My teaching philosophy

Diana is an award-winning instructor of literature and writing whose personal pedagogy emphasizes access, equity, and inclusion. She facilitates innovative, collaborative learning communities that inspire students to critically interrogate cultural texts, power structures, and their own ways of knowing. Through multimodal, experiential, and community-engaged teaching methods—-from social annotation to nature photography to conservation work—-Diana’s classes are spaces for exploring diverse learning pathways, empowering her students to discover their unique investments and strengths as agents of original knowledge creation.

Recent courses

Constructing Nature
Princeton, 2024-25

Food and beverage companies label their products as all-natural. Celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis are praised for aging naturally. Glamping resorts promise an invigorating retreat to nature. Advocates for artificial intelligence call it the natural progression of human development. Such appeals to nature are ubiquitous and widely variable. But how exactly do we determine whether something—or someone—is “natural”? Who gets to draw the line between natural and unnatural? And what are the consequences?

In this Writing Seminar, we investigate the slippery category of nature, a concept that isn’t quite as…well, natural as we might think. We begin by looking for subtle constructions of nature in commercial advertising, legislation, and scientific research, interrogating unstable binaries like nature v. culture that underpin so much of our understanding. We then take a creative turn, letting students design an object that explores a compelling puzzle in their own thinking about the natural. Finally, each student develops and pursues a research project that investigates a site or object in which nature is constructed. Possible topics could include the entangled production of nationality and race in the 1790 Naturalization Act; the beaver black ops, a rogue rewilding project in Belgium; or virtual simulations designed to provide stress-reducing exposure to nature and green noise.

What’s Your Sign?
Princeton, 2024

What’s your Myers-Briggs type? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Which tragic Greek figure are you? Countless tools are available to us today for defining the self, tools that measure and categorize our character, our behavior, our habits of emotion and thought. And while Buzzfeed personality quizzes might not predate the twenty-first century, the broader phenomenon of self-definition has a long history. Cultures around the world have been developing character typologies for millennia; the impulse to taxonomize people’s personalities is common and enduring. Our course will explore this phenomenon across time, seeking to illuminate some of the origins, the attractions, and the effects of these approaches to defining the self.

Our first unit will focus on the concept of personality types, tracing the contemporary phenomenon of the personality test and similar typologies of self to ancient antecedents ranging from Mesopotamian astrology to Hippocratic humoral theory. Along the way, we will ruminate on the roles such typologies play in not only assessing but creating the self. This line of questioning will lead us to our second unit, in which we will read Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist in the context of 19th century philosophical debates over whether character is something innate and under our control, or something produced by external influence and circumstance. In our third and final unit, we will study the psychology of group identity, using widely varied examples—from the teen movie Mean Girls to the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of queer astrology—to explore how group membership impacts the definition of a social self.

Weird Weather
Princeton, 2022-24

An unprecedented tornado devastated central London in 1091; temperatures plummeted worldwide following the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815; an extraordinarily dry monsoon season triggered famine throughout India in 1899. Humans have a long history of contending with chaotic weather events. Yet a recent United Nations report warns that weather-related disasters have rapidly accelerated over the last two decades, and climate scientists say that weather will only get stranger in the years ahead. How does “weird weather” shape the stories we tell and predictions we make about the natural world? How do we adapt when the improbable becomes the norm?

In this seminar, we begin by analyzing photographs from the 1930s Dust Bowl in light of Amitav Ghosh’s reflections on turning catastrophe into narrative. Next, we investigate the proposed New York Harbor Storm-Surge Barrier through the lenses of engineering, politics, and environmental impact. For the research project, students identify a past or present community dealing with weird weather’s consequences and place the community’s response in social, scientific, or economic context. Topics might include the apocalyptic British poetry that emerged following the “Year Without a Summer,” the new safety building standard established after the 2011 Joplin tornado disaster, or Morocco’s massive water infrastructure investments in the face of multiplying heatwaves.

Contagion and the Victorian Novel
Columbia, 2022

Contagion is a common feature of the Victorian literary imagination. And for good reason: contagious diseases proliferated in the 19th century, when transmission theories and treatment methods were still in flux. Many Victorian novels explicitly represent these epidemic illnesses, which might afflict specific characters or connect whole communities through networks of infection. But in addition to indexing the physical body’s very real susceptibility to communicable disease, the figure of contagion also harbors significant symbolic potential. What exactly did contagion mean for British writers in the 19th century? Who or what is identified as contagious in Victorian novels—and why?

Our course takes these questions as a launch pad for studying contagion and the Victorian novel. Beginning with texts in which contagious disease plays an obvious role, we’ll make our way through a series of novels in which actual contagion features less and less overtly, but in which the idea of contagion maintains an influential presence. We’ll also read contemporary essays that offer critical frameworks for considering contagion from various angles: as an object of scientific and medical study; as a phenomenon that amplifies rhetorics and practices of racism and xenophobia; and as a symptom of interconnected life, in all its vulnerability. And we’ll think together about the place of the novel in 19th -century discourses on contagion. What made this literary form well-suited to exploring contagion’s causes and effects? What do we make of the fact that Victorian novels themselves were often seen as both literally and figuratively “contagious”?

Novelists whose work we will engage with and compare include Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. As an aid to our comparative analysis, we’ll learn to use the digital humanities tool Hypothes.is, which enables collaborative annotations of electronic texts. Course participants will work together on a semester-long project of mapping contagion across Victorian novels: a “contact tracing” exercise that will allow us to make compelling connections among many different representations of contagion. This class is also an experiment in the possibilities and limitations of a consciously “presentist” approach to literature: a way of engaging with literary works so as to illuminate contemporary concerns.

Student testimonials

  • "I loved going to class! It truly felt like an environment where I could grow with other students."

    -Anonymous evaluation of “Weird Weather,” Fall 2023

  • "This is one of the best courses that I've ever taken at Columbia! The readings were well thought out, the class discussions lively, the teaching thoughtful and caring. I truly cannot recommend it enough!"

    -Anonymous evaluation of “Contagion and the Victorian Novel,” Spring 2022

  • "The one-on-one conferences that I had with Professor Newby were borderline revolutionary for me."

    -Anonymous evaluation of “Weird Weather,” Spring 2024

  • "Of all the times your teaching felt like the answer to a question I’d been trying to solve for years, the workshop you led on writing introductory paragraphs in the last week of our seminar was one of the most powerful. I almost ran back to my apartment to revise every introductory paragraph for each of the five papers I had on my desk, with the feeling that I had finally discovered something I’d been looking for since I started writing seriously."

    -Grayson Scott, “Literary Texts, Critical Methods,” Fall 2019

  • "Diana Newby is absolutely fantastic -- one of the best instructors I have had at Columbia. She is so passionate about her work and encourages her students to follow the little threads within a class that interest them. She also does a fantastic job of making her course engaging and challenging without being too difficult to manage. I was able to really immerse myself in everything we learned. Really just a wonderful instructor and person."

    -Anonymous evaluation of “Contagion and the Victorian Novel,” Spring 2022

  • "I shared my research essay with my parents after I finished writing because I was proud of my work and improvement as a writer, and my Dad summarized a take-away from writing seminar that I think is very important. He commented on the way he is impressed with how Princeton’s Writing Seminar program really teaches students how to think. Although this statement is crude and does not fully grasp the scope of what we learned/accomplished, it is true, and this skill will be useful for the rest of my life."

    -Liam Beckwith, “Weird Weather,” Spring 2024