Graduate Courses
I teach yearly graduate courses to MA and PhD candidates in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, with seats usually also available for students from the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. (My graduate teaching in any given year may be, and has often been, paused due to leaves, teaching releases, or departmental service — if you are planning on attending graduate school in one of those three programs, and are interested in taking a graduate course with me during your time here, email me well ahead of time to learn what courses I will be offering during that time.)
I choose a new topic for each year in which I teach a graduate course, based in my research into medieval drama, performance, and play: so far, my courses have covered “Medieval Drama: Morality Plays,” “Medieval Drama: The Biblical Cycles,” and “Economies of Medieval Drama: East Anglia.” Most assigned readings for my graduate courses are in untranslated Middle English (that is, English as it was spoken between 1100 and 1500; click here for a sample of what that looks like). Future graduate courses will likely be on one of the following topics: The Towneley Plays; The N-Town and Coventry Plays; Medieval Drama Outside England.
That said, even as the subject of these courses changes, the structure of the courses remains roughly the same. I choose a set of core reading assignments for our class group to proceed though. I do not attach those readings to set dates: that way, at the end of each class meeting, we can decide together where we think it best to go next, alongside weekly student presentations, which we will also schedule as we go — and we can decide, if we wish, to modify upcoming readings. I will always insist that the amount of assigned reading be kept low (I’m not interested in the idea, sometimes typical of graduate courses, that reading more is reading better; I am interested in close reading and in-depth discussion).
Below is my basic template for graduate courses (and for fourth-year undergraduate seminars, though I rarely teach those).
Class Meetings
My graduate courses meet once per week, for two hours (the meeting times and places change depending on the year; I normally announce the specific meeting times and places under this heading) — but all will be on the University of Toronto campus, on the shared territory of many First Nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, under the Dish With One Spoon Treaty, and under Treaty 13 between the Mississaugas and subsequent settlers.
I keep Zoom (or an equivalent application) open on my laptop during all meetings; I audiorecord all meetings through that application. While I prefer that students attend my graduate seminars in person, any student in these seminars can opt to attend remotely at any time.
I do require attendance, whether in-person or remote, at every meeting. If a student misses a session for any reason, that student must listen to the audiorecording of each missed session, then email our course list to share thoughts and comments on that session, including in that single email individualized responses to every student who spoke up during the meeting.
I have no attendance policy other than that. Make-up emails must be sent as soon as possible, and no later than four weeks, after the missed class session; however, the last day I’ll accept make-up emails will be two weeks after our final class meeting, so class sessions later in term may have to be made up more quickly. Two weeks after our final class meeting, I will deduct one grade level (i.e., from A to A-) for any missed session for which a student has not sent the required email responses during the required span of time.
Course Requirements/Grading Weight
Engagement and Participation in class discussions
(or, if necessary, in substantial email commentary after the fact), 20%
Two 10- or 15-Minute Presentations during class discussions, 15% each (totalling 30%)
Conference-Length Research Paper (20 minutes of material, with an option to extend length),
delivered at the final class meeting in mock-conference style, 40%
Contributions to Public-Facing Document (no individual grades assigned for this — it is a collaborative effort),10%
Every student must attend all class sessions (or make them up, as above), must be reachable by and responsive to an email list shared with the full class, and must purchase all required books and have them ready to hand on the day we are scheduled to discuss them.
10- or 15-Minute Presentations
Every student is required to give two 10- or 15-minute presentations during term (if there are 8 or fewer students enrolled in the seminar, the presentations should be 15 minutes; if there are 9-14 students enrolled, the presentations should be 10 minutes; if there are more than 14 students enrolled, a very rare occurrence for a graduate seminar but common for a fourth-year seminar, then I will ask students to present work in pairs for 15 minutes per presentation). As long as you present one at some point during weeks 3 through 6, and the other at some point during weeks 7 through 10, it’s fine by me — just give me a week’s advance warning when you’re ready (I won’t allow more than three presentations per session, and prefer to have two, so I may ask you to delay a week). Every presentation should involve a visual aid of some kind (slides, a handout, or something similar); include therein any long passages you will read, as well as clean citations for all sources you’ve consulted. You can choose any one of the following three prompts for your presentation (and yes, you can use the same prompt twice):
Option 1: choose any academic article or chapter we’ve already been assigned (it doesn’t have to be one we were assigned on the day you present) and present an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) critique and analysis of that chapter. Your aim is to provoke conversation; it will be your job, after your presentation, to moderate your fellow students’ discussion for about 20 further minutes.
