Darren Howard
Education
- Ph.D, University of California, Los Angeles
- M.A., University of Pennsylvania
- B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz
Teaching Philosophy
I see teaching and learning about literature not in terms of achieving mastery but of initiating a process. A student of literature does not master a body of knowledge so much as cultivate an active critical faculty and an ability to express ideas clearly and powerfully. In my classes I try to capture the organic process of reading intuitively and marry it to the analytical process of literary study through exercises that break these processes down into stages. Because we can best learn how to challenge our own assumptions through encountering other opinions, I structure class time around discussions, rather than lectures, and foster a sense of each class as a learning community.
Courses
- Engl 117: Hard Books and Easy Books
- Engl 117: Going Away and Growing Up
- Engl 117: Re-reading Shakespeare
- Engl 116: Recent American Fiction
- Engl 116: Pulitzer Prize and the Canon
Research Interests
Since I wrote my dissertation on depictions of animals in British poetry, children’s literature, science writing, and political philosophy of the 1790s, my research interests have somewhat unhelpfully and unhealthfully grown to encompass the entire history of world literature. I continue to be particularly interested in depictions of animals in literature, and the ways we define humanity with and against our notions of the animal, but I am also interested in issues surrounding textual difficulty, poetics, ideas of justice, aesthetics, gender, the relationship between humans and the natural world, religion and spirituality, concepts of childhood and adulthood, and the connections that authors draw between achieving individual and social change.
I am also interested in creative writing—both poetry and prose—and am an editor on the local literary journal, Gold Man Review.
Publications
- “Talking Animals and Reading Children: Teaching (dis)Obedience in John Aikin and Anna Barbauld’s Evenings at Home” Studies in Romanticism 48 (4), December 2009, 641-666.
- “Necessary Fictions: The Swinish Multitude and The Rights of Man” Studies in Romanticism 47 (2), Summer 2008, 161-178.
- “The Failure of Allegory: A Rhetorical Reading of Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism” European Romantic Review 17(5), December 2006, 559-574.