Teaching

I teach across German language and literature, comparative literature, Africana studies, and global studies. My seminars bring German colonial history, Afro-German experience, and questions of memory, justice, and belonging to Williams students at every level. Many are cross-listed and taught in English. In the classroom, students know me as Prof. O.G.

On the first day of every class I teach, I tell my students what I have been teaching myself. The piano I took up during the pandemic, while I was completing qualifying exams and writing a dissertation, and I stayed with it long enough to write something of my own and play it in front of some of the people who matter to me. Alongside this, for about a year now, I have been learning chess, and I still lose regularly. I want my students to meet a human being before they meet a professor, and to know that everyone in the room can already do something better than I can, before I ask them to take risks in front of me.

That is the first move in something I take seriously: that every course carries two curricula at once — the formal one of objectives and grades, and a hidden one of curiosity, fairness, and the habits of mind students carry out with them. I make room for questions and for mistakes, teach the skills that outlast a syllabus, and bring the world into the room through film, music, and whatever helps an idea land — because questions, not answers, create knowledge.