Dr. Levin Arnsperger

Teaching Experience:

Kennesaw State University

ENGL 2110: World Literature (Fall 2013, Spring 2014)

ENGL 3340: Ethnic American Literature (Topic: Native American Literature; Spring 2014)

AMST 3710: U.S. in the World (Topic: Arab and Muslim Responses to September 11; Spring 2014)

AMST 7520: Transnational American Studies / America in a Transnational Context (Fall 2013)

Emory University

REL 380: Internship Course (Fall 2012) – Teacher with Bobbi Patterson

ENG 101-00P: America Today (Fall 2011)

BUS 365: Business Communication  (Fall 2010, Fall 2011) – Facilitator, with Nikki Graves and Molly Epstein

ENG 101: The Road to Persuasion (Spring 2010)

ENG 181: Coping with War through Words (Fall 2009)

ENG 256: British Literature since 1660 (Spring 2009) – Teaching Assistant (for Paul Kelleher)

ENG 354WR: 19^th Century American Novel (Fall 2008) – Teaching Assistant (for Michael Elliott)

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Teaching Philosophy:

View as PDF document: Levin Arnsperger_Teaching Philosophy

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Other Teaching Tools:

New technologies have an important place in the classroom. I create and use timelines, Google docs, wikis, blogs, regular PowerPoint presentations, and maps in my teaching.

Similarly, aside from writing traditional essays, students need to use various media in their assignments. Projects can include videos, soundscapes, images, and other creative work.

Since I believe that teachers ought to practice what they teach – and indeed need to try out the tools they want their students to use – I worked on a few multimedia projects myself. Examples include this sound project on first language attrition and this image/text project on a picture from Abu Ghraib.

Here are brief notes on the image/text project, developed in the context of the Digital Humanities Winter Institute. I transformed an infamous Abu Ghraib photograph in two different ways, using Photoshop:

1) My inspiration for this image was a T-shirt of a group of Native American warriors, who have been “fighting terrorism since 1492” as part of the effort to ensure “Homeland Security” according to the T-shirt’s label. While this T-shirt was an ironic commentary on the post-9/11 war on terror waged after September 11, my image again ironizes the phrase of “fighting terrorism since 1492.” People have been labeled as terrorists or criminals for a long time. Who, though, is a terrorist? What role do images play in framing people as terrorists? The image also plays on the term “cell” – terrorist cell, prison cell (more possibilities arise of course – human cell, for example).

2) In his recent book Cloning Terror (2012), WJT Mitchell argues that cloning figures as a key trope following September 11: the war on terror only produced more jihadists and more terrorists; moreover, in this digital era, pictures for example of the Twin Towers or of Abu Ghraib can be endlessly reproduced, disseminated, and easily modified. This idea of cloning served as an inspiration for this image/text project. I was thinking more generally about the reproduction of images and our constant access to particular images as key phenomena in contemporary culture. Can we still see what’s in a picture after having seen it many times? What if we learn after a while that its context is different from the one we had imagined?