Performing Blackness on English Stages Monday, Nov 6 2006 

books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 8:42 pm

I just finished reading Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, another work on the list of books I’m reviewing. This book examines instances of blackface on the English stage from the late Medieval period through the eighteenth century. Overall, it’s a good book. I especially like its early description of how early modern actors (and eventually actresses) ‘blackened’ themselves by using makeup composed of burnt cork or coal or by wearing a mask on stage.

Since I am reviewing it formally in my review essay to be published next year (presumably), I will again leave the details of a formal review to that essay. Instead, I’d like to reflect briefly on how this book has gotten me thinking about my next graduate course. I’d like to teach a course specifically on Restoration literature, focusing exclusively on 1660 to 1688. I’d also like for about half of readings for this course to be comprised of plays, since the Restoration is mostly known for its drama.

Reading Performing Blackness on English Stages reminds me a bit of Cynthia Lowenthal’s Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, an excellent book published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2003. I’m struck by how I’d like to incorporate more of the issues raised by these studies in my class. Of particular interest to me at the moment is race and how the theater could allow Restoration society to try out its constructions of race and see if they worked. I’m also interested in doing more with religion, depictions of Islam in particular.

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Passion, Teaching, and Gerald Graff Saturday, Oct 28 2006 

academia and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 2:54 pm

As I mentioned in my first post, one of my goals during my sabbatical has been to begin reconnecting with my passion for teaching. I’m now in the second phase of my career, that huge void between being a beginning professor and nearing the end of one’s career. I don’t want my teaching to become stale. As a student, I saw many professors in this second stage lose interest in teaching. I want to imbue this next part of my career with passion. I love teaching and I love most of what I teach; I want my students to see that love, even if they don’t always share it.

Until recently this process of reconnecting has focused on specific teaching methods and assignments that I would like to integrate into my classes. For example, when I teach Restoration and 18thC classes in the future, I would like to assign my students to keep commonplace books; I then want to connect their commonplacing with reflection on processes of self-fashioning and self-discovery in the period and in their own writing. I also plan to have these students use Johnson’s Dictionary to keep track of key words from the period on a weekly basis. (These words may also lead us to potential topics for their commonplace books.) In other words, I want to synthesize the kinds of assignments I require my students to complete with the kinds of texts and issues generated in the period we’re studying.

Now I’m moving into a second phase of my thinking about my teaching: reading and reflecting on published pedagogical work by other scholars. So, this will be the first of perhaps many posts about teaching. (Of course, once I return to the classroom in late March these posts will probably be less theoretical and more about the day-to-day aspects of my teaching experience, but we’ll see.)

I’ve just finished reading Gerald Graff’s “Toward a New Consensus: The Ph.D. in English,” which is included in a collection of essays entitled Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline, Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate. This collection is the outgrowth of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. My attention was brought to this particular essay because I am looking for potential articles to propose for my department’s new colloquium on teaching series, which will commence in January. I also know two faculty members at Texas A&M University who have been participating in the Carnegie Foundation’s initiative on the doctorate.

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Inaugural Post: Being Evaluated Wednesday, Oct 25 2006 

academia and research and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 7:38 pm

I’m starting this blog while I’m on sabbatical, which means that I’m not teaching and doing very little service; instead, I’m researching and writing my new project. This quarter has also been a time to reflect on my professional goals and future teaching practices and rejuvenate myself so that I can reconnect with my passion for writing and teaching. I hope this blog gives me a space in which to think through some of this reflection and reconnection.

As a professor, I am frequently evaluated. My students evaluate me at the end of each quarter, and a committee of my colleagues evaluates my scholarship, teaching, and service annually. While my evaluations tend to be good in both categories, these processes can’t help but be fraught with a range of emotions. Student evaluations are anonymous and withheld from me until I’ve turned in final grades. This anonymity makes the one or two less positive evaluations (and there are almost always one or two students who hate a class or who were bored by the readings or hold you responsible for another student’s body odor or whatever) stand out all the more. As my colleagues and I often discuss, these one or two negative comments can overwhelm 30 positive reviews. We can’t help but agonize over which one hates “us” (since we are the class) or how we could have made the readings come alive more or which one smells.

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