Public-facing scholarship is a foundational part of my scholarly background and identity. Recently, I interviewed the bestselling memoirist Ashley Ford for a public event at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville organized and funded by the Helios Program for Integrated Liberal Arts. This event brought together over 500 first-year students, as well as faculty and community members, to listen to Ford speak on her experiences as a first-generation university student.
As a professor at UW-P, I also make a point to participate in our College of Liberal Arts Faculty Forums, public events designed to bring together faculty, students, and the broader community to foster connections and make faculty research legible to non-academic audiences. In Spring 2024, I spoke on the relationship between English literature, colonial rhetoric, and the scientific revolution. In early Winter 2025, I will discuss how the mass-market romance novel can be instrumental to both scholarship and pedagogy.
I hosted the TRaCE McGill Bicentennial event, “Celebrating McGill PhDs with Three of our Best,” in which I interviewed Martha Crago, the Vice-Principal of Research and Innovation, Yoshua Bengio, a co-recipient of the AM Turing Award, and Juan Sebastian Delgado, a prize-winning cellist, about their PhD experiences, the academic job market, and the value of the doctoral degree. This event was broadcast live on YouTube and was designed to demystify academia for undergraduate and MA students considering pursuing a PhD.
In January 2020, I volunteered to organize and facilitate the “Survival Narratives for the Anthropocene” workshop which brought three McGill doctoral students (myself included) together with liberal arts students at Marianopolis College. The students were given free tickets to see the adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost playing at the Centaur Theatre. Following the show, we engaged the students in a discussion about what Paradise Lost, in both its poetic and theatrical forms, can tell us about the relationship between humans, the environment, and climate change. One central feature of this workshop was to ask students to think about how literature and the humanities can also participate in meaningful climate action. As a result of my participation in this workshop, I was invited as a discussant on a two-part special of the public radio show CBC Ideas hosted by Nahlah Ayad to talk about Paradise Lost and how it speaks to our current political moment. Part 1 is focused on Satan and political rebellion and Part 2 discusses Paradise Lost as a climate change narrative.
In Winter 2018, I participated in a workshop called “Playing for Free – Scenes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” The workshop brought together Shakespeare scholars, Stratford Festival actors, and Ryerson University acting students, and it culminated in a free public performance that combined scenes performed by the professional and student actors with short scholarly interludes. The goal of this performance was to make both quality acting and scholarly knowledge accessible to the wider Toronto community. Together with Paul Yachnin, I published a public-facing essay on the “Playing for Free” workshop in the open-access online journal The Conversation.
Hannah Korell 