Professor Susie Phillips and Dean Adrian Randolph discuss why teaching matters, how asking bold questions can open entire worlds of “speculative possibility” in scholarship, and the power of gossip.
Susie Phillips is the Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professor of English at Northwestern University. She is a medievalist with Early Modern leanings and teaches courses on late medieval and Early Modern literature and culture, drama, poetry, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her second book, Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England (forthcoming from UPenn) examines best-selling multilingual textbooks that opened a virtual classroom to students who did not have access to formal education, offering instruction in the practical, and murky, ethics of the premodern marketplace. Phillips has also published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy.
Adrian Randolph is dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Henry Wade Rogers Professor of the Humanities. Dean Randolph’s research focuses on the art and architecture of the medieval Renaissance Italy. He joined Northwestern in 2015 from Dartmouth College. There, he served as the associate dean of the faculty for the Arts and Humanities, chair of the Department of Art History, and director of the college’s Leslie Center for the Humanities.