Prf Richard Danson Brown

At the OU, I have taught on English and interdisciplinary modules, as well as making contributions to English Language modules. I was as Chair of AA100, The Arts Past and Present, an innovative module which reconceptualised the teaching of arts subjects for entry level students. As a consequence of the success of AA100, in 2010 I received an OU teaching award in recognition of my outstanding commitment to the teaching of the Arts and Humanities. I’ve made significant contributions to A230, Reading and Studying Literature;  AA306, Shakespeare; text and performance; A300, Twentieth-Century Literature; Texts and Debates;  and AA305, The Renaissance in Europe: A Cultural Enquiry. More recently, I have written two units (one on As You Like It, one on The Faerie Queene) for A334, English Literature from Shakespeare to Austen. Recent work on modules in production includes units on reading poetry for A111, Discovering the Arts, the successor module to AA100. For A233, Telling Stories: The Novel and Beyond, I have written materials on the medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; this blog post gives a sense of the challenges and delights of working on this extraordinarily rich text: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/english/what-i-love-about-this-job-or-learning-the-merits-of-language/.  I have also written on Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream for A112, Turning Points in Culture.