Nothing comes of nothing.
New works of art are built like stained glass windows out of cultural bits and pieces. In my teaching and research I try to show where the fragments come from and how knowing more about them enriches our understanding of literature and human creativity. Teaching My special teaching interests include Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton. Often visual art or an anecdote from history holds a clue to understanding a play or poem, so I like to use examples from art, history, politics, and religion to help students see what readers hundreds of years ago found funny, sad, or frightening in the literature we study. This past summer I spent eight weeks at Ohio State on an NEH fellowship studying the cultural fragmentation that Henry VIII's marriages caused in religious and political life.