The Joys of Teaching Literature, started in September 2010 and with a Spanish version since July 2021, is a blog for ranting and raving about teaching and researching English Literature, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies, and other aspects of the Anglophone world. I publish a post once a week, usually on Monday. Please, download the yearly volumes for free or read the volume collecting some of the entries (Passionate Professing: The Context and Practice of English Literature, 2023). The comments option is not available, sorry, but you may contact me through my e-mail address, Sara.Martin@uab.cat. The contents of this blog are protected by a type 4 Creative Common License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)).

  • DIZZY: DOING LITERARY RESEARCH IN THE WEB 2.0 WORLD

    I have spent an unusually quiet day today (pre-storm: 57 exams and 30 exercises are hitting me tomorrow) to prepare a paper for a conference. I have the abstract, I’ve read the book pencil in hand, I thought I could start with the bibliography. I’m talking about a short paper, 2,500 words, for a 20-minute…

  • LEARNING FROM TEACHING ABOUT TEACHING, WITH STUDENTS’ HELP

    It’s the third time I refer here to the MQD (‘Improving Teaching Quality’) project for Literature I’m a member of since 2010. Our strategy in the last two years has passed through focusing on the narrator when teaching fiction, a strategy which, I believe, has worked quite well for us, teachers and students. This focus…

  • THE VAGARIES OF JOURNAL RATINGS (AND HOW YOUR OWN WORK MAY CHANGE QUALITY WITHOUT YOU LIFTING A FINGER)

    A colleague tells me that she’s very disappointed as a prestige journal where she published an article has now been demoted from the A list to the B list (in the ANECA check-lists, I think). She is really annoyed that when the time comes to pass her research assessment exercise this will affect her negatively.…

  • ‘BOLOGNA WELL APPLIED’: WHAT WAS NOT TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT YEARS BACK

    One of our students is spending her Erasmus year abroad in Dublin. She visits me during her reading week break and when I ask her what’s it like there, she tells me it’s “Bologna well applied.” I smile at her candid verdict, cringing inwardly, and ask her what she means. Well, this year she’s being…

  • CONSIDERING RESEARCH AND NATIONALITY (AND THE PROMPTINGS OF AN ILLUSTRIOUS VISITOR)

    The research group I belong to, led by Àngels Carabí of UB and devoted to the study of masculinities in American fiction, received last Friday an illustrious visitor: Prof. Victor Seidler, an emeritus teacher of social theory at Goldsmiths in London (although he trained originally as a philosopher). I owe Prof. Seidler an important insight…