstone Seminar in Environmental Studies

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ENG 232: Literatures of Slavery (ca. 1700-1865)

ENG 239: Visions of Environment (literary and environmental history of the U.S.)

ENG 280: Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism

ENG 329: Inventing America (transoceanic encounter to 1865)

ENG 335: American Renaissance (and “beneath” the American Renaissance)

ENG 344: Author Seminar: Thoreau (his writings amid cultural and intellectual history)

ENG 490: Literary Research Practicum (intensive seminar in archival and literary research)

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FYS 110: First-Year Seminar

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