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