Dr. Werstine teaches English Literature in China

Contributed by Cheryl Lu, Communications Intern

Dr. Paul Werstine ‘70, Professor of English at King’s University College, will bring his love of western literature to Beijing University of Chemical Technology (BUCT) for the third time during summer 2018.

This year he will be giving five lectures to the faculty and students at BUCT (one of King’s international partner schools). His topics will include Literature and Culture Studies and a history of literature from about 750 C.E. to present, specifically designed for the second-year students.

Knowing his audiences well, Dr. Werstine plans to put the literature in historical and cultural context. This will allow students to  learn how the culture of a certain period casts its influence on the literature of that time. This is similar to how English literature courses are taught in Canada.

Recalling his former experiences at BUCT, Dr. Werstine described the faculty and students as a “welcoming, hospitable, interested group of people who enjoy the opportunity to have a conversation with somebody with very different experience from them.” He was especially impressed by how well-spoken and widely read the students were.

Dr. Werstine taught western literature to students at BUCT during the summers of 2015 and 2016. In 2015, he gave classes for four days on Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet,” “King Lear,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.” In 2016, he stayed for eight days teaching a variety of texts including short stories by Amy Tan, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner and poems by Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Frost and others. The course concluded with a study of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”.

Dr. Werstine teaches Shakespeare and Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at King’s. He is a General Editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare Edition and was awarded the first Hugh Mellon Excellence in Research Award in 2015. In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.