Tax Lawyer Turned English Professor Wins Teaching Award
Laurie Shannon learned reading in depth by studying the tax code. Now the teaching award-winner uses those techniques on poetry
Like most Renaissance teachers and scholars, Laurie Shannon has a deep appreciation of poetry and language. But unlike most, she also has a deep understanding of the U.S. tax code.
Shannon, an English professor at Duke since 1996, is a one-time tax attorney who uses her legal training and tax expertise in her teaching and research of Shakespeare, English Renaissance literature, Renaissance political thought and related subjects.
These unorthodox methods, which have generated strong praise from both students and colleagues for years, have just earned her Trinity College's prestigious Robert B. Cox Distinguished Teaching Award.
"She eminently deserves it," English department chair Maureen Quilligan wrote in nominating Shannon for the teaching award. "She has been one of the best for a number of years and at this point she is the very best in English."
Using her exacting legal analytical tools, Shannon said she focuses on dissecting the language of English literature, especially examining the uses, meanings and subtleties of words. Knowing full well just how dry and mundane English can be, she seeks to convey to her students "how rich, crazy and psychedelic some of the texts from the Renaissance are."
For example, Shannon doesn't have her students just read Shakespeare and a few other great authors of the period. She also has them read minor poets, playwrights, popular pamphlets, speeches by Queen Elizabeth, church homilies, tabloid reports of witchcraft trials, accounts of New World shipwrecks and trade and other writings to appreciate the growing beauty, range and rhythm of 16th and 17th century English.
"There is something kind of cornucopian about Shakespeare and the Renaissance," she said, noting the "proliferation of vocabulary" that occurred during that period. Her experience with tax law was valuable because each word had a specific nuanced meaning that had to be read in depth, although it lacks the beauty and rhythm she finds in Renaissance poetry.
As a tax lawyer, "you had to read the tax code as hard as if it were poetry," she said. "Tax law makes you think a different way about the way language works."
Shannon also uses her legal background to focus on the rhetoric in the literature. In teaching Shakespeare and the other great Renaissance authors, she stresses the historical context of the works, exploring the philosophical discussions, political struggles, propaganda battles, royal clashes, moral debates, social mores, New World discoveries and even sexual practices of the day.
"I'm trying to get students to detect the logic of the arguments always being made," she said. "Learning to see them teaches you to make them."
Shannon, who holds a master's degree in English from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Harvard, practiced law for two and a half years in Chicago. While she found the legal and tax work intriguing, she returned to the University of Chicago for her Ph.D. in English and hasn't looked back since.
"Every thought that you could have [in legal work] had to have a billing number attached to it," she said. "What I missed was the opportunity for speculative thinking."
Besides drawing on her legal training, students and faculty say Shannon relies on a quick wit and easy charm to amuse, challenge and provoke. A bit of a Renaissance woman herself, she sees humor as a tool for teaching, particularly when the subject is as demanding as Shakespeare. Indeed, she believes that learning ought to be "sweet and useful," just as teachers did during the actual Renaissance.
"I try to make them laugh as much as I can," she said. "It makes them more open and more at ease." Plus, she noted, "I'm having fun in that classroom. I want them to have fun, too."
Many of Shannon's students describe her as a smart, funny, fast, articulate, passionate, stimulating and eloquent teacher who demands a lot from her charges but gives back even more.
"Her lectures aren't just full of smart ideas; they're full of really impressive ways of articulating smart ideas," said Anna Skorupa, a Duke senior and English major. "She's the kind of professor you are tempted to quote verbatim in your notes because you suspect there is no way you could say it better or more clearly yourself."
"She can, clearly, soothe even the seemingly inevitable ornery student," wrote English professor Marianna Torgovnick in nominating Shannon for her award. "Students see and recognize Laurie Shannon's very special qualities and respond in kind!She makes students feel and do their best."
Written by Alan Breznick
Teaching Awards
The David and Janet Vaughn Brooks Award
The Howard D. Johnson Award
The Richard K. Lublin Award
Naomi Quinn, cultural anthropology
The Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching (Graduate School)
Renan Levine, political science
The Duke University Award for Excellence in Teaching Writing