I am a doctoral candidate in the English Department. My three areas of concentration are Victorian Literature, British Romanticism, and Working-Class Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, and my dissertation focuses on British nationalism and the poetics of exile from 1780-1870.

As a literary critic, I am committed to the study of marginalized writers alongside established authors, and as a university teacher, I am equally committed to introducing my students to a range of literary texts, both canonical and otherwise. A class on British Romantic verse might include, for example, the poetry of Robert Bloomfield, “The Farmer’s Boy,” alongside that of William Wordsworth, while a late nineteenth-century British literature course could juxtapose Thomas Ince’s rebellious artistic views with Oscar Wilde’s explication of artistic ideology through pithy aphorism in his preface to Dorian Gray.

The purpose of placing writers like Bloomfield and Ince, authors unknown to all but specialists, alongside the more popular Wordsworth and Wilde is not simply to pair the unusual with the familiar in order to shock and confuse students with unlikely bedfellows. Instead, juxtaposing these diverse texts underscores two fundamental principles that shape my teaching: first, the belief that aesthetic ideals and literary canons are human constructions, ones affecting the students but not crafted by them; and second, that these decisions about canonicity, curricula, and academic norms both should be and are subject to critique and rethinking by the literature student.

As I strive to underscore the value of all kinds of texts, I simultaneously make a conscious effort to support all kinds of learning types in my classroom. For example, a line-by-line analysis of one of William Blake’s poems never fails to reward the effort, but this standard explication assists some learners more than others. But to then introduce students to the illustration that accompanies the verse and perhaps a musical rendering of that same poem—now the discussion truly comes alive. What at first glance seem like simple enhancements, a CD player and a couple of slides, in fact provide two alternate routes into the text. As a group of learners, we now have not only three different ways to engage with the verse, but also, three different “texts” to explore with each other in discussion and writing.

For the student who only processes information once she has talked through a problem, I use both large and small group discussion For the more reticent student who prefers to polish both his own views and his responses to alternate viewpoints in private, I take advantage of online discussion boards, chat rooms, and low-stakes writing assignments. I pair traditional assessment with holistic in order to reward not just performance on essays or exams but also growth over the course of the semester. I design group assignments in order to foster community, I incorporate lectures when appropriate, and I design webpages with supplementary materials to encourage independent investigation. In short, I am open to exploring any technology, technique, strategy, or device that I think will reach the students I have in a particular group. I strive to make their experience in my classroom as unique to their own needs as possible.