Zachary Michael Jack is Professor of English at North Central College. This interview is based on his new book, The Strange Genius of Ignatius Donnelly: The Populist Who Debunked Shakespeare and Found Atlantis (Northern Illinois University Press, 2024). JF: What […]
Shakespeare
Shakespeare is “mid:” and other arguments in favor of education
Skepticism about books or culture is hardly new or different or exciting. Anti-intellectualism is a grand American tradition.
January 6, 2021: The Shakespeare angle
Today at The Washington Post, Meena Venkataramanan has a piece on a letter the January 6th “Stop the Steal” protesters sent to the Folger Shakespeare Library. This is wild. Here is a taste: While insurrectionists were plotting to storm the […]
Disney people vs. Shakespeare people
Disney fans can learn from Shakespeare fans. Lately people are upset with the Walt Disney Company pretty frequently. If we limit ourselves to the complaints about films, we can observe that it’s often about movie remakes. Some people are unhappy […]
“Good [humanities] teaching matters, but it can’t be measured”
Here is a taste of Johann Neem’s review of Gayle Greene’s Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of Algorithm: These are tough times for humanities professors. Flip through The Chronicle and the disillusionment jumps off the page. Post-pandemic students are disengaged. Colleges […]