Oxford College of Emory University
I’m excited to welcome my friend, Dr. Ellen Stockstill, to discuss her fabulous book, Faking It: Victorian Documentary Novels. Come and gain new insight into novels by Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Mary Shelley, and others—with a Victorian literature scholar and inspiring human being.
As I assembled and submitted my tenure dossier, my college roommate and cross country teammate Dr. Kathryn McLeod and I took on another endurance event, this time in the Andes Mountains. As Jorge taught us, “venga a si ami!” The experience was ineffable, so here are images and song.
Another highlight of the Fall 2024 was watching Sigourney Weaver play Prospero at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, then to see David Tennant and Cush Jumbo play the Macbeths at the Harold Pinter Theater… on the same day. And even better to see live theater alongside friends: Sheila Cavanagh and Rowan McKenzie. In between we had lunch, went to a pub, walked London, and talked Shakespeare.
This June, I taught alongside Wake Forest Law Professor Jonathan Cardi at Wake’s Worrell House in Hampstead, London.
We studied English legal history immersively with twelve future lawyers—reading and experiencing how art, literature, religion, and culture intersect with their future vocations in law. We turned the pages of 400-year-old legal manuscripts at the British Library Rare Books room; viewed artifacts in the British Museum through the lens of law and justice; watched Toheeb Jimoh as Prince Harry choose between different his “fathers” of Henry IV, Falstaff—or the Chief Justice; peered into what’s left of the infamous Newgate cells in the basement of a pub; saw English legal wigs in the Royal Courts of Justice and pondered what they represent; made seventeenth-century hot chocolate; dove into the Faerie Queene‘s allegory of justice; observed a murder trial at the Old Bailey; performed Shakespeare aloud; explored how the Renaissance experimented with restorative justice in George Herbert’s poetry and prose; and criss-crossed London on foot and in the London Underground. I learned so much from the Wake Forest law students and from Professor Cardi, and lived the truth in Robert Cover’s words:
[T]he rules and principles of justice, the formal institutions of the law, and the conventions of a social order are, indeed, important to that world; they are, however, but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention.
No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live. — “Nomos and Narrative”
Philadelphia’s Free Library Rare Book Department allowed me to spend a day with John Milton’s copy of the 1623 First Folio, studying his notes, shoulder markings, underlines, and his collation of the Quarto editions. February 9, 2024.
Only awe, all day:
Every time Judge Clint Rucker visits his alma mater, I am inspired to be a better mentor and a more generous human being. I loved hosting Clint’s Dowman hallmate, Rev. Dr. Carlton Johnson, and their fellow Emory alumnus Rickey Adger. These generous men spent three hours with students from the Pre-Law Club and the Black Student Alliance—laughing, speaking truth, encouraging, listening, answering questions, sharing life advice, and telling stories about Oxford 40 years ago. Special thanks to Dr. Wade Manora, Tola Omotayo, and Lauren Wald for organizing the dinner and to Tammy Canfield, Director of Alumni Engagement.
What better place to write than the coast of Maine, on a shore filled with sea glass, and the friendship of an amazing editor, Uli Guthrie? I spent two weeks working on my book—in addition to trail running and cycling Acadia National Park. Uli sees the little things (from en dashes to the beautiful blades of a maple seed) and yet she also helps me step back and see the big picture. A month later, I spent a week in Chicago with my co-author, Noe Martinez and my son John: we watched some brilliant Shakespeare, quested for graffiti, swam in Lake Michigan, and worked on our third writing project, a book about literature and prison.
