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Fall, 2019: Human Rights and Human Dignity
Join us for a conversation with two Atlanta visionaries who have transformed their communities: October 3, 2019, 7:30 p.m. in Williams Hall. Special guest Judge Horace Johnson. Sandra Barnhill is an attorney, founder, and national president of Foreverfamily, a nonprofit agency she created in 1987 to diminish the impact of a parent’s incarceration on their children.…
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Spring, 2019: British Literature from Beowulf to David Mitchell
This semester I will be teaching the entire canon of British Literature, from about 900-2014. I cannot imagine a greater professional privilege. English 255 surveys medieval and early modern literature, covering Beowulf, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Thomas More’s Utopia, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and the sonnets, sermons, speeches, and lyric poems…
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Fall, 2018: Justice and Literature
This semester, Oxford students are reading Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and have the opportunity to hear him speak along with Anthony Ray Hinton, whom Stevenson helped to exhonerate. My Shakespeare students are thus reading Shakespeare through the lens of law and examining aesthetic represenations of justice. Dr. Daniel LaChance will visit our class to discuss…
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Summer, 2018: A Trim Reckoning
In addition to running a hundred miles through Yosemite Valley with my family, hiking the Appalachian Trail for two weeks, and teaching at the prison, this summer I also had the privilege of seeing Tom Hanks perform Falstaff in Henry IV. Hanks was transcendent. It was as if Shakespeare designed Falstaff’s role with Tom Hanks…
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Spring, 2018: John Milton’s Poetry and Prose
Since 1667, John Milton’s Paradise Lost has awed, angered, and inspired readers. It’s a poem of enormous ambition and profound beauty, one that novelists, classical composers, punk rock bands, political radicals, and contemporary filmmakers have engaged with in creative and generative ways. Written by one of the most educated men of the English Renaissance, this…
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Fall, 2017: Oxford College of Emory University
I’m looking forward to visiting at Emory Oxford this academic year to teach William Shakespeare, Critical Reading and Writing, and John Milton.
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Spring, 2017: Shakespeare, Law, and Violence
“Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare, humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”
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Fall, 2016: Shakespeare’s First Folio
Seven years after William Shakespeare died, one of the world’s most important books was published: a collection of thirty-six plays that we now call the “First Folio.” Without the First Folio, we would not have Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, or two plays that have profoundly changed the way that I think ,…
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Summer, 2016: Shakespeare & Law
Shakespeare’s lines reverberate not only on stages, movie screens, and in classrooms, but also in courtrooms: he has been cited in more than 800 judicial opinions. This course will explore three of Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of the law, examining the ways in which justice, punishment, and litigation are a cultural practice often rooted…
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Spring, 2016: John Milton’s Paradise Lost
William Blake, Satan Watching Endearments of Adam and Eve. 1816. For 350 years, John Milton’s Paradise Lost has awed, angered, and inspired its readers. It’s a poem of enormous ambition and profound beauty, one that novelists, classical composers, punk rock bands, political radicals, and contemporary filmmakers have engaged with in creative and provoking ways. Written by one…