Category: Pedagogy

  • On Time and Teaching

    I’m writing this blog post in the middle of graduation season. Seeing all the students finish their time at university, and talking with them about the tumultuous last few years and their plans for the future has made me muse a little about how they (and I) have experienced time. Students talk about time in…

  • Teaching Assessment

    It’s a bit ironic, but I keep having ideas about teaching while I’m on research leave from teaching. I suppose it’s the new perspective I’ve acquired, and will make the most of these thoughts by putting them down in blog posts from time to time. The one that came to me most recently concerned assessment.…

  • The Lion

    One reason why this blog has become a bit less regular of late is that I am supervising this term. That said, supervising students this term is also one reason for me to discover and rediscover a lot of new material for this blog. Hence this post, which is born out of a little seminar…

  • Marian Hobson-Jeanneret and My Thesis

    Following on from my post on Anne Barton (née Righter), this post is dedicated to Marian Hobson-Jeanneret (née Hobson), and, more particularly, her book The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France, published in 1982. Like Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, this book grew out of Hobson-Jeanneret’s thesis, so…

  • Anne Barton and My Thesis

    I came across Anne Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play on a nicely named ‘local interest’ shelf at the Chaucer Head bookshop, Stratford-upon-Avon. The title immediately leapt out at me, as it offered a way of formulating my own thoughts on Shakespeare and drama in the eighteenth-century: the phrase ‘the idea of’ neatly…

  • Diderot and Shakespeare’s Performability

    This is the text of a five-minute presentation I recently gave as a training exercise at Cambridge. Since it was for a non-specialist audience, and had to be kept both short and clear, I thought it would make a great blog post. Enjoy. Introduction Two observations. The performances of the eighteenth-century actor David Garrick were…