Interview with Dr. Matthew Hansen, MA Advisor

Lizzy Walker: What is your area of expertise?
Dr. Matt Hansen: My area of expertise is Renaissance Literature, primarily drama, Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

LW: What is your teaching philosophy?
MH: It is more of a question you write out a response to (laughs). I think that my role as an instructor is to be a little bit more of the kind of agent provocateur that I ask questions and guide or lead discussion as opposed to doing a lot of lecturing and decoding texts in simple kinds of ways that says “this means this”, especially since my primary area of interest is in dramatic literature.  I think that dramatic literature is always open to interpretation, not least based on performance. Once we get into the position of performing a scene or an entire play, we have to make decisions about it whereas in reading it, any number of those decisions are constantly forestalled. We don’t have to decide, depending on how much information we get from the playwright, how old a character is, what he or she looks like, things like that. A lot of that can then be manipulated in performance and even once it is performed it still allows for any amount of debate and discussion, so my classes in general focus on discussion and exploring possibilities as opposed to me leading from the front and saying, “This is what this means and this is how this achieves it.” It is a fact that I am much more interested in asking questions and soliciting responses for how texts works and how language works.

LW: What classes have you taught, are currently teaching, would like to teach in the future?
MH: I have taught ENGL275: Introduction to Literary Studies, ENGL349: Renaissance Drama (Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries), ENGL348: Renaissance Poetry and Prose, ENGL345: Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Histories, as well as ENGL346: Shakespeare’s Comedies and Romances. I have also taught one section of a graduate level course on Renaissance literature specifically and I focused the course on Renaissance revenge tragedy. I’ve also taught ENGL500 a couple of times which is Research Methods in Literary Studies, for the graduate students in the MA program and ENGL 588,  Survey of Critical Theory.

LW: What classes would you like to teach or propose?

 MW: I’m pretty happy and pretty blessed in that my primary areas of interest are really already covered in the catalog in terms of having two courses on Shakespeare, which for me is great because it’s really hard to make the choices of what plays to include in a semester. The very first time I taught Shakespeare at the college level, it was at the University of Nebraska and the calendar there is similar to Boise State’s, about a 15-16 week semester, it was a 200 level course and I think we did 12 plays in 16 weeks, so it was pretty close to a play a week.  I learned my lesson in that we survived and we had a really good time doing it, but you just don’t get to get into much of any depth with the plays. A lot of the time in college catalogs Shakespeare classes will be divided into early Shakespeare and late Shakespeare or Elizabethan Shakespeare and Jacobean Shakespeare or it will be divided like it is at Boise State along generic lines, so we have a course on comedies and romances and another on tragedies and histories. . My greatest regret, at least in the configuration of the tragedies and histories this semester, even though I really like the line up that we have, is that Macbeth isn’t in there because it is a really fascinating play, but I can’t do them all so something has to give at some point.  This time around it was Macbeth and in subsequent offerings of the course something else will get pushed out and he will find his way in there I think. So, I’m really fortunate with that. I love the Renaissance Drama course focusing on Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  Marlow, Jonson, Middleton, Marsten, and Massenger and Fletcher are all amazing playwrights and the plays are a lot of fun, so the catalog’s already pretty well set up for me. One thing that I’ve thought about in terms of some other courses to possibly offer and one that I may work up a proposal on would be a course more specifically focused on Shakespeare on film and certainly I would probably think about it more in terms of if we were to develop a course on adaptation so that any number of people could possibly teach a course under that focus in terms of looking at plays or novels that have been adapted to film and things like that. My particular focus would be, surprise, surprise, on adaptations of Shakespeare, both in terms of relatively straight forward adaptations that maintain Shakespeare’s language and things like that, but also some of the looser adaptations like the way in which The Taming of the Shrew gets reimagined as Ten Things I Hate About You or the way Othello gets reimagined as O, so that’s one I’d like. Another that I’ve contemplated, and I could simply offer this focus in teaching either ENGL345 or ENGL 346, but I hesitate to do it, would be something kind of along the lines of "Shakespeare’s B-sides", just the lesser known plays of Shakespeare and just do a semester in which we look at The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Loves Labors Lost, and Coryelanis, and All’s Well that Ends Well, different plays that don’t tend to get produced in Shakespeare festivals as often, aren’t necessarily at the tip top of the list of most courses on Shakespeare. For example, I didn’t read All’s Well that Ends Well until I started working on my master’s degree and I was specifically focused on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama was what I had gotten through my undergraduate course work never having read that particular play. Most of the others I had encountered in multiple Shakespeare courses but not that one, so something like that would be interesting. I deliberately try to organize ENGL345 and ENGL346 more or less around Shakespeare’s "greatest hits" and I’ll occasionally slip a more odd or unique play into the mix sometimes. I usually start the comedies course, for example, with The Comedy of Errors, one that not many people are as familiar. I also included As You Like It, which is a pretty popular play and pretty well known, but Much Ado About Nothing is probably better known, not least because of Kenneth Brano’s big film version and Twelfth Night is probably more often included on syllabi for courses like the one I teach as opposed to As You Like It, but As You Like It is a personal favourite. I guess those would be the two classes, a film adaptation class, my version of the course would be a focus on Shakespeare in film, and then I’d like at some point maybe do something kind of lesser known Shakespeare. I have a book on my shelf that was edited by David Bevington. It’s a selection of plays and it’s called The Necessary Shakespeare, so I’d kind of like to teach the unnecessary Shakespeare, if there really is such a thing as unnecessary Shakespeare.

