Position
Academic Background
Sample Courses   
Teaching Philosophy
Research & Interests   
Notable Academic Appointments & Awards
Publication Highlights    

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• Professor of English
• Director, Liberal Arts Honors Program

Academic Background        

• Indiana University - Ph.D. in English, July 1982
• Indiana University - M.A. in English, December 1979
• State University of New York at Albany - B.A. in English, May 1977

Sample Courses Taught at Providence College

• Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances; Histories and Comedies
• Honors Colloquium on Dostoevsky
• Development of Western Civilization I, II, III, IV
• Survey of British Literature I
• Introduction to Literature
• Advanced Writing 

Teaching Philosophy

When I first began to teach, I aspired to a style I admired in teachers who had a special influence on me. I figured that I would master that style and teach everything accordingly. I have since realized, however, that I need to adjust or even transform my style from course to course, and from day to day within the same course. I no longer want to be the one teacher I most admired. Instead, I want to be several teachers: the one who struts about the room, the one who sits calmly on the desk, the one who gathers students in a circle, the organized lecturer, the negotiator of lively discussions, the teacher who argues and defends a position, and the teacher who asks probing questions without committing to any particular view.

Although I strive for variety in my style of teaching, I always try to be as encouraging and as demanding as possible-and I see little conflict between the two. In my experience, I find that most students not only learn more but enjoy a class far more if they are habitually prepared, and if they are in the company of students who are likewise prepared-and that, I admit, takes a bit of coercion. If I have mastered anything in my teaching career, it is the ten-minute in-class response paper. And yet I have never encountered discontent on the part of students for such means of encouraging them to keep up with the readings. Reading great literature may be hard work but it is also a source of intellectual joy. I merely insist that all students take their full share. In class I freely call on students whether their hands are raised or not because I assume all my students have come to class prepared, and most often (but not always) they have.

Research & Interests

Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature, Dostoevsky, Interdisciplinary Studies, Islamic Literature and Culture

Notable Academic Appointments and Awards

• Accinno Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2004

Publication Highlights

Books:

• Shakespeare's As You Like It: A Guide to the Play (Greenwood Press, 2003).
• Shakespearean Intertextuality: Studies in Selected Sources and Play (Greenwood Press, 1998).

Articles:

• "Sin, Suffering, and Redemption in Leir and Lear." Originally published in Shakespeare Studies in 1986, this essay has been selected for reprinting in Critical Essays on King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio, New York: G.K. Hall (forthcoming).
• "Christopher Marlowe," Encyclopedia of British Humorists, ed. Steven Gale, New York: Garland  Press, 1996, 719-724.    
• "The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles," Mediaevalia 16 (1993): 325-42.
• "Shakespeare Among the Romantics," Romanticism: Culture in Britain, 1780-1830, ed. Laura Dabundo, Garland Press, 1992.
• "Hector and the Theme of Honor in Troilus and Cressida," The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 7 (1987): 68 79.
• "The Idealism of Shakespeare's Troilus," South Atlantic Review 51 (1986): 19 29.
• "Shakespeare's Cressida: 'A Woman of Quick Sense,'" Philological Quarterly 63 (1984): 357 68.

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