11r1_UAFS_SPSU10:G&W
4/13/10
3:35 PM
Page 11
Q 5
SCHOLAR OF THE RELEVANT:
Assistant Professor of English Dr. Keith Fudge has published work on, among other topics, Southern literature, American war literature, and the literature of baseball, but he’s particularly well known as a student and teacher of popular culture— music, TV, and movies—as literature. This semester he’s teaching a 4000-level English course on the Beatles.
1
You’ve said Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a place right alongside Shakespeare when discussing the human condition and that the Beatles are as significant as Beethoven to today’s students. Really?
We used to say that you can’t teach like you taught 5 or 10 years ago, but now it’s more like, “You can’t teach like you did last year.” You have to make learning today a little more relevant to students’ everyday lives. Many of today’s students, for example, grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer during their formative years. If you can demonstrate core messages and philosophies and ethics through familiar mediums, they’re going to make connections better. Anything that reflects the problems and intricacies of the human condition—one is just as powerful as another.
2
Seems like there must be some opposition from the “ivory tower” to the teaching of pop culture right alongside the traditional canon.
It’s more and more accepted. Established research institutions have sort of paved the way. Indiana University has taught a course on the Beatles for years. Hope University in Liverpool right now is offering a Masters Degree in Beatleology. Don’t ask me what you can do with it, but it’s out there. And
there are international Buffy conferences. I spoke at one, and there were scholars from everywhere. People may roll their eyes, but they kind of get over it. It seems that the ivory tower should really be about learning and thinking critically, and as long as you’re teaching those skills, people shouldn’t worry about how you’re doing it.
3
You’re also interested in the literature of baseball. What are your top three baseball films and/or books?
The Natural (the movie). It captures the golden era of baseball, that late ’30s era. Bull Durham for just the zaniness of minor league life. I like—and it’s just because I’m kind of connected to it—David Halberstam’s book October 1964. It chronicles the CardinalsYankees World Series. I grew up in Cardinal country in the ’60s, and my grandfather and grandmother took off and went to that Series without a ticket. And my parents took me to the World Series in 1967 when the Cardinals played the Red Sox. Halberstam chronicles what I saw in that era.
4
Among the comments about you on Ratemyprofessors.com are “Great professor!” “He is amazing!!” “Very engaging!” “AWESOME!!!!!” and so on. Why?
I think there are two types of teachers in the world. I think there’s the type of teacher who
KAT WILSON ’96
Dr. Keith Fudge
will figure out what students know and help them build on it and get better. And there’s the type of teacher who wants to find out what students don’t know and catch them and play “gotcha.” And I vowed I would never be the second type of teacher. You treat students with dignity and respect, and you will see it in return. And this should be fun, and it should be good. It should be a great experience for everybody. And when it ceases to be, that’s when I’ll get out.
5
What are you working on these days?
My interests now in higher education are shifting toward the whole experience—the college experience for students, particularly at this institution. I think that this institution has an incredible positive vibe going on, for lack of a better way to describe it. But the mindset here when it was a two-year college was, “Come take your classes and then go home. And when you’ve finished taking classes here, then go somewhere else.” And now, since 2002, we have to change the mindset to say, “This is your academic community. Come learn with us. Come stay with us. This can be your social and academic home.” So I’m real interested in that change and creating an atmosphere of collegiality across the board. UA Fort Smith BELL TOWER
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