ABBY CLAYTON
Thinker, Writer, Teacher
My Mission
I am a teacher-scholar with a commitment to increasing the accessibility of a humanities education. I am dedicated to helping all students ask and answer deep questions about society and their own lives. Through strategies such as inquiry-driven and adaptive pedagogy, and ungrading and self-evaluation, I invite students to take personal stake in their learning.
Courses Taught
Introduction to Nonfiction Prose
The Stuff of Memory
Indiana University, Instructor of Record
First-Year Composition
Conflicts of Culture and Capitalism
Indiana University, Instructor of Record
Intro to Advanced Study of Literature
Island Stories
Indiana University, Teaching Assistant
What is the stuff that holds your memories? Think of a childhood toy, an old scar, a house, your Camera Roll. In this class, we will explore together how the things that store our personal and collective memories—known as archives—affect our memories themselves. As we do, we will consider problems of decay, power, relativity, and truth. Our readings and discussions will move from the tangible to the intangible and from small to large, investigating objects, bodies, places, and the digisphere.
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In this course, we will be developing skills of analytical thinking, reading, and writing that are key to your success as a university student. To meet that goal, we will examine essays, films, music videos, and a range of other cultural objects. We will consider in our study the inquiry question, how does late-stage capitalism affect the ability to maintain and express cultural identities?
Why are we so fascinated by islands? In literature and art, islands can offer the promise of new ways of life, self-invention, even magical transformation. At other times (or simultaneously), they can become occasions for domination and colonial violence. This semester, we will consider “island stories,” beginning with two masterpieces of British literature: Shakespeare’s magical The Tempest (1611), and Daniel Defoe’s realist Robinson Crusoe (1719). From there, we will consider a range of fictional reimaginations of and responses to these foundational works from Shelley's poetry to Anglo-Jamaican Andrea Levy's novels.
Courses Planned
Introduction to Literary Criticism
Ctrl+C: The Craft of Authorship
Anglophone Literature Survey
Writing the Emerging Anglosphere (1800–1900)
What does it mean to be an author? Can originality ever really exist, and does it need to? These questions are not new to the age of AI nor are they confined to any one genre or career. For centuries authors have copied content from one another without apology. Imitation could be the highest form of flattery; viral media could be democratizing. And yet self-made, unreliable experts abound, copyright law continues to evolve, and generative AI has caused heated debates about the labor of authorship and what is considered plagiarism. In this class, we’ll think together about originality and the politics of citation as we read adaptations, watch reboots, and study criticism.
How was an English-speaking “West” constructed? And how did it accumulate its power? Our class will trace the cultural roots of these Western alliances in the nineteenth century, surveying Anglophone literature from roughly 1800–1900. Our goal for the semester will be to understand how diverse writers—and diverse genres—from Britain, the United States, and their burgeoning empires, were envisioning national identities in relationship to global power. We will begin with writing about and from settlement, move through mid-century nation-making, and end with the turn-of-the-century’s new imperialism. As we do, we will pay special attention to: 1) racialized ideals of Anglophone whiteness; and 2) the ways in which literature came to stand in for nation/empire itself.