This essay describes and illustrates the activities associated with the University of California at Berkeley’s Shakespeare Program, over the last forty years, covering teaching innovations, numerous research publications, multiple productions and videos of Shakespeare’s plays, and creation of websites, Shakespeare’s Staging and Milton Revealed.

A description of a successful team-taught introductory literature/DH course on “Identity, Ethnicity, and the Digital Humanities” at Washington & Jefferson College.

John Milton is a hero to Millennials: C. S. Lewis based Perelandra on Paradise Lost; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy mirrors the epic; Mark Morris’s best ballet is “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso”; digital artist Terrance Lindall created virtual images of Paradise Lost for the Oxford U. Press; Comus is the originator and lead Krewe for…[Read more]

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

This syllabus describes an interdisciplinary course for first-year students in the NC State University Honors program in Fall 2015. “Interpretive Machines” offers a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit our cultural inheritance and ideas. The course also…[Read more]

This syllabus describes a first-year interdisciplinary honors course undertaken in fall 2014 at NC State University. It welcomes students into a hands-on environment for thinking about and practicing with new and old platforms for reading, interpretation, and understanding. It attempts to bridge book history and digital humanities into an…[Read more]

This course, designed for a graduate program in education which focuses on leadership, explores works of literature that have had a significant cultural impact and shaped ways in which societies view social issues from the perspective of how leadership is enacted within the texts. For students from disciplines outside of literature studies, this…[Read more]

contribution to the 2016 MLA Convention Panel sponsored by “Connected Academics”

“You taught me language, and my profit on ‘t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!” (The Tempest, I.ii.362-4).

What does a home mean to you? Have you left it? How did you get there? Would you go back? Starting with the foundational travel narrative in Western literature, Homer’s The Odyssey…[Read more]

Where do we come from? Our families play an instrumental role in our development. Indeed, the idea of the individual, apart from the family, challenges notions of family as a continual process, as something permanent. How old is the idea that the individual can strike out on her own, separate from her family, and thus do as she pleases?…[Read more]

[from pp. 151-52:]

“Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we…[Read more]

[from pp. 151-52:]

“Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we…[Read more]

Session #339: paper for AAUSC panel QUO VADIMUS?

My talk at the round table on Service Learning in Literary Studies about the necessity of failure in experiential learning.

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]