English, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
B.A., University of California, Berkeley
I love teaching medieval and early modern literature, early modern and contemporary political philosophy, and tragedy from Aeschylus to Suzan-Lori Parks, but my purpose as a teacher is, above all, to challenge and encourage students to confront—fearlessly, rigorously, joyfully, and with growing confidence—the extraordinary demands that Shakespeare’s plays make on our cognitive faculties and their baffling and enduring power to move readers and audiences.
To accomplish these aims, I must help students, in large lecture courses––my four most recent offerings of English 117S and English 117B enrolled 630 students––and in seminars, recognize that Shakespeare is for them, that the plays invite their intelligence, their experience, and their curiosity; that he is theirs rather than the property of an exclusive, rarified club. My central pedagogical challenge is to dismantle the sense of exclusion that often accompanies canonical literature and replace it with a sense of intellectual ownership.
I often begin my courses by telling students that, for more than four centuries, thousands of philosophers, poets, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, composers, and theorists have written about, wrestled with, and reimagined Shakespeare. This may seem like an odd gambit: if figures such as Hegel, Stendhal, Freud, C. L. R. James, and Toni Morrison have already grappled with these plays, what room could possibly remain? But that is precisely the point. I am inviting students to join an ongoing conversation: the fact that Shakespeare continues to generate thought—after Marx, after Arendt have had their say—is evidence not of closure, but of inexhaustibility. The door remains open, and students bring to these plays new forms of attention and historical situatedness.
In office hours, Q&A sessions, written comments on papers, and visits to discussion sections, I can often say—honestly— “That’s new. I’ve read this play fifty times, and what you are saying is new.” Watching students register that moment—that their insight is not derivative but genuinely contributory—produces visible excitement and intellectual confidence. In course evaluations, many students note that they enrolled to satisfy a requirement, often with reluctance, but left with a sense of having been invited into serious thinking they did not expect to be accessible or interesting to them.
I want students to grasp the magnitude of what is at stake when they read Shakespeare and other complex, influential writers. I ask them to think with Shakespeare as he thinks about monarchy and republicanism, friendship, agency, faith, freedom and unfreedom, love, beauty, justice, racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. Doing so requires historical and philosophical scaffolding: I introduce students—in part, through dozens of weighty handouts—to early modern political thought, theology, and social theory, not as background ornament, but as tools for thinking. Great literature always seeks to induce thinking and feeling: from Aristotle on, philosophers have turned to fictions, especially epic poems and tragedies, to think about agency, ethics, consciousness, and what is peculiar to human beings, but as I encourage students to philosophize about and with Shakespeare, I also want them to recognize that plays and poems make meaning in distinctive ways, that there are things poems and plays can do that sermons, political tracts, or philosophical texts cannot do.
I want students to grasp the magnitude of what is at stake when they read Shakespeare and other complex, influential writers.
-Oliver Arnold
Over the last decade or so, I think that I have more effectively helped students recognize the beauty and emotional power of literary works by becoming a more open teacher. I know from evaluations that students have, from my earliest classes, recognized my passion for complex literary texts and for attending to them rigorously, and it always gives me joy when they say that the passion is catching. But I used to avoid reading aloud, in lecture or seminar, passages in Paradise Lost or The Tempest that I knew would make me choke up or even cry. I am not sure what exactly I feared, but I do know why I began to let go of my fear. In 2016, the English Department Citation Winner included the following recollection in her Commencement speech: “The other day, I saw one of my friends sitting out on Sproul. She looked like she had been crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said: ‘I just came out of Professor Arnold’s lecture about Cleopatra in Shakespeare and you know, it was so beautiful. I think the GSIs were crying too.’ I did know. I immediately remembered what lecture she was talking about.” I am shamelessly celebrating myself, but that meant so much to me, in part, because I had been trying not to cry in front of the students and I realized that I had become part of a community of feeling as well as of thinking.
An entirely different circumstance also helped me become a more open and accessible teacher. In 2019, a few months before covid struck, I broke my back and neck in an accident. I have been a Type-1 diabetic since I was ten years old, but I always took care to hide my insulin pump from my students, to silence the many alarms that I wear. Once I was back on my feet, I hobbled around campus for a year in a neck brace and walking sticks: I couldn’t hide that. Somehow, this physical vulnerability contributed to my teaching: students with disabilities felt more comfortable and confident talking with me. I became more conscious of the ways in which students may feel challenged and even vulnerable when confronting a Renaissance text. I sense now that I am bringing my full self into the classroom and that many students respond in kind.
I want students to discover that Shakespeare is not only of his time but also a resource for thinking about ours. Philosophers and theorists continue to return to Shakespeare to reflect on consciousness and the unconscious, the meaning of history, the uses of compassion, and the conditions of political life. When students see that they, too, can keep thinking with Shakespeare about their own world, the plays cease to be monuments and become transformative.