Dr Peter Howarth

National Teaching Fellow 2012 Dr Peter Howarth lectures in modern English literature, particularly poetry. What keeps teaching exciting, for him, is the sense of watching the artwork offer new things to every class and every student. His aim has always been to help students feel how the book or poem, even the difficult or intimidating one, is a live work, continually happening, and not just an object to be intellectually anatomised. Over the last few years, Peter has tried to keep this sense of discovery through creative-critical work in his own courses, and by initiating a series of training days for postgraduate teachers for Queen Mary's Graduate School, the English Subject Centre, and for the HEA. These events have looked at the psychological dynamics of the seminar, motivating students to think like researchers, and using the writing process to help students take more notice of their changing internal responses, and why they might be significant. Peter has also found that research-led teaching in the arts has been a spur to better research as well as better teaching. Classroom and public arena discussions have influenced his writing about the conflict between modernist and non-modernist ideas of poetics (British Poetry in the Age of Modernism, Cambridge, 2005), the fascinations and difficulties of Modernist poetry itself (The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry, 2011), and the historical meaning of a form in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (2011). Peter has now begun a new project exploring the growth of performance poetry in the twentieth century, and its relation to experimental theatre, broadcast media, celebrity confession, pop music, group psychology, civil rights, participative democracy and, of course, teaching. He is planning a series of networked events exploring how the university and its social function became part of the creative framework for the modern writer at the same time as the ideas of psychoanalysis, and the peculiar path taken by pedagogy in English as a result.