In Fall 2022 I taught my first graduate seminar at UH on medieval poetics. I’m grateful to Kimberley Philley for writing up a short piece about the class and our end of semester colloquium for Forward, our department’s newsletter.
I was apprehensive about teaching my first graduate class, especially knowing that most of the students wouldn’t be medievalists (or have much interest in medieval literature at all) but it was an incredible experience. During the semester, I sought to combine deep scholarly engagement with demystifying the profession.
All too often we’re expected to simply know how things work in academia. Often we talk about ‘professional development’ to address this imbalance, but demystification is a more useful way of thinking about how we move beyond the hidden curriculum to enable students to find their way through the academy.
Through the seminar, students put together syllabi for class sessions, wrote book reviews (and some got published!) and produced new critical and creative work.
The culmination of the class was our colloquium, where students presented new poetry, prose, and critical work. I was blown away by the level of the work they presented, and I am so excited to see how it develops.
Read more here.