Stephen Buhler

Professor

Degrees and Institutions Granting the Degree

• California State University, Long Beach, BA
• University of California, Los Angeles, MA
• University of California, Los Angeles, PhD

Professional Areas of Specialty

The literary culture of Early Modern England, especially the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Literature's connections with philosophy and the performing arts.

Courses Regularly Taught

• Shakespeare
• Milton
• Introduction to Renaissance Literature
• Music and Text in the English Renaissance (with Pamela Starr of the UNL School of Music)
• Renaissance Drama

Personal Teaching Statement

I regularly ask students to read aloud, recite, enact, or perform passages from literature. In encouraging them to bring the language more vividly to life in their own understandings and for their listeners, I share some of my own contemporary musical settings of early modern poetry. When the students respond in kind--a staged dramatic interpretation, a screenplay adaptation, or even an outdoor rally--it shows their grasp of the material and their engagement with it.

For me, the best part of teaching is learning: when everyone in a class, including the instructor, comes away from the experience knowing more (and more deeply) about the subject. Dialogue with students and with colleagues on campus, throughout the discipline, and across disciplinary lines provides both the inspiration and the environment for effective teaching and constructive research. I've found that work in the humanities especially depends not only upon individual insight and effort but also upon collaboration and conversation.

Selected Publications, Projects, and Awards

• Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
• "Musical Shakespeares: Attending to Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona," in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• "´Sweet Lydian airs´ Meet ´Anthems clear´: Intelligibility in Milton, Handel, and Mark Morris," The John Donne Journal 25 (2006).
• "The Sirens, the Epicurean Boat, and the Poetry of Praise"; Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
• "Form and Character in Duke Ellington´s and Billy Strayhorn´s Such Sweet Thunder," Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1.1 (Spring/Summer 2005).
• Education Director and Co-founder, Flatwater Shakespeare Company. Dramaturg and Text Adviser for productions of Macbeth (Haymarket Theatre, 2006), The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Love´s Labor´s Lost, and King Lear (Swan Theatre 2006-7).
• 1999 Recipient of the University of Nebraska´s Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award (OTICA). Member of UNL´s Academy of Distinguished Teachers.