I design and teach courses on the intersection of science and art. Currently, I teach a year-long seminar at Butler University, “Physics and the Arts,” where we look at how physics intersects with fiction, poetry, drama, graphic novels, visual art, and dance. The first class I designed on science and art was for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (“Writing Workshop: Where Art Meets Science,” or WAMS) in 2000. That summer course expanded into two online courses for the Johns Hopkins CTY Distance Education Program that continue today, though I no longer teach them (Nonfiction: Art Meets Science (NAMS) and Literature: Art Meets Science (LAMS)). In 2015 and 2016, I introduced my science poetry curriculum to a summer program for female high school students in Dammam, Saudi Arabia as well as a co-ed program in Beijing, China in 2017, both for the Center for Excellence in Education’s Research Science Institute (RSI).
I started my career as a college professor at Purdue University. I taught at Arizona State University, Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, and now Butler University. I also teach and design courses for summer programs, libraries, and offer courses through the Indiana Writers Center.
Welcome to WestWorld: A.I. and Human Values, Butler University (2023)
Course description: Machine learning and advanced algorithms are used in hiring, determining criminal sentences and parole, making medical diagnoses, modeling climate change, banking, navigation, and surveillance, as well as creating and curating the news that we read. But do people have the knowledge and moral courage to maneuver the tools we have created? Are we the “sorcerer’s apprentice,” having made something too powerful for us to control? Increasingly, our world is being turned over to computational models, and deep learning has exhilarating promise. But our “robots” show us who we are. Biases and seemingly banal errors are embedded in our models, and they proliferate, creating profound problems for social justice, education, and privacy. How artificial intelligence is structured and implemented spark debates about the nature of fairness itself. In this course, we will reckon with the A.I. that makes up the fabric of twenty-first century life. We will examine text and art generators like ChatGPT and DALL-E and read current articles about how well deep learning aligns with our values, and we will also look at the history of computation and related literature for context. Through graphic novels like Syndey Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage and Victor LaValle’s Destroyer, thought-provoking fiction such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Louisa Hall’s Speak as well as film and television shows like Her and Westworld, this course explores the relationships between humans and the machines we create.
Physics and the Arts, Butler University (2016-2023)
Course description: From a graphic novel about Marie Curie to a film on Stephen Hawking, from plays and symphonies inspired by quantum physics to fiction and poetry on astrophysics and relativity, the arts are a powerful way to investigate the beauty and complexity of scientific ideas. Physics and literature have a rich historical past, reaching at least as far back as two millennia, with Lucretius’ didactic epic poem about atoms. And yet there is often a perceived division between science and art. This seminar will examine representations of physics in literature, celebrating their common ground, whether in essays by Carlo Rovelli, Alan Lightman and K. C. Cole, poetry by Arthur Sze and A. Van Jordan, fiction by Italo Calvino, plays by Tom Stoppard, Lauren Gunderson, Michael Frayn, Peter Parnell, and Steve Martin, or graphic novels on great physicists such as Richard Feynman and Marie Curie. Contemporary poets such as Brenda Hillman, Rae Armantrout, Robert Hass, Tracy K. Smith, Forrest Gander, Bin Ramke, Alice Fulton, Alison Hawthorn Deming, Diane Ackerman, and more have brilliantly incorporated modern physics into their projects. Students will explore opera, dance, painting, photography, and sculpture that engage with the most fundamental questions physics poses, and in the process will discover how physics approaches the world.
Science Poetry
Center for Excellence in Education (Saudi Arabia, two years, China, one year) (2015-17)
Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (I designed in 2004, taught by others now)
Original course description: Art Meets Science: Nonfiction challenges the common conception that scientists and artists are fundamentally different. Many people view science and art as two of the most disparate disciplines imaginable. C. P. Snow, a writer who also had a background in science, felt that the two should be reconciled, but he also believed that the division had grown so strong during this past century that there were two separate "cultures," and a great divide between them. So, how do we attempt to bridge that gap? To answer that question, students read nonfiction works by writers such as Annie Dillard, Oliver Sacks, Stephen Jay Gould, Diane Ackerman, and Richard Feynman and they write four essays and one substantive revision.
Current course description: In this course, you will read nonfiction works inspired by science and use them as models to write and revise personal and critical essays. You’ll research scientific topics, reflect on personal experiences, learn and apply new scientific vocabulary, and study the relationship between science and the arts to write about what you know as well as what you hope to discover about yourself and the world around you.
This course offers written forum discussion of readings, as well as workshops in which you and your peers offer constructive feedback on each other’s writing.
By the end of this course, you will understand that observation, imagination, and the use of metaphor are all essential aspects of both science and art.
Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (I designed in 2004, taught by others now)
Original course description: In Art Meets Science: Literature, students explore the connection between discovery in science and creativity on the page as they read poetry, plays, and fiction written about or inspired by scientific ideas. As students learn the craft of poetry, they see that creative writing has an element of precision. Without imagination, there is no purpose to observation; without keen observation skills, even the wildest imagination is shabbily furnished. Planck's discovery of the quantum, Einstein's theory of relativity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, for example, reveal a universe far stranger than previously imagined, and the students' task as writers is to inhabit that universe. Towards the end of this short course, it will become clear that observation, imagination, and the use of metaphor are all essential aspects of both science and art.
Current course description: In this course, you will read works inspired by science and use them as models for your own poems, stories, and essays. You’ll research a scientific topic and write a poem about it; research a scientist and write a series of journal entries from their point of view; and write a scene featuring one character explaining a scientific concept to another.
This course offers written forum discussion of readings as well as asynchronous workshops in which you and your peers offer constructive feedback on each other’s writing.
By the end of this course, you will understand that observation, imagination, and the use of metaphor are all essential aspects of both science and art.
Writing Workshop: Where Art Meets Science
Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (2002-2005)
Science and Literature: Wonder in the Complete Sense
Indiana Writers Center, NEH, IN Humanities Quantum Leap. 2018
Art Meets Science; Writing with Constraints; Getting Unstuck; Drawing Out Story (Graphic Novels)
Indiana Writers Center (2015-2020)
Uncreative Writing; Where Art Meets Science; Voice Workshop
Trade School Indianapolis (2013-2015)
Blossom and Water and Wheat Kernel: Image Workshop; Voice Workshop; Cutting to the Bone: Minimalism and Revision
Brownsburg Public Library (2013)
Voice Workshop; Creating Characters; Dialogue; Blossom and Water and Wheat Kernel: Image Workshop; Music and the Poetic Line; Voice Workshop II; Voice (Teen Workshop)
Danville Library (2012-2015)
Art Meets Science
Phoenix College Saturday Workshop (Spring 2006)
Exercises in Style: Experimenting with Voice
Phoenix College Saturday Workshop (Fall 2004)