 So we're doing these videos as a chance for you to introduce yourself a little bit. And I wonder if you could start by saying a little bit about your background and what you did before coming to UBC. Sure. Well, maybe I'll start by apologizing for the rather barren state of my office. I've been watching the other interviews that have gone up and they've been very warm environments with densely populated bookshelves. But in my defense the offices moved to me so I'll be doing a lot to warm up as best I can. I started out in terms of my academic career at the University of Lethbridge in Southern Alberta and I actually started in the business program. I was in pursuit of a business degree with a major in accounting, which I saw through to the end, but about halfway through that process I realized I wasn't really passionate about it and what I was really living for was the one or two English courses that I could squeeze in every semester. And I had sort of a proverbial life-changing moment. I was sitting outside in a accounting classroom with a friend and looked down and he had a gigantic chemistry textbook with him. And I asked him, what are you doing with that chemistry textbook? And he said, well, I'm a double major. I've always had this passion for chemistry. And I think I went to the registrar that afternoon and called my parents that evening and told them I'd need an extra year because I'd be doing an English major. And my life's never been the same since. I came to UBC, did all my graduate work here. I did an MA here and a PhD here as well. Following that I did a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at Simon Fraser University in the English department there. Came back to UBC, had my first experience in Arts 1 teaching in dangerous questions and forbidden knowledge stream. Last year I was back at SFU for a one-year assistant professorship and a limited-term appointment. And now I'm back at Arts 1 and thrilled to be here. So you've explained a little bit about... This is a big switch from business to... It seems like a lifetime ago. But you do Shakespeare in particular. Why Shakespeare? Hasn't everything already been said about Shakespeare? Yeah, I don't know how... I had some wonderful undergraduate professor of Shakespeare who sort of helped to instill a fondness for Shakespeare. I've always had a great love of storytelling and literature and all of my earliest memories are of people reading to me. Not necessarily Shakespeare, whether it was my sister or parents or teachers. All of my earliest memories of the Hardy Boys and the Chronicles of Mary and the Lord of the Rings and countless comic books. So they've instilled in me this lifelong interest in storytelling and how stories work and how stories work on readers and how stories work in the world. And I think if you're interested in storytelling and how it works on people of Shakespeare, it's a pretty rich area in which to work. Can you tell us a bit more specifically about some aspect of your current research? Sure. Well, I'm particularly interested in textual theory, editorial theory, editorial practice. I mean, interesting thing about studying drama. I primarily work on Shakespearean drama, early modern drama. Of course, plays are written to be performed on stage. But in terms of Shakespearean and many other playwrights, they're quite often read as literary objects. I'm very interested in that tension between the printed book of a play and the performed event and that space between text and performance. So a lot of my work has to do with how printed plays negotiate that space between text and performance and how they ask readers to imaginatively engage with performance. And quite often that means studying not just the play itself, but all kinds of paratextual materials, looking at title pages, looking at lists of dramatic personia, letters to readers and things like that. And of course, in more modern editions, you're looking at editorial methodologies and editorial apparatuses. I've taken a fairly long view on that, working with all the back-to-early quartos and folios up through formative editions of the 18th century through to modern editions and even doing some work on digital editions and online archives. So that's sort of the textual side of my research, which is always sort of tending towards performance. There's also a performance aspect to my research which seems to be always sort of tending back towards the textual. I'm very interested in performance history of Shakespeare's plays, how plays get remembered, how plays get recorded and textualized. And today I'm going to work on a book-length study of the performance history of a play called Time of Athens by Shakespeare and one of his contemporaries, Thomas Middleton. I'm working on that for Manchester University Press. It's a little known play. People always scratch their heads and furrow their brow when they hear that title. But I'm becoming quite fond of it and I think that plays interest in economic hardship and disaster and financial recklessness is for better or for sort of becoming very, very resonant to our current moment. So how do you approach teaching? Well, I mean, despite the coldness of the current state of my office, I think my classrooms tend to be very inviting spaces, very sort of interactive kinds of spaces. I'm always asking a lot of students in terms of participation and leading the discussion and allowing them to take the discussion where they're going to go. Certainly in a program like Arts One, I think of myself more as a facilitator of discussion rather than a kind of authority figure or someone who has to sort of have the last say or just sort of put forth a kind of binding interpretation of something. But the texts we read in our seminar are so rich and so diverse and the students have such different responses and questions as they make their way through the reading list that I think my main task, or the way I approach my main task in terms of teaching Arts One is to ensure that everyone has a voice in the classroom and to make sure that those voices are heard and to do my best to make connections between students' points