Teaching

My student-centered pedagogy seeks to channel what often daunts my students—music’s elusive, shifting meanings—into transferrable intellectual habits. My strengths-based mentorship hinges on getting to know my students before day one. Having had to learn how to learn as a first-generation student, I encourage my students to be curious, even experimental, about how they learn. I support this exploration with course design that operationalizes and rewards practice and revision. I use frequent, low-stakes assignments to assess student learning and fine-tune the class's progress. Read my full teaching philosophy here. Select syllabi are linked below.

Prospective Courses:

Theory and Analysis of Technology-Mediated Popular Music. Teaches the theory and analysis of popular music as communication and translation, situated between musical spaces, notations, and instruments. Students gain experience coordinating across different expertises in collaborative group projects.

The Flattened Recording Studio. Digital Audio Workstations in Theory & Practice. Uses DAW software as a hands-on gateway into the history of musical instruments and technologies.

Lecturer, University of Chicago

Rock Music and Genre. Spring 2025. Explores rock music's complex, evolving legacy in global culture and its far-ranging, if ambivalent influence on the study of popular music and genre. 

MUSI 273: Topics in Music History 1900-present. Winter 2025. Covers composers and stylistic developments in Western art music and the global traditions touched by it during the 20th and 21st centuries, teaches students to relate music to context critically.

MUSI 253: Analysis of Twentieth-Century Music (advanced undergraduate/early graduate). Spring 2024. Covers pc set and transformational theory, teaches analysis of post-tonal music from serialism to free jazz, with attention to how these theories are justified.

MUSI 252: Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Music (advanced undergraduate/early graduate). Winter 2024. Covers neo-Riemannian theory, teaches analysis of chromaticism and forms used by European composers, foregrounds stylistic heterogeneity and echoes of the pasts and futures.

MUSI 104: Introduction to Music Analysis and Criticism. Fall/Winter 2023-2025. Teaches students to use sound as evidence for arguments by exploring the dimensions of “metaphor” and “genre” in deliberately broad repertoire (soul/hip-hop/concerto/oratorio) and with a focus on revision.

MUSI 143: Music Theory Fundamentals. Spring 2021. Teaches students the fundamentals of Western notation, uses student-brought examples to teach aural skills, and shows limits of the writing system taught.

Course Assistant, University of Chicago

MUSI 122: Music in Western Civilization II. Spring 2022.

MUSI 151-153: Aural Skills Lab of Harmony & Voice-Leading. Fall 2019/Winter 2020/Spring 2020. Leader of a yearlong aural skills lab for a music-major theory sequence. Taught and assessed transcription, sight-singing with movable-do solfege (incl. modulation and chromaticism), keyboard skills, and improvisation.

MUSI 23509: Eurovision Song Contest. Spring 2019.

MUSI 101: Introduction to Western Music. Fall 2018.

Tutor, University of Vienna

Introduction to Musicology II. Spring 2014. Taught a one-semester introductory lecture for fifty undergraduates from a pre-existing script, and designed summaries and exam preparation materials.

Theory of Harmony. Fall 2012. Supplemented a core lecture by practicing and reviewing with students, covering concepts of figured bass and functional analysis.

Other Pedagogical Experience

Part-time Theory Instructor, South Side Suzuki Cooperative. Summer 2020. Designed lesson plans, materials, and exams for a diverse group of local high-school-age string players taught remotely.