Option 2: choose any three-minute passage from a play we’ve already been assigned (it doesn’t have to be one we were assigned on the day you present), memorize it, and perform it as a dramatic piece (you can do so in the original early English, or in a light adaptation/translation). After that, offer us an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) close reading and analysis of that passage. (You can also do analysis first, then performance).
Option 3: seek out, and read, any text that is not already on our list of readings, but that would fit well into our class. Present an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) lecture on that chapter, which includes a rough summary, basic historical contexts, an original bit of analysis, and at least short passage of the text to be read aloud (it doesn’t have to be a dramatic reading; you can also prompt us to read dialogue with you).
[Note: in the future, I may likely replace one of these presentation assignments — or one of the presentation options — with an exercise, done in conjunction with the Records of Early English Drama (REED), involving TEI/XML coding of early dramatic records. I’ll first have to train in TEI/XML myself (!) but after some conversations I have had with better-trained REED editors, that possibility has looked increasingly viable and interesting. Check back here for more news on this idea.]
Conference-Length Research Paper
By the end of term, each student must produce a conference-length research paper (20 minutes) that takes any one of the plays on our syllabus as its primary subject. 20-minute conference papers are usually about 2000-2500 words long, but it is up to each student to determine their best length (by practicing the paper aloud). Each student will present their conference paper during our final class session (Week XII, usually paired with a secondary session, scheduled according to student availability). From there, you will have two options for handing in the final written document:
Option 1: At our in-class conference, immediately before presenting, you may email me your final polished draft, about 2000-2500 words. That will be your final paper of the semester, due on the day of the mock-conference. I will do much of the marking during and immediately following your delivery of the paper, taking into account your handling of the Q&A (and the quality of the Q&A that your paper provokes), then send you a summary of my comments by email soon after.
Option 2: After our in-class conference, you may return to your ongoing research and produce a longer article-length paper, about 5500-7500 words, due by email exactly two weeks after our final class. (Note: I only make this option available in graduate seminars; fourth-year undergraduate seminars must use only the shorter option).
We’ll work together in class sessions to develop our ideas; you can choose to build your paper out of one of your presentations, if you wish. It is up to you, over the course of the term, to determine — in dialogue with me and with your classmates — which critical questions and hypotheses will form the core of your project, and whether that project is most appropriate for a conference paper or for a longer work. Each student is required to meet with me at least once, for a one-on-one Office Hours session in Week 7 or earlier, to informally propose their research paper; depending on the quality of that proposal, I may withhold approval of the project and require further work and a subsequent meeting. Research papers will not be accepted unless they have been proposed to me in person and received my approval; however, it is acceptable for papers to evolve and change, deviating significantly from the initial proposal if necessary.
Public-Facing Document
During term (probably starting in Week 3), we’ll all work together to produce and edit a public-facing document, something that a layman might find while Googling the topic of our course — to put it simply, I want us to work together generate a replacement for the current Wikipedia entry on the topic for our course. We’ll locate our collaborative effort on a public page of this website, but I will also actually replace the Wikipedia entry with our text. My goal is to mobilize us as scholars to influence public conversation about and perceptions of early English drama, literature and culture (if not us, who?). I won’t assign individual grades for this—it’s an informal, collaborative effort (I’ll help too!) that we’ll return to every couple of weeks, until we feel it’s ready to post.