LW: What are your responsibilities working with graduate students?
MH:  I’m the default advisor for all of the students in the MA for the English program . We currently have three areas of emphasis in the MA in English; English education, rhetoric and composition, and literature. So, when students first come into the program I try to meet with them early on to go over the specific requirements of the different emphases, what courses they have to take, where they have options in terms of electives and so forth and then also to talk to people about what they think they want to do in term so of the culminating activity for the degree program that if students are pursuing the degree full time, which is 9 credit hours per semester for graduate students or 3 credit courses.  Students typically finish the MA in two years. I help students decide whether or not they want to work on a thesis project to complete the degree or a project which is similar to a thesis, but can have a little but different configuration or, at least in the literature emphasis, you also have the option of taking two additional courses and so doing a total of 36 credit hours and then don’t write a thesis or extended research project, you just take the courses and do the requirements for them. If what they are thinking going on for example to a Ph.D. in English then I think it’s a really good idea to do the thesis, not because it is going to be required to get into a Ph.D. program, but you can learn a lot and if you find in trying to do a 60 to 80 page master’s thesis that you really don’t like working on that kind of extended independent research project on a narrow topic ultimately then you should probably seriously reconsider whether or not you want to go onto a Ph.D.  You may enjoy the course work aspects of doing a Ph.D., but if you hated doing the MA thesis, you are probably going to really hate doing writing a 200 to 300 page dissertation on a similarly narrow topic. That’s nothing to do with a person’s intelligence or capabilities, it’s just a temperament thing and there are a lot of people out in the world that are what we call ABD, or "all but dissertation", meaning they did all of the course work, and then started on the road of writing the dissertation only to realize “I have no desire to do this, I have no interest in finishing this dissertation”, and there is no shame in that happening. It seems to me that you could save yourself a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of heartache if you figured that out as part of doing a master’s degree as opposed to adding another three or four years on top of that and however much money in student loans or whatever else to then decide “I’m never going to complete this Ph.D.”. That’s among the advice I kind of work through with people for they want to do. Similarly in our configuration of the emphasis area in English Education you can do a thesis or project, but you can also take a comprehensive exam to satisfy that. For some people, that is just easier and makes more sense that they’ll work with a faculty member to devise their own exam and in particular to have themselves examined in an area of literature, for example, that they weren’t as prepared for in their set up with undergraduate courses or graduate level courses, then when they go into schools to teach that literature, they feel that much more confident because they’ve set themselves the challenge of reading all of Hemingway or reading some more Shakespeare or Victorian novels and then setting up a timed exam on that material.  Another thing I do with the MA is managing all of the admissions processes for people that then apply to the program. I chair a committee to select and award the teaching assistantships. The one form of scholarship that we have for the MA in English is a teaching assistantship whereby we employ some of our graduate students to teach first year writing courses, maintain the website, try to do some other things in terms of recruiting students into the program and then once they get here I also then try to keep tabs on them in terms of academic performance and issues of advising and so forth.

