Guest Post – Brandon Hawk: Life in a New Job

First, let me say how happy I am to be back in New England and within the proximity of Kisha, John, and the wider MASSMedieval community. And thanks to them for the invitation to share some thoughts on my new position as Assistant Professor in English at Rhode Island College. At RIC, I am “the lone medievalist,” but I mostly see this an opportunity rather than a drawback: while I’m the sole pre-modernist in the department, I’ve also been encouraged to pursue some of the ways in which I can look beyond the medieval period in my teaching and research. In other words, I see plenty of possibilities for expanding the diversity of my work.

For example, I’m eager to cultivate my interests in the long history of media and technologies. Several of my colleagues have a strong media studies focus, and there’s a close link between English and the Media Studies Program. Related to that, I’ve made some great friends in the Adams Library on campus, including a new reference librarian who specializes in English and digital humanities, as well as the interim Head of Digital Initiatives. While there are no details plans yet, we have informally schemed to think about collaborative projects around campus and using the library’s special collections.

In terms of research, I’m using some of my interest in media studies to start new projects or reframe old ideas as I revise. In particular, I am turning to revising my dissertation into a book, which I’m tentatively calling Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England. As I rethink this project, I’m particularly thinking about the long history of media, how Anglo-Saxon culture can be thought of as “multi-media,” and what that can tell us about the contexts of translation and adaptation, the circulation of books, and especially preaching in medieval England. Last weekend I attended the York Christian Apocrypha Symposium (http://tonyburke.ca/conference/) and presented part of my research on sermons and visual art related to stories about Jesus’ infancy in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. This represents one step in bringing medieval and media studies together as I forge ahead with the larger book project.

Teaching has also posed opportunities both to stay rooted in the medieval and to look beyond it. I’m teaching a 100-level general education “Literature and the Canon” course; a 200-level course that welcomes students to the English major as “Introduction to Literary Study”; and a 300-level “Literature of Medieval Britain.” I’ve taken the most liberty to look beyond the medieval period in “Introduction to Literary Study,” in which we’re reading a smattering of literature including Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “A Village After Dark,” Homer’s Odyssey, the biblical Genesis, Sophocles’ Antigone, Beowulf, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s short stories in Monday or Tuesday, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Essentially, I’ve mixed a bit of classic, canonical literature with things that I just want to read (and some, like Woolf’s stories or Satrapi’s Persepolis, that I’ve never read before). For the last book of the semester, I had students nominate ideas (a total of 6) and then vote on them—offering a type of democratic ending to the semester—for which they collectively chose Harper Lee’s recently published Go Set a Watchman. I’m also taking the opportunity to experiment with teaching, like an exercise you can read about here (http://brandonwhawk.net/2015/09/04/teaching-with-lego/).

So far, I’ve had a good start to the semester and this position, and I’m looking forward to what else might come—medieval and otherwise—in my future at RIC.

–Brandon