ABOUT Caroline
BACKGROUND AND EXPERIENCE
I have always loved books and reading (perhaps unsurprising, given that my parents were both librarians, met in a library, and announced their engagement at the Huntington Library). As an undergraduate at Occidental College, I initially majored in history but soon shifted to English, and after receiving my B.A. and working for a year in publishing, I lived in England while earning an M.A. at the University of Exeter. Once back in the U.S., I fell in love with teaching, working first with high school students and then, after earning my Ph.D. at UCLA, with the wonderful undergraduate and graduate students at California State University, Los Angeles. I was hired as an expert in Shakespeare’s poetry and plays and other early modern English literature, and I also specialized in children’s literature and in English Language Arts pedagogy. I delighted in training and advising Single- and Multiple-Subject Credential students, who were committed to teaching in local schools.
My students taught me, daily, how to be a more effective teacher, and I will be forever grateful to them. Early in my career, I was honored to be distinguished as a Cal State LA Outstanding Professor, and my lively classroom practice was profoundly enhanced by my participation in an NEH seminar on performance at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Committed to teaching not only in the classroom but also in surrounding communities, I have offered professional development and literacy workshops at the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, Advanced Placement Summer Institutes, the Lancaster State Prison, public libraries, and K-12 schools (public and private), in addition to sharing my critical reading strategies via professional publications and national conference presentations.
After 27 years at Cal State LA, I "retired,” but did so with a commitment to continue writing, teaching, and supporting humanities-based education. My ReadingGladly practice enables me to share with others the wisdom and expertise I’ve gained as a mom and a professor and a lifelong reader—and it allows me to spend time gardening and dancing and cooking, walking my dog, watching whales and quail and my resident fox, and playing every word game The New York Times has to offer. I look forward to reading with you!
Publications (Selected)
Teaching Practices
“Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors for Princes, Primers for Pedagogues.” Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays. Ed. Laurie Ellinghausen (Modern Language Association, 2017, 185-191).
“The Multiple Readerships of Elizabethan Poetry.” Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney and Anne Lake Prescott (Modern Language Association, 2000, 119-122).
Shakespeare
“Fooling with Matches in Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night; or, Lines, Women, and Song.” Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen. Ed. Lena Cowen Orlin and Miranda Johnson-Haddad (U of Delaware Press, 2008, 183-196).
“Subverting Romantic Comedy: Edith Wharton’s Reading of Shakespeare in The House of Mirth.” Studies in Philology 100.1 (Winter 2003): 87-104.
Early Modern Literature and Culture
Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Reading of Women (U of Delaware Press, 2002).
“Queen Elizabeth, Dol Common, and the Performance of the Royal Maundy.” The Mysteries of Elizabeth I: Essays from English Literary Renaissance. Ed. Kirby Farrell and Kathleen Swaim (U of Massachusetts Press, 2003, 43-66).
“The ‘carefull Nourse’: Female Piety in Spenser’s Legend of Holiness.” Huntington Library Quarterly 60.4 (1997): 381-406.
“Reading the Margins: Female Courtiers in the Portraits of Elizabeth I.” Ben Jonson Journal 2 (1995): 31-58.
Children’s Literature
“Redistributing the Riches: Shakespearean Adaptation in Moss Gown and Mama Day.” Re-imagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults. Ed. Naomi J. Miller (Routledge, 2003, 260-268).