Dr. Matt Heitzman, Assistant Professor of English and ‘Hamilton’ Superfan
What possessed you to create your Literature of the Revolution course?
My dissertation was looking at the ways in which English writers responded to the French Revolution, so I’m really interested in how people write about revolution and how they think about revolution. The idea of this course was born in no small part as result of the Women’s March. That moment in time got me really thinking: When you are in a revolutionary moment, when you are in a moment of significant social change, do you know it? When people were in moments of big change, did they feel it? So I started to imagine a course where we would look back at periods that we now know were those moments of great social change, great revolutionary change, and see what the writers of the time were talking about, how they were processing it, how they were understanding in real time what was happening, and how those times touch upon our contemporary moment.
One of the big selling points of the class was that students got to study the Broadway musical Hamilton. Why Hamilton?
Well, one, I am a superfan. My vague hope is that if we play songs loud enough from it, Lin Manuel Miranda might hear them and come in and visit us. But really, swimming around in his beautiful writing for a couple weeks was a luxury.
In literary studies, we talk about New Historicism a lot. It’s trying to think about the relationship between literature and history and culture. It’s trying to understand why certain texts were produced when they were. I really want to think through that with Hamilton. Stuff explodes in popularity for no small part because it touches a chord with us. It touches into things we want, worry about, or are working through. It’s such a runaway success because Lin’s an incredible writer and the cast is amazing, but it how has it touched on who we are right now?
How do you feel about your Revolutionary Lit class making a Bingo sheet of phrases you commonly say in class?
I’m horrified with it— it has made me so aware of what I say in class. But it is, in a nutshell, what I love about Arcadia and what can happen here. This is not me working with a class of 35 students. We get to know each other. Working with me over the course of 15 weeks in a semester, you get to see my quirks too. I think it’s something that can happen in these wonderfully small classrooms.
