Teaching
I teach on the BA Arts and Humanities, BA English, MA Cultural and Critical Studies, and MA Romantic Studies.
Birkbeck is special for its research-led teaching. The Birkbeck classroom brings together people with an impressive range of knowledges and experiences, which illuminate what each of us brings to the act of reading. Collaboration across the disciplines and specialisms in the School of Arts enhances the possibilities to explore the relationship between literature, visual, and material culture at Birkbeck. I am particularly interested in how reading and writing are affected by the material conditions of cultural production.
At the BA level, right from the first year BA Arts and Humanities classroom, you get to curate your exhibition: this exercise asks you to select 6-8 objects – from museums to your drawer at home - that represent what it means to be human, classify them, and write a rationale about the story your exhibition tells.
In the second year module ‘Enlightenment and its Others’ I will ask you to go to the British Museum and fill in a questionnaire about the Enlightenment Gallery, which alerts you to the lives of enlightenment objects, disciplines, and cultural practices in today’s museums.
At the MA level, I designed the MA Romantic Studies, which emphasizes the material and multisensorial aspects of Romantic Period Culture, restoring literature, reading, and writing to a vibrant emerging culture of spectacles and visual attractions.
Modules I teach include:
- Blake (BA English)
- Enlightenment and its Others (BA Arts and Humanities)
- Literature and Visual Culture (BA Arts and Humanities)
- Literature and Empire (BA Arts and Humanities)
- Romanticism (BA Arts and Humanities)
- The Sublime (BA English)
- Exhibiting Cultures (MA Cultural and Critical Studies, MA Victorian Studies)
- Romantic Objects (MA Romantic Studies)
- Romantic Feelings (MA Romantic Studies)
- The Book Unbound (MA Romantic Studies)
