Teaching
BA Seminar: Shakespearean Spin-offs (2h/week) – at Freie Universität Berlin
The students studied three Shakespearean tragedies: Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet. The participants then looked at two modern comedies which are adaptations of these tragedies: Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). They analyzed how the modern authors use and adapt the Shakespearean plays, stories, language, techniques, and conventions.Course language: English.
BA Seminar: Shakespearean Tragedies (2h/ week) – at Freie Universität Berlin
The participants read three of Shakespeare's great tragedies. In Macbeth, murder stands at the beginning of the play, in Hamlet and Othello the play leads up to murder. The question of responsibility is addressed in all three plays: who is to blame for the tragic outcome? Is there something intrinsically tragic in the heroes' characters? Or is an exterior (possibly supernatural) force at work? Through these and other questions, the students analyzed and investigated the characteristics of Shakespearean tragedy.Course language: English.
BA seminar: Shakespeare and Women (2h/ week) – at the University of Geneva and at Freie Universität Berlin
The students studied three comedies – Twelfth Night, All’s Well that Ends Well, and The Merchant of Venice– presenting a total of eight women (originally played by boy actors) confronted with difficulties on their way to love and marriage. They analyzed what constitutes these difficulties, and how the female characters deal with them. This meant that a chief object of this seminar was to investigate how much and what kind of agency is given to the female characters in these comedies.Course language: English.
BA seminar: Shakespeare's Star-crossed lovers (2h/week) – at the University of Geneva and at Freie Universität Berlin
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream have often been called "sister plays". They were written around the same time, and the play-within-the-play in the latter intriguingly parallels the plot of the former. Both these plays resemble Much Ado About Nothing in a variety of ways, and the three plays display a total of no fewer than seven pairs of star-crossed lovers in different constellations, offering a variety of aspects that were analyzed and compared in this seminar.Course language: English.
First-year course: Analysis of text (3h/week) – at the University of Geneva
This seminar accompanied the introductory course on English Literature. It was divided into analysis of texts and composition. The two modules were drama and poetry. Course language: English.
Workshop: Travelling players in seventeenth-century Germany – at the University of Bern
This 2-day-workshop accompanied the rehearsal period of a group of theater students who prepared a production of Romio und Julieta. Und Picklhäring, based on a seventeenth-century German adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The workshop covered a historical introduction, the living and working conditions of the so-called English Comedians on the German strolling stage, the relevant Shakespearean playtexts and the theatrical conditions and conventions under which the itinerant players performed. Course language: German.
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