Introductions to particular literary periods, genres or schools make me as nervous as a party where I don’t know anyone: I want to meet everyone but I know that I’ll end up mixing up faces and stories and making serious gaffes (um, same problem with academic conferences, apologies to all concerned…). I’m currently going through […]
This week the experiment of having students perform scenes from a selection of contemporary British plays in class has started… with top results!! The first texts were Act I and Act III of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and I can only say that the women students playing the roles turned out to be top performers […]
One of my first year students eats during my class and I scold her publicly. I tell her this is rude, she should have had breakfast before 8:40. The class goes well but I must stop now and then to ask for silence. I have two clever-looking students who oscillate non-stop between chattering like old […]
Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German Defence minister in Angela Merkel’s Government, has finally resigned. The reason? The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung has made it public that Zu Guttenberg had plagiarised part of his doctoral dissertation: a staggering 20% of its 475 pages. Zu Guttenberg, a very popular politician, has taken his time to resign, as […]
I’d run out of reading matter a few stops from my station, which is annoying, when a hassled thirty-something mum got on, dragging a feisty six-year-old and holding a crying, twisting, screaming two-year-old. They sat opposite me. For some puzzling reason, the baby was shouting at the top of her lungs for ‘The hen! The […]
I invite to my Contemporary British Theatre class Prof. Mireia Aragay and Prof. Enric Monforte of the University of Barcelona, two of the best Spanish specialists in the field and co-authors of the excellent collection of interviews with directors, playwrights, critics and academics, British Theatre of the 1990s (Palgrave, 2007) I interview them with interventions […]
Happily for me, I’ve been commissioned a short book on heterosexuality for the collection ‘Los textos del cuerpo’ (EDIUOC) that the research group I belong to (‘Body and Textuality’, coordinated by Dr. Meri Torras) has been publishing since 2009. I’m now at the stage of putting together a bibliography… and making decisions about how much […]
I assume that what I’m going to complain about here is something that British Theatre specialists know very well. Yet, since I am not really a specialist and only teach theatre now and then, I must say that I’m surprised by the lack of good material on YouTube. The last time I taught a drama […]
I read on the train –how/where else?– John Berger’s brief novel From A to X: A Story in Letters (2008) and I’m moved as I hadn’t been in a long time by what I can only describe as its exquisite prose. Some readers, as I see in Amazon, are annoyed by Berger’s vagueness about where […]
An angry student comes to my office to tell me how badly I do my job because, in her view, her paper has been unfairly awarded an appallingly low grade. Yes, a 2 is low indeed. I agree. As the temperature in the room rises I try explain to her, not as calm as I […]