Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major

This edited collection considers the task of teaching Shakespeare in general education college courses, a task which is often considered obligatory, perfunctory, and ancillary to a professor’s primary goals of research and upper-level teaching. The contributors apply a variety of pedagogical strategies for teaching general education students who are often freshmen or sophomores, non-majors, and/or non-traditional students. Offering instructors practical classroom approaches to Shakespeare’s language, performance, and critical theory, the essays in this collection explicitly address the unique pedagogical situations of today’s general education college classroom. M. Tyler Sasser is Assistant Professor of Honors at the University of Alabama, USA, where he teaches several courses on early modern literature, children’s literature, and film. Sasser’s research appears in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Shakespeare Newsletter, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Children’s Literature in Education. He has contributed recent chapters to Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction (2017), Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture (2018), Shakespeare and Geek Culture (2020), and Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation, Trauma and Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences (2023). In 2018, Sasser co-organized “Teaching Shakespeare in and beyond the Classroom” for the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, a 2-day conference focused on teaching Shakespeare to non-English majors. Emma K. Atwood is Associate Professor of English at the University of Montevallo, USA – Alabama’s only public liberal arts college. She teaches courses on Shakespeare and contemporary society, early modern drama, early modern poetry, and Renaissance women and gender. Atwood’s research interests include Shakespeare, pedagogy, spatial dramaturgy, performance theory, and women, gender, and sexuality. She has published articles in Comparative Drama, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and This Rough Magic. She is an editor of the forthcoming digital critical edition of The Court and Kitchin of Elizabeth Cromwell, an associate of the Shakespeare and Dance project, and has contributed to public-facing scholarship with the American Shakespeare Center and JSTOR Daily.