For an example of a previous class’s public-facing document, see ENG 1007’s document on morality plays and its counterpart entry for Morality Play at Wikipedia.
List of Readings/Required Course Texts
Under this heading, I normally provide a list of required course texts to purchase, a recommended location at which they can be purchased, and a link to a shared Google Drive file for other class materials.
Then I break those texts down into twelve assigned readings. Most assigned readings for my courses are in untranslated Middle English (click here for a sample of what that looks like). Below, to give a sense of how my courses usually work, I’ll include the list of assigned readings that we used for ENG 1007 (Medieval Drama: Morality Plays). As I mention above, I do not assign dates to most readings; a class may proceed through the list in order from week to week, but I invite suggestions for switches, changes, additions, or deletions. (They’re subject to change from my end, too!)
UNIT 1 (first day): The Pride of Life. (We’ll read through the TEAMS Middle English edition together in class, translating and discussing as we go — and hypothesizing about the portions of the text that are lost; in so doing, we’ll figure out where we all stand in terms of Middle English, while working through a rough definition of morality plays. It’s okay if it turns out our Middle English skills are new (or rusty)—we will simply slow down the pace of our further readings, and eliminate some secondary readings, in order to make the course as valuable to its students as possible.)
UNIT 2: Wisdom; King’s “Morality Plays”.
UNIT 3: Klausner’s TEAMS introduction and appendices to Wisdom; Johnson’s Staging Contemplation, Introduction and Chapter 5 (on Wisdom); review Wisdom.
UNIT 4: Mankind; Garrison’s “Mankind and the Masculine Pleasures of Penance”; Steenbrugge’s “Morality Plays and the Aftermath of Arundel’s Constitutions”.
UNIT 5: The Castle of Perseverance (through line 1601).
UNIT 6: The Castle of Perseverance (lines 1602-3649); Young’s Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama, Chapters 2 and 5.
UNIT 7: Everyman; Davidson’s TEAMS introduction; Little’s “What Is Everyman?”
UNIT 8: Paulson’s Theater of the Word (full book).
UNIT 9: Beadle’s article and edition of Occupation and Idleness; EETS ed of Reynes Fragments; Brantley’s Reading in the Wilderness, Chapters 6 and 7.
UNIT 10: Medwall’s Nature; Blake, “Allegorical Causation”; The Interlude of Youth.
UNIT 11: Skelton’s Magnificence.
UNIT 12: Presentation of student conference papers.
If you are new to Middle English, I'm happy to share with you some handy materials I've used in my undergraduate classes. Email me for links.
Ongoing Student Feedback
If there is any element of this class that you would like to see improved, changed, or removed, you don’t need to wait until the end of term to give your opinion. In fact, I welcome ongoing feedback about this class throughout term (and I still welcome it after term ends). You can offer feedback directly to me in three ways:
Bring it up in class discussion or Office Hours! I don’t have thin skin and I don’t mind dedicating some class time to course housekeeping — and I love talking through solutions to make my courses better. If you feel comfortable doing so, feel free to bring your issue up in class so that other students can share their opinion too.
Email me.
Comment anonymously, using Google Forms, by clicking here. You do not need to be signed into Google to fill out the feedback form — but even if you are, I still won’t know it! I’ll receive an email alerting me that someone has made comments, which will not reveal your identity.
From there, I may respond to you directly (unless you’ve chosen to remain anonymous), or bring up/enact the proposed change in class (without revealing who suggested it), or start a quick anonymous student survey in which fellow students can vote on whether to make the proposed change to our course.
Note: These avenues of direct student feedback are different from the university-run, automated evaluations made available at the end of every class — those give you a direct line to the graduate chair, the department chair, and higher administrative bodies (who may evaluate, reward, reassign, or penalize a professor in relation to the quality of evaluations), but they are not an effective way of delivering actionable feedback directly to me. If you would like me to take action or make changes, however small or large, you should send your feedback to me directly, through one of the above avenues (and as soon as possible, so I can make changes to the class you’re currently taking!).