and to continue to push the students to make connections between readings that we may have already passed over. That's sort of how I think of my primary task. I also work very hard in the classroom at fostering close reading strategies, so I'm often drawing attention to particular passages that I find astonishing or troubling or confusing and working with small chunks of text and presenting to the group and saying, okay, this is something that I am having trouble with and I'm particularly interested in working with you as a group and encouraging students to do the same. You've started to tell us, I think, already, but what particularly attracts you to Arts One? Well, I think initially it's the reading list, I think as a scholar, the opportunity to spend an entire year making a way through these canonical or formative works of literature and philosophy and history, it's just too tempting an opportunity to pass out. It's certainly a program that I wish I would have had an opportunity to take part in as an undergraduate and I'm thrilled to take part in it now. Having been away from the program and now coming back to it, I sort of have a better sense of what I really enjoyed in the moment and I think, I mean, it's still the reading list and we still have a great reading list, but I have a greater appreciation now for the sense of community in Arts One in terms of both the faculty team that I get to work with, a group of world-class scholars that we get to see in action every week and work very closely with in terms of the reading list and setting course questions and things of that nature. And then, of course, working with students for eight months and getting them from there. It's their first year on the university campus through their first year and seeing them grow and navigating reading lists with them is a pretty rare and rewarding opportunity. You're teaching a wide range of different kinds of texts this year from the classic Othello through to a graphic novel and contemporary novels as well. Can you say a little bit about a couple of the texts that you're teaching? Sure, well there's a couple of them in minor texts, the Unfortunate Traveller which is a prose text of the late 16th century and Othello, you mentioned those are texts I taught before in other situations but I'm excited to get back to them because I know different things will honor themselves and make themselves a parent as we put them into context in the Arts One context. In the second half of the year I'm teaching a couple of texts that are sort of outside my primary research areas. A graphic novel called Safe Area Garage which is a work by a journalist, a war reporter named Joe Sacco and what makes his work unique is that he files his reports by way of sequential comics so he's working both words and images. That's a text I taught before at the undergraduate level and it was a very productive experience. He's sacro in that graphic novel during the Bosnian Wars of the mid-1990s. So that text presents some unique challenges working with words and images and how they can work together to signify in unique ways. So students come to graphic novels often with little experience working with them or preconceptions about how they might work so I'm excited to explore that. And then towards the end of the year I'm scheduled to lecture on most of the comics by a fundamentalist, which is a text I've never taught before. It's a novel I've read a couple times now and each time I go back to it it seems more complicated and a bit richer so I'm excited to sink my teeth into that. I think it's a remarkable novel because I mean it's created this narrator who's telling a story over the course of an evening and he's constructed the book in such a way that you can have different interpretations of this narrator depending on how you interpret certain sections of that book and based on what preconceptions you bring to that novel. So it's a novel that I haven't quite figured out yet but in my experience that's often the best time to stand in front of a class and try to work your way through something as if you don't understand it entirely. What are you looking forward to this year? Well working with a new group of students that just met them this week and they all seem very energetic and very positive and so just that excitement of navigating that reading list with a group of students because of course so much of the reading list is new to me as it's new to the students so that opportunity to learn along with them is something that I'm really looking forward to. And I always look forward to the Monday lectures. There's always a kind of in the room I find on Monday mornings and the opportunity to see my colleagues lecture on things that I might have some familiarity with, lecture on things that I have no familiarity with and seeing how they navigate a classroom and how they pass along their knowledge to students and how they communicate with the arts one group is always really exciting to me. And finally one advice you have for a new student or somebody thinking of coming to study on the arts one course Well I think you have to really to embrace all aspects of the program so I've been talking to my seminar sort of an introductory phase this week about Arts One really pushes you to work hard at critical reading, critical writing and critical thinking and I think if you can commit yourself to working hard at all three phases of the program that the payoff at the end is quite tremendous. I think you have to this is hard to do when you sort of miss the arts one but I think you have to take some time to appreciate where you're at and to look at your bookshelf which hopefully isn't as bad as mine but look at what you've read so far, look at what you still have to read and take some time to really feel some pride in what you're accomplishing and the kinds of discussions that are taking place. Above all I think you have to read, you have to read read when you're tired and read when you're hungry and read when you can't think you can do another page, do one more page and it will all turn on What a fantastic way to end Thank you so much. Thank you