Teaching Spotlights are Q&A style profiles of UChicago faculty and instructors discussing thoughtful and innovative teaching methods. If you would like to suggest a faculty member or instructor for inclusion in the series, please contact Amanda M. Jungels (amanda.jungels@uchicago.edu).
Teaching Spotlights
Darya Tsymbalyuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Committee on Environment, Growth and Urbanization (CEGU), and the Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. She is a writer, researcher, teacher, and maker of images, and the author of Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity, 2025). Since coming to UChicago in Autumn 2024, she has offered courses on modern Ukrainian culture, ecocide in a global context, the future of Russian and East European Studies, autoethnography and autotheory, and “wild” Easts.
Darya sat down with us to talk about the final project in her course “Ecocide: Reckoning with Environmental Destruction” (REES/CEGU/GLST 24010), in which her students collaborated on a collectively authored zine that demonstrated their learning in a range of ways, from writing to art to comics to video games. (Watch a flipthrough video of the zine here.)
Ahmed Abozaid is a Lecturer in the Committee on International Relations (CIR). His research interrogates security and power through a decolonial lens, especially as they pertain to small states in the Global South. A prolific scholar, Dr. Abozaid has published eleven books (two in English and nine in Arabic) and more than seventy peer-reviewed articles. His forthcoming book, Racial Injustice and Decolonial Praxis in Global Academia, will be published by The American University in Cairo Press. He is currently completing a book manuscript for Oxford University Press that develops a non-Eurocentric account of state formation grounded in comparative historical sociology and global political thought. His teaching experience extends over a broad range of topics in international relations, from human rights to the climate crisis to crisis management and conflict resolution.
Ahmed Abozaid talked with us about how he uses student-led presentations to engage students in his “International Security of the Global South” course.
Michele Friedner is the Chair of the Department of Comparative Human Development. She is a social and medical anthropologist whose research explores the category and experience of “deafness” and “disability.” In particular, she is interested in D/deaf and disabled people’s social, moral, religious, and economic practices, with a primary focus on deafness in India.
Jennifer Iverson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music. Her research explores intersections between music, technologies, people, and history. She is currently particularly interested in the development and use of synthesizers in a musical context.
We spoke with them about how they approach access in their disability and design course.
Read Michele Friedner and Jennifer Iverson’s Teaching Spotlight
Mehrnoush Soroush is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies and the Director of the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) Lab. In her research and teaching, she examines the histories of human-environment interactions, focusing on water provision in the Middle East and other arid climates, and using interdisciplinary methods such as archaeological fieldwork, textual and archival research, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and computational methods.
We spoke with Mehrnoush about her approach to scaffolding a final project over the entire 9-week quarter—a project that lets students demonstrate their newly acquired software skills, show their accomplishment of the course objectives, and pursue topics that motivate them, all without relying on AI.
Lisa Rosen is an Associate Senior Instructional Professor and serves as Director of Instructional Programs for the Committee on Education. She studies the relationship between education and social inequality as well as the interaction of schooling and identity. Together with Committee on Education colleagues Stephen Raudenbush and Elizabeth Hassrick, she wrote The Ambitious Elementary School (UChicago Press, 2017), which, through a study of schools on the South Side of Chicago, argues that addressing educational inequality requires a reimagining of institutional structures and norms, ones that emphasize collaboration between teachers, parents, school leaders, and social workers. She teaches courses on educational and social inequality in addition to a number of other topics in educational research.
We spoke with Lisa about her research translation assignment and how it promotes student learning, particularly in an AI landscape.
Fausto Cattaneo is the Deputy Chair for Academic Affairs and a Professor in the Astronomy and Astrophysics department. His research focuses on computational astrophysics and solar physics. In particular, he is interested in the computational modeling of basic astrophysical processes like the generation of magnetic fields, the transport of angular momentum in accretion discs, or the transport of energy by turbulent convection.
Julia Brazas is the Academic Affairs Administrator and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in the department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She is responsible for undergraduate programs, advising, and research placements, as well as undergraduate and graduate curricula. She serves on the Astronomy and Astrophysics curriculum committee and the Advisory Board for the College Center for Research and Fellowships.
We sat down with them to discuss their approach to assessing and addressing students’ prior knowledge in astrophysics.
