Nadeen Kharputly

About me

Hi! I’m Nadeen. I’m a writer, a qualitative researcher, and a former professor. After ten years in academia, I left for a job in tech and now work as a content strategist.

You'll find highlights of my work in this portfolio. Don't hesitate to reach out if you want to learn more.

I received my BA and MA in English from Stanford and my PhD in Literature from UC San Diego.

Want to learn more about my work or find opportunities to collaborate? You can find me on LinkedIn or you can e-mail me at nkharputly at gmail dot com.

Writing

Writing has always been at the center of my career. Up until recently I was a content strategist at Reforge, where I designed learning experiences for professionals looking to sharpen their expertise in product, growth, and marketing. I worked in a team of strategy leads, visual designers, and producers to write short and longform content for cohort-based programs and to design other forms of asynchronous content.

As an academic, I spent ten years teaching writing, rhetoric, and composition to college students, particularly first-year students. Teaching a required class to students who seemed like they would rather swim in shark-infested waters ended up being one of the highlights of my career. I'll say more about that here.

I’ve written across a wide range of contexts, including but not limited to:

For detailed descriptions of specific projects, please get in touch to receive access to my portfolio.

Teaching first-year writing

I taught first-year writing to students at UC San Diego and Washington and Lee University over a period of ten years.

I’ll just say it: those classes were the bane of everyone’s existence. The students didn't want to take a *required* class. The professors didn't want to teach classes that the students haven’t elected to take out of genuine interest. It was all very demoralizing sometimes.

When I taught my last ever writing course in the winter of 2022, I was thrilled to leave this part of my career behind. But I was also grateful that I got to hone so many of my skills in these classes.

I learned how to reach a tricky, reluctant audience. I found the best ways to inspire engagement between learners and content. I modeled constructive critique and sensitive conversation tactics. I taught my students how to think, read, write, and research effectively. I managed the early college learning experiences of more students than I can count.

That's probably what I loved the most: reaching students at the beginning of their college careers and seeing how their skills and scholarly interests evolved over time. Some of the most satisfying moments of my career involved challenging students to reframe their perceptions of their abilities - for example, students who didn’t think they were great readers or writers. Very often those students ended up transforming the most, and witnessing them build or regain confidence in their abilities was a true joy.

These writing classes were never easy to teach, and in academia, they were not seen as a productive use of one's time (at least in my experience). To me, however, these classes had the biggest impact on my precision as a writer and on my ability to lead and engage with audiences - especially reluctant ones.

Teaching and learning

I spent ten years in higher education, teaching across a wide range of contexts: at large public research institutions and at small liberal arts colleges, in the humanities and in the social sciences, in-person, hybrid, and online. I’ve taught classes solo and in teams of ten colleagues, and across a number of disciplines, including English Literature, Writing, and Ethnic Studies.

My philosophy as an educator was to build deep connections between learners and challenging subject matters, no matter what my students’ backgrounds. I was a first generation international student who was privileged to have access to incredible learning opportunities, so I strove to build learning communities that were as accessible and as engaging as possible. You can learn more about some of my experiences building these communities here.

As a content strategist at Reforge, I relied heavily on my higher ed background to build engaging and intuitive learning programs for tech professionals in product, marketing, and growth.

Here's a complete list of my course syllabi. If you’d like to see specific examples of assignments that I designed (instructions, rubrics, etc.), please get in touch.

Virtual learning

Like educators everywhere, I briefly descended into panic when we had to shift to virtual education in March 2020, but then quickly shifted my mindset and took the opportunity to learn new skills in order to deliver an outstanding educational experience remotely. I am forever grateful to the incredible Paul Hanstedt for leading emergency faculty workshops as soon as we received stay at home orders. He and the experts whose skills he solicited helped us pivot online seamlessly.

After some trial and error during the winter and spring terms of 2020, I adopted a strategy that I would use for my fall 2020 and winter 2021 classes, which all met Mon/Wed/Fri:

• Each Monday, my students watched a short (~10-20 minute) prerecorded lecture video on the week’s topic. I created and edited the videos using iMovie and kept the lectures short on the recommendation of trusted pedagogical research.
• The videos were accompanied with an assignment - depending on the week, students were asked to: record a video of themselves on Flipgrid in response to a specific prompt, write a 250-500 word post on our LMS discussion forum, or come to Wednesday’s meeting with prepared responses to a specific question.
• Each Wednesday we had a remote meeting on Zoom to have a structured conversation and activity about our topic and text of the week.
• On Fridays, I held one-on-one meetings with students over Zoom so that I could get to know them better and so that they could spend more time on the topic of the week if they wanted. These were not required, but I asked each student to sign up for at least one session with me. Some students showed up on a weekly basis.

