I am passionate about making literature meaningful to my students. What does it mean to confront Grendel's mother, to go on pilgrimage with the Wife of Bath, or to cross swords with Hamlet? Not all my students are English majors; many need to be persuaded that literature matters. To help them enjoy literature, I rely on techniques that tap into their inner resources and creativity. Performance is a key element in my teaching, since reading a text aloud means interpreting it. But so are class discussions and group projects, which prepare my students to become part of an educated and supportive community. Showing my students how to fold and paginate an octavo made out of a blank sheet of paper is a great start to a lecture on codicology. I am always on the look-out for class materials that provoke the imagination. This means that I often think about teaching when in unexpected places, such as on the top of Vesuvius (where I picked up a piece of calcified lava as a pretext for discussing the gothic landscape in The Italian) or in the middle of Cotswolds (where I purchased a trencher to teach students Renaissance table manners).