Q: What is something you enjoy doing in downtown Charlottesville?
A: I think there is a booth in Bizou Restaurant that has my name written on it. It's a little bistro, sort of towards the cinema end of the Downtown Mall. I really enjoy eating there. I think I've worn a path between the downtown movie theaters and the restaurant.
Q: What is your favorite piece of literature?
A: I'm going to demand to have two answers to this one. The high culture answer: Jane Austen's novel "Persuasion." Not so high culture answer: Anything by the author Terry Pratchett. He is one of the funniest and most humane satirists writing in the 20th century. His books are disguised as fantasy novels, but they are much more richly textured than the conventional fantasy novel.
Q: Where did you go for your undergraduate degree?
A: Cambridge University. Cambridge has residential colleges -- something very vaguely along the lines of Brown College. My residential college was 'Clare College,' exactly like my name. I did my bachelor's degree in English literature. I got a fellowship that brought me to Yale University, and I did my Ph.D. at Yale. I just stayed in America after that; the job market in England in academia was lousy at that time and I had married an American. Just coincidentally, the fellowship I came to Yale on was founded by Paul Mellon, a Virginia philanthropist. Somehow Virginia was calling all the time it seems, or at least it was funding me to get over here.
Q: What is one place you've really enjoyed traveling to?
A: From my point of view, that would be America. That was the biggest trip I ever made -- coming over here. The ironic view would be to say London, because it wasn't until I came to America and then went back to teach one semester on a program in London that I found out how wonderful my own capital city was.
Q: What are some of your hobbies?
A: It's going to sound incredibly predictable, it's the usual range of cultural things: Love movies, love really good theater, which is why I like spending time in London over the summers, good food and wine, travel. Music, and I have really eclectic taste because I like everything from early classical music to rock and roll.
Q: What classes do you teach in the English department?
A: Outside the dreaded ENGL 381 medieval and Renaissance survey: Mainly Renaissance literature: I've done the big Shakespeare lecture courses, a seminar on gender and genre in Shakespeare, a seminar on Shakespeare on film, Milton at both the lecture course and seminar level (a whole semester on "Paradise Lost"!); seminars on gender and power in Renaissance literature, a seminar on the transformations of classical myth in the middle ages and Renaissance, a seminar on the depiction of desire from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Among my graduate level courses: A course on 16th century romance and lyric entitled Masks of Desire, an advanced seminar on the poems and prose fiction writings of Philip Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth, a course on Renaissance prose fictions in general.
Q: What do you love most about U.Va.?
A: The physical beauty of the campus. The fact that (unlike Yale, where I did my graduate work), it's not a mock Gothic imitation of Oxford or Cambridge. The general civility of Charlottesville and the collegiality of the University. Oh yeah, and the fact that you're all rabid Anglophiles and I get huge amounts of extra brownie points for my accent!
Q: What do you enjoy most in being a professor?
A: Being paid to do what I love -- read literature, think about literature, write about literature, talk about literature. Having far more control over how I schedule my time and where (in the most basic physical sense) I do my work than most human beings on the planet. Getting to play all the best parts when I lecture on Shakespeare.
Q: In your childhood, what was your dream job? (If this one, why?)
A: Oh, I was convinced I was going to be a world famous medical researcher. But a physics course in high school quickly persuaded me that the hard sciences were not really my thing.
Q: How many years have you been at this University?
A: I've taught here since 1985.
--Compiled by Neela Pal
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