By Keenlyn Kilgore and Juliana Perri
Dr. Lauren Shohet, a beloved English professor, sat down with two of her former students to talk about her experience at Villanova University as a professor, researcher, and member of the Villanova English community. In addition to her work at Villanova, Dr. Shohet is Subject Editor for Literature and Drama in English for Routledge On-lineResources.
So what made one of the university’s most loved professors decide to teach? For one, conducting. Dr. Shohet experienced a novelty in high school when she was introduced to the world of conducting. For her, conducting choirs was a position of leadership that she now equates with being at the front of a classroom. Then, she helped guide others by providing the proper procedures with a baton. Now, she does the same with her students, providing them with the foundations they need to thrive. Dr. Shohet loves seeing her students come into their own, taking what they learn from her and independently applying it elsewhere.
Dr. Shohet’s draw to teaching gathered momentum when she became an undergraduate teaching assistant at Oberlin College. There, she worked independently four days a week with a group of ten beginning language learners. Only cementing her desire to one day become a professor, Dr. Shohet not only found the work to be incredibly energizing, but also loved getting to know people and creating a community in the classroom setting.
Speaking of community, one of Dr. Shohet’s favorite parts of the Villanova English program is the mutual love for reading and writing that permeates every classroom. Colleagues and students alike are binded by this commonality, which is truly at the core of the English department.
Over the years of her impressive career as a professor, Dr. Shohet says that technology has drastically changed the teaching and learning experience, mostly for the better. Mainly, it has allowed for more efficient communication and a more effective organization of materials. Students now spend less time on mechanics and lower-ordered diversions/preoccupations, and therefore have a greater capacity to engage with the coursework. While Villanova students today find Blackboard tedious and faulty at times, Dr. Shohet points out that it alleviates many stressors that would otherwise be present.
If Dr. Shohet could give any advice to her younger self or other aspiring educators, it is to remember that the classroom is a place for learning both by the student and the professor. Hoping to ease some of the expectations of perfection or omniscience that is placed on professors, she says even professors can get something wrong, forget something, or not be able to do something. What’s important is creating “a community of people doing their best.”
Like other professors at Villanova, Dr. Shohet is completing her own research while simultaneously teaching in the classroom. One long-term project that Dr. Shohet is excited about is her soon-to-be-published book about John Milton’s Eve and the idea of media and mediation. In our heavily mediated world, Dr. Shohet wishes to demonstrate the ways Paradise Lost answers some of contemporary society’s most urgent questions, as well as discuss the affordances and dangers of such a mediated world.
Dr. Shohet is also co-editing a collection that comes out of seminars regarding death, collaborating with Christine Varnado, an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at SUNY Buffalo. Their work seeks to determine what is queer about early-modern death, as well as to answer questions about non-binary death. Dr. Shohet looks at some of the traditional, Renaissance, and Christian ways that say death isn't so final in an effort to deconstruct the notion of death. IVF, ventilators, and vegetative states are all examples of the ways death is not as absolute as one might think; an animal raised for the slaughter may not truly be alive, but in fact, in some ways already dead. Augustine says that life rather should be called death than life if you aren’t fully open to God. In these cases, a one-dimensional definition of death egregiously ignores the complex realities of death.
Dr. Shohet has taught a range of classes from Foundations of Literature to Narrative Television. In the fall, she will be teaching that Narrative Television class on Mondays and Wednesdays at 4:45-6:00, if you want to check it out!
