When people are subjected to deep and sustained stress, they can respond with anger, with aggression, with avoidance, or with withdraw. Or they can be resilient. I seem to be surrounded by resilient people this Spring: my Oxford students, who filled the classrooms on the first day back with their creativity, kindness, laughter, and intellectual…

Thanks to the generosity of Oxford College’s Academic Affairs, I have leave from teaching this fall. I miss the classroom but am grateful for the extra time and mental space to write and study in the archives, especially with my daughter, Kathryn. University of Virginia Special Collections Today my daughter Kathryn taught me how to…

For a week in June, I studied how to teach the history of the book with Professor Michael Suarez, SJ at Rare Book School. Prof. Suarez and my inspiring classmates (including old friends, and new) demonstrated how I can activate my students’ wonder and how I can honor the community of people who created the…

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Emory’s “sidecar” courses bring together two professors from different disciplines—like behavioral biology and Shakespeare—to find points of connection with their shared students. I look forward to connecting with my colleague and friend, Dr. Rick Thompson, as students cross boundaries between science and literature. We will also work with the acting crew at Atlanta’s Shakespeare Tavern. Testosterone…

In this our fourth pandemic semester, I’ve been thinking about what it takes to endure. Fortunately, I have a lifelong friend, college roommate, and college teammate—Dr. Kathryn McLeod—who has taught me about the joy of endurance. We spent a week together in September-October testing our endurance against desert trails: we ran 40 miles in 50…

Simone Weil writes that “attention is the purest form of generosity.” As a way to be more attentive to people around me, and in celebration of my daughter’s college graduation, and as a way to recalibrate from teaching through three pandemic semesters, my daughter and I are spending the summer hiking the Redwood Forests, from…

I’m honored to be teaching alongside my friend Brian Kurlander this semester, approaching Hamlet from many perspectives.

As I followed my Emeritus College colleagues reading Hamlet, I was moved by their presence. Each of these colleagues personalized the play for me — made the Ghost touchable, nuanced the personality of Hamlet, raised up the poignancy of Ophelia. Hamlet came alive. Why was that? Perhaps it was my colleagues’ depth born in the second…

Our semester began in a familiar pattern of socratic classes, poetry readings, faculty meetings, writing, theater productions, and events — with a special emphasis on transcribing early modern texts for my literature students in English 255.  I’m inspired by how quickly my students adapted to recorded lectures, discussion forums, alternative assignments, endless emails, and zoom…