Here’s an overview of some of the courses I’ve taught and/or consulted in recent years. I have almost twenty years of teaching experience in higher ed across various modalities (in-person, online, blended, Hy-Flex). I’ve taught courses at Brown University, Northeastern University, Arizona State University, and Wentworth College. Happy to consult with educators in higher ed and K-12 on effective uses of technology in the classroom and digital pedagogy: feel free to get in touch via Twitter (@JimMc_Grath) or email (jimmcgrath.us@gmail.com)!

Unless otherwise noted, course materials created by me (syllabi, assignment prompts, descriptions) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Please feel free to re-use and re-mix (with attribution) in your own courses and workshops (and please let me know via Twitter or email!). Student work (blog posts, digital projects, etc.) should be considered intellectual property of students and should be attributed when linked to in relevant contexts. If you have questions about re-use, please email me at the address listed above!

PDF backups / remediations of course descriptions and syllabi available on Humanities Commons.

Northeastern University (Fall 2020-Spring 2021)

Digital Space and Place (Northeastern University; Spring 2021)

Course site. Graduate-level course for Northeastern’s History Department.

Topics in Public History: Publics, Projects, and Methods in Digital Public History (Northeastern University; Fall 2020)

Course site. Graduate-level course for Northeastern’s History Department.

Brown University (Fall 2015-Spring 2020)

Digital Archives and Digital Publics (Brown University; Spring 2020)

View our course site here. The site documents our original syllabus and semester calendar as well as changes made in the wake of COVID-19.

Mapping Violence (co-taught with Monica Muñoz Martinez and TA Edwin Rodriguez; Spring 2020)

We used a Canvas site for this course, but I’ve added a PDF copy of the syllabus to Humanities Commons. The PDF includes hyperlinks to readings and documents the changes made to the course in the wake of COVID-19.

Digital Storytelling (Brown University; Spring 2019)

 View our course site here.

Media Literacy in The Age of Fake News and Big Data (Brown University; Summer 2018)

“Media Literacy in The Age of Fake News and Big Data” was a course for pre-college students offered through The Brown Leadership Institute. I wrote about the course here; you can view and download a PDF of the syllabus here. 

Digital Public Humanities (Brown University; Fall 2017)

I taught Digital Public Humanities (a graduate-level course) for the second time at Brown in the fall of 2017. This particular version of the course is centered on a collaboration with the Providence Public Library Special Collections Department. View our course site for more information. I wrote a bit about our collaboration here.

Digital Storytelling (Brown University; Spring 2017)

This is a graduate-level course offered through the Public Humanities M.A. program here at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (institutionally house in American Studies). Visit our course site to view readings, our student-run blog, and digital projects / stories in development.

This course met at Brown’s Digital Scholarship Lab, ran informal workshops for students on particular tools, and made use of Slack to augment and continue class discussions and project development.

Digital Public Humanities (Brown University; Spring 2016)

This is a graduate-level course offered through the Public Humanities M.A. program here at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (institutionally house in American Studies). Visit our course site to view readings, blog posts, and student descriptions of the digital projects they began developing by the end of the course. We made use of Slack and Google Docs for class notes and discussion.

This course also led to the creation of a few Twitter bots after a class workshop. One bot, @elpublicoes (made by Eddie Roble and Bárbara Elmúdesi), is still running in 2019.

Wentworth Institute of Technology (Spring 2014-Summer 2015)

In the spring of 2014, I consulted with the instructors of a Wentworth course titled “Digital Approaches to Boston Culture: Curating the Legacy of Mayor James Curley.” Specifically, I helped the course make use of Neatline, a plugin for digital exhibits in Omeka, in order to create an annotated tour of “The Curley House,” the former residence of Boston Mayor James M. Curley. In the summer of 2015, I co-taught a version of “Digital Approaches to Boston Culture” that continued work on the Curley initiative and began work on a similar digital project concerning The Loring-Greenough House, a historic site in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston.

Northeastern University (Fall 2003 – Spring 2015)

During my time at Northeastern, I spent over ten years teaching various courses in the university’s Writing Programs (College Writing, Advanced Writing in the Disciplines). I also ran workshops on digital tools with the Northeastern University Library, guest-lectured on digital media and technology (in undergraduate and graduate-level courses), worked as a teaching assistant for tenured faculty, and served as a writing tutor (as part of Northeastern’s Writing Center and International Tutoring Center) My in-class work at Northeastern involved a range of uses of digital tools and methodologies. Highlights include:

• Ran Omeka workshops for students and faculty in the spring of 2015
• Assisted an undergraduate service learning course with the creation of digital exhibits for Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive in the fall of 2014 (link)
• Created “Alex Panoptix,” a commentary on student social media use and surveillance culture via a collaboratively-written (with students in a College Writing course) Twitter account about a fictional Northeastern student living in Boston (Spring 2013)
• Created “@Robert_Frost,” a playful critique of periodization and literary history in the form of a Twitter parody account (for a Spring 2009 Special Topics course on Robert Frost)
• Assigned students Wikipedia editing / revision assignments that asked them to participate in and reflect on issues related to knowledge production and public writing (various courses)