Nick Feamster is a Neubauer Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He directs the Network Operations and Internet Security research lab; co-leads netml.io, a research initiative focused on applying machine learning to networking problems; and co-directs the AI and Policy Pillar, which works on policy issues at the intersection of AI and technology. His research focuses on applications of AI and machine learning to improve the performance and security of networked systems. In 2026, Professor Feamster was awarded the Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring.
We talked with him about how he integrates and encourages AI use in his courses, prompted by a post he wrote on his Substack available here.
Jean Clipperton (Associate Director of MACSS and Associate Senior Instructional Professor), is a political scientist and computational social scientist who studies how institutions and individuals use language to construct shared understandings and identity. Her current research examines how emotional messages and symbols manifest and impact political messaging and campaigning, as well as how pop music encodes emotional meaning. She teaches courses in computational music analysis, data visualization, agent-based modeling, programming in R and Python, and research design.
We spoke with her about engaging students in online courses.
Benjamin Morgan (Department Chair and Associate Professor of English) studies literature, science, and aesthetics in the Victorian period and early twentieth century. He specializes in nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion; aestheticism and decadence; and speculative and science fiction. His interests also lie in the environmental humanities, including topics such as extinction, energy cultures, and the literary history of climate change.
We spoke with him about his opt-in/opt-out approach to students’ use of artificial intelligence.
Megan McNulty is a Senior Instructional Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, and teaches general education biology courses for nonmajors as well as courses for neuroscience majors. She, along with Oscar Pineda-Catalan, co-led an effort to augment the Core Biology curriculum by including hands-on approaches to scientific research and habits of mind through student-designed research projects, which is now included in the Core curriculum for biology.
Oscar Pineda-Catalan is an Associate Senior Instructional Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division. Pineda-Catalan is a conservation biologist who has developed research and education programs to motivate and engage youth to pursue careers in science.
We spoke with them about leveraging Inquiry-Based Learning in their biology course.
Read Megan McNulty and Oscar Pineda-Catalan's Teaching Spotlight
Jon Satrom is an Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Director of the Program in Media Arts and Design. Over the past few years, Satrom has worked with his colleagues in Cinema and Media Studies to develop the practice-based Media Arts and Design major and minor. He regularly teaches Core and Capstone courses and irregularly develops special topics courses within the areas of video games, realtime audio/video performance, creative computing, electronic sound, and glitch art. As a teaching artist, Satrom works to craft studio classroom experiences that foster experimentation, criticality, and "creative problem creating.”
We sat down with him to talk about pedagogical approaches to AI's role in art creation, understanding its potential and limitations in meeting artistic expectations.
Tamara Golan (Assistant Professor of Art, Art History) studies and teaches medieval and early modern art from northern Europe. She specializes in the visual and material culture of Switzerland and southern Germany, and her interests range from the intersections of art, science, and the law; paradigms of expertise; artistic fraud and deception; and questions of materiality.
Noel Blanco Mourelle (Assistant Professor of Medieval Iberian Studies, Romance Languages and Literature) is a specialist in medieval Iberian languages and cultures. His teaching and research engages with themes of religious conversion, theories of universalism, political theology and history of the book. He teaches courses in both English and Spanish.
Tamara and Noel co-teach a course called “Witchcraft and the Cultural Imagination” in which students create digital exhibitions using Omeka. We talked with them about this innovative assignment and their approach to co-teaching.
Read Tamara Golan and Noel Blanco Mourelle's Teaching Spotlight
Russell P. Johnson is Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program and Core Sequence in the University of Chicago Divinity School and a CCTL Associate Pedagogy Fellow. His teaching includes courses on nonviolent direct action, argumentation and epistemology, and religion and film, and contributed an essay, “First Impressions: Expectations and Tone in Syllabus Construction” to the CCTL column Teaching Matters, and “On ChatGPT: A Letter to My Students” to the Divinity School digital magazine Sightings. In 2026, Professor Johnson was awarded the Swogger Award for exemplary classroom teaching in the College Core.
We sat down with Russell to talk about humanizing the classroom in response to AI.
Hoyt Long is a Professor of Japanese Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and is Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His teaching and research focus on modern Japan, with specific interests in the history of media and communication, cultural analytics, platform studies, the sociology of literature, book history, and environmental history.
We talked with Hoyt about using AI as historical personae in his courses.