Classes
TEaching at Harvard University and Beyond
At Harvard, I have designed and taught courses across a range of historical and thematic areas, including historiographies of American religion from the nineteenth century to the present, the history of American evangelicalism, case studies of religious encounter and conflict in contemporary America, transnational religious networks and global patterns of change between 1500 and 2000, and an introductory seminar in Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies. My teaching has earned recognition through Harvard's Certificate of Distinction and Excellence in Teaching in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, awards given to graduate instructors demonstrating exceptional classroom effectiveness.
Committed to connecting academic scholarship with wider public conversations, in Fall 2023, I designed and taught a public-facing course examining the religious history of the Korean diaspora, emphasizing thoughtful dialogue between scholarly perspectives and local community knowledge.
A detailed teaching philosophy statement and comprehensive teaching portfolio—including numerical and narrative student evaluations—are available upon request.
BNI F23: Invention of the Family: Religious History of the Korean Diaspora (Instructor, Fall 2023)
Synopsis: Designed for Korean/American communities, religious leaders, and general publics, this course traces the religious formation of the Korean diaspora in the United States, examining how Protestant Christianity generated new modes of racial, moral, and communal belonging under pressures of exclusion, empire, and displacement.
From early twentieth-century mission-linked migrations to Cold War evangelicalism and transnational adoption, we explore how Korean diasporic subjects were not merely received but assembled—molded into coherence through Christian institutions, theologies, and moral vocabularies. Rather than treating religion as mere background, we analyze it as a historical force that rendered Koreans intelligible to the American racial state as exceptional migrants, model believers, and ideal citizens.
Home Institution: Boston Nehemiah Institute (BNI)
Level: Public-facing course
Instructor
HDS 2185: Narratives of American Religion: The Canon and Its Revisions (Teaching Fellow, Fall 2021 & Spring 2025)
Synopsis: What is the American religious historical “canon”? What stories have historians chosen to tell about America’s religious past? How has the canon been revised in recent decades as historians have challenged older understandings of who “makes” history?
This course examines narratives of American religious history from the nineteenth century until the present. Beginning with Robert Baird's Religion in America (1844), and concluding with Jon Butler, Grant Wacker and Randall Balmer’s Religion in American Life (2003), we will trace how scholars have imagined the whole "plot" of American religious history. We will focus particularly on how narratives have changed over time.
Harvard Divinity School Course (level: graduate)
Course Heads: Catherine Brekus and David Holland
HDS 2343: Christianity at the Crossroads: the Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era (Teaching Fellow, Spring 2025)
Synopsis: Much of the writing on the history of Christianity is organized around national histories and religious denominations or traditions. By contrast, this course aims to build on work by historians of all kinds, not just historians of religion, suggesting that traditional explanations of religious, social, and cultural change have undervalued the role of international networks and transnational encounters in shaping the dynamics of religious change and innovation. By looking at a selection of such international networks, and nodes and nuclei (or junction boxes) as sites of encounter among different traditions and cultures, the course will analyze patterns of change and transmission that will challenge conventional historiographies and modes of explanation. The course concentrates predominantly on the period 1500-2000 and will include international religious networks such as the Catholic religious orders (Jesuits), Protestant benevolent and missionary societies, migratory populations resulting from colonialism and other factors, the rise of transnational Pentecostalism, print networks, and so on.
Harvard Divinity School Course (level: graduate)
Course Head: David N. Hempton
EMR 1020: Topics in Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Studies (Teaching Fellow, Spring 2022 & Spring 2023)
Synopsis: This course looks to historical, theoretical, and cultural sources to understand Asian American and Pacific Islander visions for identity, justice, community, and coalition. We will consider in each case the complexities involved in navigating coloniality, racial formation, and particular temporal and local contexts. This course foregrounds issues of coloniality and ecology, anticolonial and antiracist solidarities, and formations of desire/ability.
Harvard College course (level: undergraduate)
Course Head: Eleanor Craig
REL 3004: Pedagogy in the Study of Religion (Course Organizer & Facilitator, Spring 2023)
Synopsis: This course is designed for PhD students in the Committee on the Study of Religion, and is open to students in related fields who teach courses pertaining to religion. The course aims to equip students with skills to be effective Teaching Fellows at Harvard and to develop their own approaches to pedagogy as independent instructors in the field of religion. Classes will be workshop-style and will cover various teaching methods, course design, and professional development topics. They will also provide a space to discuss day-to-day success stories and challenges in the classroom.
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (level: graduate)
HDS 2187/REL 1497: Evangelicalism in America (Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022)
Synopsis: This course is an overview of American evangelicalism from the 1740s to the present. Beginning with the rise of transatlantic evangelicalism in the eighteenth century, we will explore the growing power of evangelicals after the American Revolution, the crisis caused by slavery, the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in the early twentieth century, the emergence of Pentecostalism, the controversies created by neo-evangelicalism in the 1940s, the Civil Rights Movement, the charismatic movement, and evangelicalism today. Throughout the course, we will focus on the historical development of evangelicalism and the relationship between evangelicals and American culture, with special attention to gender, race, and nationalism.
Harvard Divinity School Course (level: graduate)
Course Head: Catherine Brekus
GenED 1166: Pluralism: Case Studies in American Diversity (Teaching Fellow, Fall 2021)
Synopsis: Who do we mean when we say “we?” How does our society deal with religious, ethical, and cultural diversity? What challenges do we face as people of different communities encounter one another in cities and public institutions, schools and businesses, neighborhoods and families? This course explores, discusses, and analyzes the changing multi-cultural and multi-religious landscape of America with an eye to the growing Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh communities in the most recent period of post-1965 immigration. The course’s approach is through the study and in-class discussion of case-studies enabling you to enter into some of the controversies and dilemmas that confront us in our schools, universities, town councils, zoning boards, and places of work.
Harvard College General Education course (level: undergraduate)
Course Head: Diana Eck