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 sessions, like this one featuring actor Brian Kurlander. I didn’t know it was possible to be any more impressed by my students. But their fierce, creative, determined kindness and resiliency fill me with awe, once again.

 

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.

Danny Shoy (95C) is President & CEO of the East Lake Foundation, equipping east Atlanta citizens to build better lives for themselves and future generations through a holistic approach to community revitalization that incorporates mixed-income housing, cradle-to-college education and community wellness.

Sandra and Danny have been nationally recognized for their advocacy in the areas of criminal justice, housing, and education equity reform.

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 of the early and late English Renaissance.

English 256 then picks up at the English Restoration and will cover Romantic, Victorian, and modern authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Carlyle, the Brontës, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch.

Both courses will read Margaret Cavendish, the seventeenth-century scientist and fiction writer pictured above. Faced with a world that didn’t accept her as an intellectual, she created her own world:

I am not Covetous, but as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was… [so while] I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavor to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made one of my own.

I look forward to a semester in which we discover the literary worlds that have been created for the last 1100 years.

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 legal personhood and Rachel Chmiel to talk about her eighteen years’ experience representing people on Georgia’s death row. I’m also excited to be mentoring Katie Pleiss as an Oxford Research Scholar, studying the death penalty, mass incarceration, and criminal justice reform. We are planning a road trip to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL.

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 in mind and staged 1 & 2 Henry IV specifically for the small, outdoor, garden theater in Los Angeles, including the grassy hill behind the stage to serve as Gadshill and Shrewsbury. Hanks is a lovable, funny, optimisitc, and utterly genuine Falstaff, especially in his love for Prince Hal — yet refuses to be held accountable for his debts or his sins, making the play’s final scene exquisitely poignant

The awe of mountain ranges, teaching at Phillips State Prison, and live theater in LA make for a rich and beautiful summer.

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 epic poem probes both the sweetness of romantic love and the corruption of the church and the political state — all the while demanding that its readers make active choices.

“Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” Milton writes in Aeropagetica. This semester English 389R will center on knowing, communicating, and arguing freely about Milton’s poetry, prose, and all that it enkindles.