Category: Pedagogy

Academic Summers

Like most professors, I don’t usually teach during the summers. But that doesn’t mean we don’t work. In fact, since so much time during the semester is taken up with planning classes, grading papers, and meetings (with students, committees, etc.), the summer might be when the most academic work gets done — if by academic

Wikipedia Assignments: some thoughts from mid-semester

Right now I’m teaching a first-year composition class, themed around Wikipedia. This is the third iteration, redesigned with the support of a Faculty Instructional Technology Integration grant, and mid-semester seems like an appropriate moment to share some thoughts about the course. The first section explains the background, but if you just want some tips for

Teaching, Scholarship, and Literary History

This semester I find myself, even more than usual, thinking about literary history. In addition to a new seminar for English majors, “Disney’s Victorians,” I am teaching the first half of our department’s two-part British literature survey. So while I’m partly in my Victorian wheelhouse, I’m also far afield in British literature from the Middle