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 … [Read more]
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 … [Read more]
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 … [Read more]
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. … [Read more]
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 … [Read more]
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 … [Read more]