Roger Schmidt

Biography

My primary specialty is Eighteenth-century British literature. I enjoy the poetry of Pope, Johnson's Rambler essays and Boswell's Life of Johnson, Hogarth's prints, eighteenth-century typography, the history of manners, the history of medicine. Beyond the eighteenth century, I love introducing students to literature in translation, especially Japanese and Russian literature. I am especially interested in the pleasures of low-tech teaching and am doing my best to preserve them in my classes. I try to keep teaching at the center of my intellectual life. In 2013 I received a fellowship from the Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton, UK, and (with additional funding from the Idaho Humanities Council), spent the month of May living in the stables of an Elizabethan manor house on the Jane Austen estate in Chawton, England, teaching myself to forge Austen's handwriting. This has inspired me to teach my first-year composition students how to write their essays with a dip pen – or a hand cut quill – in an eighteenth-century hand like that of Austen or Benjamin Franklin. I try to instill in them a sense of the tangible – to see writing as a physical artifact and not disembodied words on a screen. To this end I have also received various grants to establish, in collaboration with Dr. Paula Jull from the Department of Mass Communications, the VisCom Experimental Print Lab, where students can work with traditional hand-cranked letterpresses, where they can touch, smell and hear how traditional fine printing is done. In 2001, a $15,000 grant from ISU, as well as an Innovative Teaching Grant and matching monies from several other sources, allowed me to establish Samuel Johnson and his Circle, a collection of rare books and prints at Oboler Library, an ongoing project. At some point, most of my students, especially undergraduates, work with this collection. I am delighted to work with graduate students on eighteenth-century topics. That said, I have directed a wide range of Master Theses, Doctoral Papers, and PhD dissertations, over such authors as Shakespeare, Sterne, Austen, Emily Bronte, Hawthorne, Chopin, H.H. Brackenridge and Philip Freneau, and the Japanese fiction writer, Koda Rohan; on such subjects as the Ballets Russes' 1912 production of Daphnis and Chloe, Humanist Pedagogy, the rhetoric of medical case studies, and using eighteenth-century poetry in first-year composition classes; I have also directed MA creative theses in poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction (memoir), and a graphic novel.

Research Interest

British literature