Dr. Amy Gais

As an instructor, I emphasize three skills that I view as central to an undergraduate education: the ability to interpret texts with care and nuance, to think critically across ideas and traditions, and to engage in intellectual dialogue. In my classes, students encounter influential works of political theory. Yet beyond encountering these influential texts, I hope that students leave my courses as more attentive readers, more discerning thinkers, and more generous interlocutors.

One of the central skills that I aim to cultivate in my courses is careful, attentive reading. Given all of the forces competing for students’ attention in our digital age, the honing of this skill is more important, and more challenging, than ever. The texts that we encounter in my courses are dense and demanding, but I also hope to show students that reading deeply can be rewarding.

To practice this skill, I anchor class discussions in close engagement with specific passages. For example, when teaching Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” we begin by reading the passage about the ringbolt. I then pose a few questions to guide our conversation in reconstructing the passage. What are the guiding principles of American democracy? How does the image of the ringbolt reveal Douglass’s view of that democracy?

From there, we reconstruct Douglass’s argument about the hypocrisy of American democracy. We probe his rhetorical strategy, examining how his language exposes the tension between the nation’s image and its reality. We consider his vivid examples of the chasm between the ideals of American democracy and its practice and his vision of what it would mean to enact those “guiding principles.” Reading these passages slowly, line by line, and unpacking them together, students are empowered to discern the nuances in Douglass’s language and argument.

When my students have developed the skill of careful reading, they can begin the more ambitious work of putting ideas into conversation with one another. In a recent class, one student connected the passage on the ringbolt to another passage in one of Douglass’s autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom, a text that he had encountered in another one of my courses. There, Douglass explains that learning to read revealed to him the injustice of slavery, empowering him with insight into his oppression but also burdening him with tortuous knowledge that offered no path forward to freedom. In both texts, the student noticed, the pursuit of democracy depends on the capacity to see injustice clearly.

This kind of sophisticated thinking, linking distinct figures or texts to illuminate shared ideas and problems, exemplifies the more ambitious intellectual work that students work toward in my classes: thinking critically across traditions and contexts in ways that foster deeper understanding in the classroom and often inspire students to pursue undergraduate research projects. As the student later reflected to me, my courses have encouraged him to reflect on a “common humanity in the way we think. From Plato to Tocqueville to Douglass, I have seen the same ideas form and reform through the words of figures whose circumstances differ vastly.”

Finally, I aim to cultivate a dynamic and inclusive seminar environment that encourages students to engage actively and critically in intellectual conversation. In my first semester as a professor, I noticed some disconcerting dynamics: a few students dominated discussion, comments felt disconnected, and students tended to address me rather than one another. I quickly realized that one of my most important roles in the classroom is to create an environment in which all students contribute to our shared conversation and have an opportunity to learn from one another.

Now, I begin each course by asking students to “think generously” with one another, by which I mean building on a peer’s intuition, challenging them constructively, or connecting their ideas with other parts of the text. I encourage students to address one another by name and make eye contact. These small practices shift the energy in the room and make discussions livelier and often more effective. By mid-semester, students are actively in dialogue with one another and pressing tentative intuitions to a more nuanced understanding. This, to me, is what productive dialogue in the classroom looks like: not agreement, but deep engagement even across meaningful disagreements, in the pursuit of intellectual excellence.

Another student described my emphasis on addressing one another as “helping us see ourselves as contributors to a broader political conversation.” She described how making eye contact and using one another’s names had a “powerful humanizing effect,” making it easier for students to navigate “difficult material on politics, race, and religion.” This student’s investment in the seminar conversation, comfort with difficult topics, and curiosity about the ideas of their peers is precisely what I aim to foster in the classroom.

Outside of the classroom, mentorship is central to my teaching practice. Many academic and professional pathways require institutional knowledge that is not equally available to all students, and I work closely with my students to help make this “hidden curriculum” more accessible. I have benefited immensely from the generosity of my teachers and mentors, and I am committed to passing along that support to another generation of students and scholars.

Whether in a seminar or a one-on-one office hours conversation, my goal is always the same: to help students develop confidence in themselves and their ideas, continue to grow intellectually, and connect their academic work to their professional aspirations and the broader demands of democratic citizenship. This is, at its core, a commitment to intellectual excellence, inviting students to see that we can understand the world better together by drawing on the many perspectives, disciplines, and backgrounds that each of us bring to the classroom and beyond.

I regularly offer an advanced seminar on African American political thought, “Freedom and Resistance in African American Political Thought.”

Course Description: How do African American writers conceive of freedom, agency, and self-determination in the face of longstanding injustices and inequities in American politics, from slavery to segregation, lynching to police brutality, economic disenfranchisement to voter suppression? What tools of resistance should be employed in the struggle to confront and dismantle racial oppression? This course explores competing understandings of freedom, as well as the plurality of ideas about strategies of resistance, in African American political thought. We will engage with an interdisciplinary group of African American writers, activists, and artists, such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper.

Please find the syllabus here.

I regularly teach a course on American political thought, “Race and Religion in American Political Thought.”

Course Description: What is conscience? What role should it play in democratic politics? By considering what conscience means and what vision of politics it implies, this course reflects on the question of what it means to be American and how individuals in American society have resisted inequity and injustice. In particular, we focus on the understanding of conscience in debates on religion, race, politics, and sex in twentieth-century American politics, from the Interwar Period to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War, to the Sexual Revolution. We engage with Ronald Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, among many other authors in American political thought.

Please find the syllabus here, as well as our intuitions about conscience on the first day of the course.

During the COVID pandemic, I developed a course, “Politics in a Time of Crisis,” which I continue to teach occasionally. This course invited students to situate the COVID-19 pandemic in a long history of political, social, environmental, racial, and economic crises, such as nuclear warfare, climate change, police brutality, and political polarization. While the promise of timely material brought students into the classroom, this course exposed them to the rich humanistic traditions and interdisciplinary approaches that help us all make sense of these systemic and multi-layered crises. This course engaged students facing uncertainties by showing them that our current challenges are hardly unprecedented and empowering them with the historical perspective and conceptual tools to reflect on our particular moment in history. We engaged with an interdisciplinary group of authors, both historical and contemporary, from across social and political thought, such as Thucydides, Abraham Lincoln, Carl Schmitt, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Hans Morgenthau, Martin Luther King, Jr., David Wallace-Wells, Brandon Terry, among many others.

Please find the syllabus here.

I regularly teach the introductory political thought sequence, “Early Political Thought” and “Modern Political Thought.”

Course Description for EPT: This course engages with texts in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance political thought, focusing specifically on ancient Greek political thought, medieval Islamic and Christian political thought, and Renaissance political thought. We will pay attention to central political concepts underlying this intellectual tradition, such as justice, sacrifice, glory, and political rule. We will attend to tensions between many of these concepts, such as the tension between justice and power, religion and politics, and obligation to family and state.

Course Description for MPT: What is modernity? What kinds of politics are characteristic of modern politics? How did early modern figures imagine the modern world? What view of politics were they rejecting in creating this new world? This course begins by examining two early modern figures, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and the guiding ambitions of the modern project, such as the nation state, modern notions of freedom, and private property. Next, we will consider some of the most influential critics of modernity, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Hannah Arendt, asking how they challenge our modern commitments.