Congratulations to Department of English professor Robert Rouse on being awarded a 2015-2016 UBC Killam Teaching Prize. The Killam Teaching Prizes are awarded annually to faculty members in recognition of excellence in teaching.
Professor Rouse is a very popular teacher whose courses are often wait-listed. Students, some of whom have taken three or more of his courses, enjoy his infectious enthusiasm for his subject. They find him generous in sharing his knowledge, and prompt, thorough, patient and kind in his dealings with them. To help his classes understand the medieval world, he has organized demonstrations of swordplay, brought in a full-sized replica of a pre-Cartesian map, and cooked historically documented pre-modern food. He is skillful at drawing parallels between medieval and contemporary culture, and he draws out the cultural afterlife of medieval texts.
Robert Rouse
I joined the Department of English at the University of British Columbia in 2005 after studying and teaching in the United Kingdom. My own research has been primarily concerned with medieval romance (both Arthurian and non-Arthurian), writing on issues of historiography (in particular post-conquest perceptions of the Anglo-Saxon Past), English national identity, saracens and other medieval others, the law, the medieval erotic, the medieval geographical imagination, and ecocritical approaches to premodern texts. I have published three books and numerous articles on medieval literature and culture, details of which can be found on my publication and research pages. I am currently completing a book on the Medieval Geographical Imagination, in addition to being one of the General Editors (with Siân Echard) of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Medieval Literature (forthcoming in 2017).
Learn more about Robert Rouse»
