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.
This portfolio website gives insight into my work with students and fellow educators and provides shareable course resources.​
Resources
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, Graduate 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
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.
Anglophone Literature Survey
Border Writing and Transatlantic Crossings
“Nation”—as an organizational form—has so deeply embedded itself in our perception of others and ourselves that we do not know how to exist outside of it. And, literature has always been central to our sense of distinct national culture. At the same time, national borders are so fluid that some political commentators outright consider them useless. This class surveys Anglophone literature from 1800 to the present, exploring how writers on both sides of the Atlantic imagined and contested boundaries through literary and media exchange. From nineteenth-century meditations on empire and migration to modern reckonings with globalization, we will consider how transatlantic authors wrote about both belonging and displacement.