Education
Teaching Interests
My primary teaching responsibilities in the English department are a regularly scheduled intermediate course on Shakespeare and Shakespeare reproduced, an advanced course that focuses on modern filmic and theatrical appropriations of Shakespeare's plays. Every three to four years, I teach Renaissance plays in process, a course that focuses on only a few plays by contemporaries of Shakespeare (like Ben Jonson) and mixes intensive reading and research with applied work in acting, directing, dramaturgy and design. I teach a Medieval literature course every third year or so that focuses on Old French chivalric romances, Dante’s Inferno, and Middle English texts like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in addition to more irregularly scheduled courses on James Joyce’s Ulysses, the fictions of J.M. Coetzee, and a senior seminar, The Work of Fiction in an Age of Terror. My film studies teaching concentrates on international and regional cinemas, broadly in my 200-level contemporary world cinema course, more narrowly in the advanced courses on new Asian cinemas, the cinema of new Europe, and the film cultures of North Africa and the Middle-East, which I teach on a rotating basis.
Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests
My most recent research project--Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: the Intermedial Turn & Turn to Embodiment-- concentrates on the development of experimental approaches to the staging, adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare’s plays in the 20th century and beyond. It particularly seeks to bring some of the more daring postmillennial developments in Shakespeare performance and production—the Wooster Group Hamlet, Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies, Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More—to the attention of students, scholars and theater professionals whose experience of performed Shakespeare is largely confined to the comparatively conventional production practices of regional theater companies and more Shakespeare-centric institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company, to a Shakespeare played “straight.”
When I can, I also keep hacking away at an older, considerably larger project that is rooted in research and writing I began doing in the early 1990s on how disorder was dramatically produced in Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays. This project has evolved into a broader study of how some of the same discursive formations I found at work in Shakespeare were deployed by differently situated writers to stigmatize as embodiments of misrule or disorder everyone from insurgent Irishmen to Native Americans to May-pole and Morris dancers to our own so-called Puritan fathers and mothers.