Teaching
Some of the courses that I’ve taught at the universities of Bristol, Exeter, and Vienna.
If you’d like to receive a copy of the course syllabi, please send me an email.
New Dimensions of Terror: Weird Fiction
This Proseminar considers a mode that has been described as the ‘foundational aesthetic category […] of the new millennium’ (Greve and Zappe, 2021), but whose origins extend as far back as the nineteenth century. Organized thematically and chronologically, it traces a line through late-Victorian stories of bodily transformation, early-twentieth-century investigations of extra-sensory perception and monstrous forms, to later-century documentations of otherworldly visitations, maddeningly ancient civilizations, and Cold War tales of domesticated weirdness. It addresses questions of literary form and genre; the relationship between literature and science; epistemology, strategies of representation, and perception; and period-specific historical contexts (fin-de-siècle spiritualism, Antarctic exploration, and mid-twentieth-century conceptions of femininity).
Beginnings: English Literature Before 1800
This first-year survey course selects texts that represent some of the richest sources and most complex moments of English cultural history before 1800. These texts, and the cultural elements they combine, went on to have afterlives of great significance for English language, literature and other media. In other senses, they offered legacies that were not taken up, and what has been lost in cultural transformations will also be considered. Texts include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Behn’s Oroonoko. The module also emphasizes essay-writing skills that are fundamental to researching and communicating in English literature. (Text adapted from course outline.)
(Image: Oscar Senonez from “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, 2019)
Literature 1740-1900
This unit introduces students to a range of literature across the 160 years covered: eighteenth-century fiction; romantic period writing; Victorian poetry; the mid- and late-Victorian novel and the writing of the Decadents and Aesthetes of the 1880s and 1890s. In doing so, it enables students to engage with such ideas as the Enlightenment, sensibility, radicalism and political revolution, urbanisation and industrialisation, class, personhood, gender identity and sexual inequality, outsider status, and emancipation. The unit exposes students to a range of literary forms, elite, popular and middlebrow. It raises major questions about: the evolution of new genres, including that of ‘the literary’; the role of the author and the social utility of art; poetry and poetics; the power of gender, sexual, national, class and racial identities; and the interplay between literature, widening literacy and national education.