I earned my PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, where I studied Ancient Greek, French and English Literature. My dissertation was on William Faulkner and Honoré de Balzac. In the seven years following, I lectured in the Humanities Core at Stanford, as well as in their Programs of Writing and Rhetoric, and Structured Liberal Education. During my time on "The Farm," I also co-founded and served as Faculty Director of The Great Ideas, an immersive residential program that introduced Chinese nationals of all language levels to reading and composition in the Liberal Arts. I am a winner of Stanford's Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching.
In 2012, I began commuting to Hollywood to work with producers and writers on film and television development. During this time, I continued to teach writing, rhetoric, and story structure at Stanford, USF and UC Berkeley. In 2019, I joined the Comparative Literature and English Departments at Cal, then found a welcome home in College Writing.
My current course offerings reflect my ongoing interests in story structure and script analysis. Other favorite subjects of mine include philosophy and literature, crime, gangs, and border trafficking and feminism and race theory in American culture. And I offer a fiction-writing class, The Noble Lie. My instruction in all forms of writing—critical, research-based, or creative—stresses empathy and honesty.