Jeffrey Knapp
Associate Professor, English

Jeffrey Knapp teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance, and British Literature; students time and again point to his ability to make the literature come alive: “He makes difficult texts fresh and relevant, and he inspires us to think deeply.” Knapp is also praised by graduate students for his advising and mentoring: says one, he “stands as a model of the kind of teacher I hope to become.” Knapp, who has been the recipient of a Folger Long-Term Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, received both his B.A. and his Ph.D. from Berkeley.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

At first I taught by imitating my teachers. But the limitations of my approach came clear to me during an adult-education course I taught during my second year as an assistant professor at Harvard. My lectures to this night audience had nothing like the effect that my day audience had led me to expect. At night, I was teaching working men and women who had paid for the course themselves; many had come straight from their jobs; most were older than I; and they were intent on having their questions answered. They listened closely as I examined various semantic complexities in Hamlet, but when I was finished, they wanted to know why Hamlet had taken so long to avenge his father, why he was so upset about his mother, whether Shakespeare believed in ghosts, how I knew that Shakespeare had even written the play. Slowly it dawned on me that, by teaching from my teachers, I had also been teaching to them, trying to answer questions that might engage professionals long familiar with the literature at hand. In effect, I had been addressing not the actual group of people assembled before me, but an audience of admired and admiring ghosts.

Now I could put my finger on what had been missing from my courses: I had never seriously thought about literature from the student's point of view. What, after all, would a person reading Hamlet for the first time want to discuss? What would she find baffling or exciting? What could I say that would draw her even further into the play? My very trepidation in posing these questions to myself suggested that I would not be sacrificing intellectual complexity if I built my courses around such basic issues. On the contrary, I would have to work much harder for my students, because I would have to think more comprehensively as well as incisively about the literature I assigned.

Just as I began to put this more inclusive conception of teaching into practice, I moved to Berkeley, where the range of student backgrounds, ages, and expectations at every level of instruction is far broader than at Harvard. Here, I learned, students are less likely to take the value of Renaissance literature for granted, and, to my surprise, this difference inspired me. By looking at my course material as my students might--from the ground up--I quickly found myself rediscovering the sources of my own joy in literature. It is this joy that I hope to convey to my students, and I believe that I can, so long as I keep the freshness of their thinking as my encouragement and my guide.