Teaching/Research

In the stories we tell about teaching and research, we generally cast teaching as the beneficiary of burning  the midnight oil over, say, obscure Reformation polemics or the works of the Bollandists.  Scholarship keeps us attuned to "what's going on," keeps us energized, keeps us from eternally lecturing from the proverbial yellowed sheet of paper.  (Whether, in this age of iPads, anyone lectures from yellowed sheets of paper is, of course, open to question.)  And scholarship does do these things, even if the scholar in question never teaches the subject of his or her own research.  (Bad religious poetry from The Protestant Magazine? Probably not going to be attractive to undergrads.)  My work on anti-Catholicism, for example, is proving awfully handy in the Gothic course; I gave a down-and-dirty brief lecture on anti-Catholic tropes just this week, as it happens.

But we rarely talk about how teaching provokes or affects our research.  This evening, while prepping tomorrow's class on Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother, I suddenly found myself working out how to talk about the White Lady of Avenel as a non-problem in Walter Scott's The Monastery and The Abbot duology.    (Why she's usually treated as a problem: supernatural figure wandering about loose in the otherwise realist first novel, who then gets the delete-key treatment in the second. See also the history of critical unhappiness with The Bride of Lammermoor.)  Or, more directly, an article I have coming out in just a few weeks emerged from a "wait, haven't I seen this before?" moment while rereading Vanity Fair for a seminar.  Both instances, you'll note, were very spur-of-the-moment, very unexpected--something that's also important for scholarship.  How can we ever know what will help us to learn some new thing or break through some old mental block?     

Comments

[jseliger.com]

In the stories we tell about teaching and research, we generally cast teaching as the beneficiary of burning the midnight oil over, say, obscure Reformation polemics or the works of the Bollandists.

I like how you use the phrase "stories we tell," which connotes a certain amount of skepticism about the claim, and I like it mostly because I've become more skeptical over time that research affects teaching skill, especially at the undergrad level, when students need so much help with basic skills like close reading and simple analysis. The gap between those things and research on the Bollandists (or, in my case, the academic novel) seems pretty damn wide—which is one of the points that Louis Menand makes in The Marketplace of Ideas:

The argument that [graduate students or professors] need the training [of acquiring a PhD] to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belief by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive. And the idea that the doctoral thesis is a rigorous requirement is belief by the quality of most doctoral theses.

Would your lecture in the Gothic course really have been substantially worse without current research? Maybe.

[Ahistoricality]

I have at least one colleague whose yellow-pad lecture notes (based, as near as I can tell, on class notes taken in the late '80s) I have -- against my better judgement -- found in my classroom and returned. I didn't have the forethought to get a picture, though, which I deeply regret.

This is the same colleague whose World Since 1500 surveys never leave Europe and rarely get past Napoleon.