Meeting once a week felt antithetical to the spirit of a small liberal arts college, which boasts small faculty-to-student ratios and prizes close contact with one another. But it was a setup that I thought best fit the challenging circumstances we were all in. My priority was to carefully balance an exceptional learning experience with our collective mental health.

• My strategy was successful: students overwhelmingly loved the setup of the class and expressed appreciation for its flexibility.
• We built a solid learning community remotely - evident in the fact that students felt comfortable having tough conversations about issues ranging from race and racism to immigration and citizenship.

Here are a few classes that were 100% remote (during fall 2020 and winter 2021): Malcolm X, Animal Intimacies

As an educator, I built learning communities with the intention of changing the way people move through the world. I tok pride in designing classes where learners come into contact with content that has the potential to enrich their perspective of our world.

For example, whether I teach a course on Asian American literature or an Ethnic Studies course on citizenship or social movements, I often taught a module on the history of Japanese American incarceration in the U.S. during the second World War.

I wanted students to understand the historical details of this dark period of time, but I also wanted them to empathize with the individuals at the center of these histories. I employed a people-first and narrative-centric approach in order to amplify the impact of the events. I also needed students to understand the longevity of these events and to understand how today’s world is shaped by the past.

• I delivered a short lecture on the details of Executive Order 9066 and the forced relocation of Japanese Americans into concentration camps, with a focus on terminology (i.e., I explain why I use “concentration camps” and “incarceration” instead of “internment camps” and “internment”) to accompany the assigned texts.
• I often assigned the following texts:
• Yuri Kochiyama, “Then Came the War”
  A text by the famous activist describing period of time in which she and her family were detained in a concentration camp in Jerome, Arkansas. I also include a video of the actress Sandra Oh reading the letter in order to bring Kochiyama’s words to life.
• An episode of More Perfect
  A podcast from the creators of Radiolab, this episode features the story of the civil rights activist Fred Korematsu. It’s a striking episode because it begins with the story of Karen Korematsu finding out in school that the Korematsu involved in the 1944 Supreme Court case was none other than her father. He had never revealed the truth about his past to his own daughter.
• John Okada’s No-No Boy
  A novel (published only 12 years after the end of WW2) that received deeply negative responses from Japanese American readers who felt that this novel portrayed them poorly, which to them was irresponsible given their efforts to recover after the war. Though troubling in some respects, the novel offers a cutting portrait of several Japanese American characters who are negotiating what it means to be American after the war.
• Hisaye Yamamoto, “Wilshire Bus”
  A short story that takes place on a bus traveling through Los Angeles. The narrator recounts a disturbing scene of anti-Asian hatred against her fellow passengers on the bus but ultimately does nothing. The story offers a telling look at interracial solidarity (or lack thereof) and bystander politics.
OUTCOMES
• The diverse collection of texts that I assign encourages students to connect to the subject matter on multiple levels: historical, political, literary, and emotional.
• Students learn about aspects of U.S. history that they don’t often encounter in their education. Even in California, a very small number of my students were exposed to an exhaustive account of forced relocation and concentration camps.
• Students draw connections between past and present events. They often share George Takei’s work, as the actor and activist often draws from his experience of incarceration to speak out against Islamophobia.
• Students' perspectives are enriched by diversity and necessity of narratives across different mediums (literary narratives, memoirs, podcasts, photographs, etc.).
Back

Understanding Reading practices

In the spring of 2021, I designed a brand new English class for Washington and Lee's experiential 4-week spring term with the following parameters in mind:

• The class would meet 3x a week for 3 hours per session (9 hours/week)
• Some of my students were on campus and others would join us remotely from their homes around the country.
• We were still in the middle of the pandemic and only just getting access to vaccines.
• We were all were exhausted by the prospect of spending nine hours a week on Zoom after a tough year of making sacrifices to keep each other safe.

My goal was to design a class that would a) deliver an outstanding educational experience for in-person and remote students and b) rejuvenate our minds and spirits after a long and difficult year.

I designed a hybrid class that revolved around a single novel: Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994).

Rather than building a curriculum with my usual approach - to curate a wide and diverse range of interdisciplinary sources - I decided to focus on one text to help alleviate our collective burnout. We would spend the 4 weeks exploring four major aspects of reading a novel:

• reading and analyzing the novel itself
• learning about the author (and authorship in general) and understanding the novel in the context of the author’s work as a whole
• understanding one’s role as a reader of novels and developing insights on reading audiences and communities
• appreciating that text in its cultural, social, historical, national, and/or global context.

Each week we focused on one component so that by the end of the class, students would understand how to appreciate the novel through this multifaceted approach. I also curated a list of secondary resources to give students a comprehensive guide to each aspect of the novel - the text, the author, the reader, the world.