LW: About how long have you been working with the graduates?
MH: This is my second year as the director of the MA. I kind of think to a certain extent that Carol Martin, who is my predecessor as the director of the MA, set me up, in good ways, mostly in good ways (laughs). It just happened to fall out when I first came to Boise State, the very first semester that I was to be here, my teaching assignment was to be ENGL275, Intro to Literary Studies, ENGL349, Renaissance Drama, and ENGL348, Renaissance Poetry and Prose. One of the members of the faculty who was slated to to teach the graduate Survey of Critical Theory that fall, Marcy Newman, had won a Fulbright fellowship, and she was going to be gone so I then got asked, “Would you be willing to teach this graduate course instead of one of the Renaissance lit classes?”. My first love is Renaissance drama so I was unwilling to drop that class, but I let the Poetry and Prose class go. My second semester here I was then asked to teach the graduate Research Methods course and then at the end of that academic year during the summer, I was asked if I would take over as the director of the MA, part of the justification being, “You know so many of the graduate students because you’ve been teaching all of these graduate courses” and it was true. It worked out and I’m very happy to have been asked to do it. It’s a great job and I really enjoy it. But, yeah, I think I was set up.

LW: When should undergraduate students start thinking about a graduate program?
MH: I think it’s a good idea to probably start thinking about something along those lines in your junior year, particularly if what you think you want to do is go straight from undergraduate work to doing a graduate degree without any break in between. Then you’re really needing ton be figuring out what sort of graduate work you want to do, where you might apply, what programs best fit your interests and needs sometime in your junior year.  It is going to be around late December, early January in your senior year that then applications are due at the various programs that you may want to go to. That said, and based in part on my own personal experiences, I had almost two years off in between my undergraduate course work and then going on to do a master’s degree and another two years off between finishing my master’s degree and starting a Ph.D. program. I personally think that’s really valuable to go out and do something else, get away from the pressures and rhythms of school for awhile. For me it wasn’t being too long away from that undergraduate experience in particular that I came to realize how much I missed it and I missed the end of the summer coming and the idea of getting ready to go back to school and start up a new academic year and things like that. I think it’s a good idea to go and do something else and it doesn’t have to be any great job. If you have the means to travel, I think seeing other countries and other cultures is a really good idea and will only make you a more insightful reader and a more interesting person to talk to, which is good, or working some crappy job that makes you all the more appreciative of the time that we get to spend particularly as English majors, reading books and discussing them and language, as well as ideas. Time away is good, but if you want to go straight through, you need to start in your junior year and think about getting back in. An important question to ask is why you want a master’s degree, whether you want a masters degree or a Ph.D., what it is going to do for you, what you envision possibly doing with that degree on the other side of things. A phrase I use on the website and then on some of our promotional material is that its an advance degree in literacy. A masters degree in English can be a really powerful tool for thinking about language and ideas and their effective expression and uptake and a lot of complex ideas that then have application beyond just teaching or staying in the academy, that there are lots of great uses for an MA in English.

LW: How do you prepare the students for graduate work?
MH:  One of the main things is that I’ve tried to structure English 500 to be something as useful and as informative as possible for the graduate students to then succeed in the program over all. The focus is on research methods in literary studies so its learning a little bit more about how to find information and how to situate one’s own ideas within the larger professional conversation about a particular author or a particular text that they are interested in researching and writing something on. I have students do presentations on the types of databases and bound resources that we have in our library or literary research so that everyone is familiar with what we have and how to use it effectively and then I also have them beginning to find out more about a particular author, a particular set of texts that they choose in terms of what are the sort of standard editions that scholars tend to read and site or refer to in their publications, what are the major biographies, what are the major bibliographies on authors and other useful or necessary resources for understanding a particular author for her or his time period. Students would also produce handouts on their particular subject to distribute to the class. I invite a number of faculty in literature to come in and present to the senior seminar. In preparation for my colleagues coming in, as a group the class and I will read an article or maybe more by the person that is going to come in so that we get familiar with their area of expertise and some of their published research. Toward the end of the semester I ask students as the two final assignments in the course to produce a pseudo-thesis prospectus and an annotated bibliography. They do a dry run on a proposed thesis and and provide some of the background in terms of preliminary research that can feed into that type of project. In practical terms they do go on to do a thesis as the culminating activity for the MA program.

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