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Dan Birkholz
Daniel J Birkholz Wins the President's Associates Teaching Award
Dan Birkholz is one of the English Department's finest teachers. He combines carefully structured and intellectually challenging syllabi with creative flexibility; under the rubric of “active investment” he demands student participation in and responsibility for classroom activities; he foregrounds the centrality of the writing process, and he seeks to foster passionate engagement with the material.
The classes he teaches range widely. His course on “Viking Literature” moves from Beowulf through the Scandinavian sagas to modern film adaptations of Norse materials. His comprehensive “Survey of Early English Literature” takes in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Chaucer, Gawain, Shakespeare, and Donne. The ambitious “Fiction and Medievalism” examines eighteenth-century Gothic fantasies and the nineteenth-century obsession with the Middle Ages before turning to twentieth-century films and neo-medievalist novels. “Premodern Lives” analyses the genres of biography and autobiography from Augustine to Luther and Shakespeare.
In his student evaluations certain words are constantly repeated: “challenging,” “inspiring,” “passionate,” “creative.”