Heather Clark - Literature
"I think it is important to look at teaching from a historical perspective – to consider the political and social currents which engendered a particular poem or novel, but it is just as essential to look closely at the language itself, to study the nuts and bolts of the writer’s craft," says Heather Clark. Her comprehensive philosophy of teaching literature is an extension of her own expansive course of study. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Oxford University, focusing on poetic collaboration in Northern Ireland, and her other literary interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish, British and American poetry and literature, dramatic literature, postcolonial literature and critical theory.
Heather is the author of The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972 (Oxford UP 2006) and has published articles in the Journal of Modern Literature, the Cambridge Quarterly, Eire-Ireland, and Symbiosis. A regular contributor to London’s Times Literary Supplement, Heather has published reviews, poetry, fiction and scholarly articles in several publications. She was awarded a 2006-2007 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which she is using to work on her book documenting the poetic dialogue of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Through teaching teenagers and college students in both classroom and tutorial settings before coming to Marlboro, Clark arrived at the realization that, as a teacher, it is her role to "prompt students to come to their own conclusions. I have come to agree with Socrates’ feeling in the Meno that students have a reservoir of knowledge waiting to be tapped – it is our job, as teachers, to release that knowledge, and to challenge students to build upon it."
B.A. Harvard University, 1996; M.Phil, Trinity College Dublin, 1997; Ph.D., Lincoln College, Oxford University, 2002; Marlboro College, 2002 –