I selected the novel by considering the following factors:

• The text in question had to be long enough to sustain us over four weeks (36 hours of class time).
• But it also had to be engaging enough to read rather quickly so that students could finish the novel within the 4 week period and still have time to a) engage with secondary resources b) complete writing assignments to deepen their understanding of the novel.
• I wanted something modern (my area of expertise is 20th and 21st century literature) but not too recent - something that had existing secondary research and preferably a text with a relatively well known author.

I put out a call on social media, checked out a ton of books from the library, and after considering all the options (some of which included Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, and Richard Powers’ The Overstory), I landed on Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - a novel with a rich national and historical context, of significant global repute, and authored by someone who enjoys an enormous worldwide fandom.

I reserved an outdoor classroom to prioritize a safe meeting space. Since this setup lacked AV support, I asked everyone to bring a device with Zoom on it so that each person in the class would be visible and audible to each other, particularly to the students who were joining us remotely. We also used online annotation tools (MS Note and Jamboard) to document our conversations and enable backchannel communication. We met in the outdoor classroom twice a week and remotely on Zoom once a week.

I also opened up this class to a select group of people from all around the world after several friends and colleagues expressed interest in the course concept. These folks were invited to read the novel during the same 4 week period as my class. I set up a Goodreads forum so that this group could chat about the novel (my students had a separate discussion board on our institutional LMS). Some of my colleagues visited my class (both in-person and via Zoom) and I received permission from the readers outside of our campus community to share some of their reactions to the novel with my students.

• The students developed fresh insights on their reading habits, which they documented regularly in a journal that they would share with the class. Rather than learning exclusively about the text, they engaged in a self-reflexive study of their own practices.
• They appreciated the streamlined structure of the class and the relative simplicity of having only one text to read (though with access to plenty of secondary resources).
• Both my students and the readers I invited to read along with us enjoyed the sense of community that was built from this class. My students got a glimpse at what reading practices might look like after college and my friends were able to participate in a robust reading community, which many of them lacked.

Research

I’m a qualitative researcher. As a graduate student and professor, I designed independent and collaborative research projects and taught my students to build robust research skills.

My research projects

My research projects are driven by my desire to understand equity in creative landscapes. I’ve researched, presented, taught, and written about the barriers faced by underrepresented writers, artists, and cultural creators, primarily in contemporary American media. The overarching question that informs my research projects is: Who gets to make art and what social, political, and cultural forces determine those outcomes?

I’m fascinated by the dynamic between storytellers and their audiences. There are so many forces that complicate the process of both telling and receiving a story. A deeper understanding of creative landscapes (whether the literary or media industry) can be empowering for storytellers and audiences alike.

Learn more about my subject matter expertise and my current research projects.

Teaching research

I’ve taught over a thousand students to conduct research in different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. I’ve developed research-based assignments that lead students to:

• curate a diverse repository of resources related to a specific topic
• rely on a creative set of tools and technology to conduct, organize, and present their research
• prepare resources that enable them to conduct a guided conversation or interview about a certain topic
• articulate the impact of their projects and situate them in our current social or cultural landscape.

To learn more about the research-based assignments that I've designed, please get in touch with me.

Current research projects

In my ongoing research project, I investigate the links between race, representation, and responsibility through a study of American literature and culture from the 20th and 21st centuries. I work primarily with contemporary Muslim American texts, which offer a fascinating look at the intersection of art, culture, and politics. Muslim American storytellers are navigating a world that is informed by a host of different forces (such as Islamophobia, racism, citizenship and immigration restrictions, war, political instability), which means that the art they make is shaped by those forces.

My research is informed by some of the following questions:

• How do underrepresented storytellers navigate the social, cultural, and political landscapes that they’re working in?
• What expectations or responsibilities are placed on underrepresented storytellers once they gain a platform?
• How do storytellers react to those expectations and what tactics do they deploy in order to affirm or reject the burden of responsibility?
• What kinds of relationships are formed between storytellers and their audiences amidst these expectations?
• What conflicts arise between the storyteller’s freedom of expression and the values of the audience community?

METHODS
I did my doctoral training in a Literature department that emphasized interdisciplinary approaches, which means that the objects of my research include literary sources as well as popular media (television shows, movies, podcasts, and music). Some of the texts that I work with in my current research activities include:

• Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced
• Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• Fatima Asghar's If They Come For Us
• Aziz Ansari's Master of None (Netflix)
• Ramy Youssef's Ramy (Hulu)

I rely on qualitative research methods to understand this body of literature and media, including but not limited to: primary research, secondary research, textual and content analysis, data collection and organization, site visits (to museums, libraries, community centers, playhouses), and interviews.

OUTCOMES
I've shared my findings across a range of outlets: journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedias, public talks, and conference presentations. You can find a list of my publications and presentations here. My most recent research project is a book (tentatively titled The Burden of Humanization: Race, Representation, and Responsibility in Muslim American Culture) that I am currently writing.

For access to articles behind paywalls or for more information about current works in progress (my book + journal articles under review), please get in touch with me.

Projects