Traveling to Washington, D.C. last week to participate in the "Superstar Lecture Series" produced by The Teaching Company, English Professors William Cook and Donald Pease performed the verbal equivalent of a marathon.
Giving 40 lectures in seven days, they lectured all day in front of a studio audience. Each lecture was different, Pease said. He described the volume of information conveyed during that period of time as equivalent to a term's worth of lectures.
These lectures are part of a continuous video series, which spans a range of academic fields, owned by The Teaching Company.
The company recruits some of the best professors in the country and hires them to record their lectures in front of the company's own audience. The company then sells the tapes and the professors receive royalties.
The Teaching Company recruits professors who are known to have an excellent teaching style as well as scholarly accomplishment, Vice President of Programming at The Teaching Company Tim Dombro said.
"We look for college and university professors that absolutely wow their students," he said.
Pease is a playwright and an internationally renowned literary critic. In 1981, he was awarded the Dartmouth distinguished teaching award.
Cook, the current chair of the English department and former chair of the Afro and African-American studies department, was named the 1989 distinguished teacher of the year by the Dartmouth senior class. He has also appeared in "Who's Who in Education" and "Who's Who in Black America."
Pease described the experience as "a great honor," and he said it shows that "Dartmouth's strength as an institution for the scholar/teacher has been nationally recognized."
"For both Bill Cook and myself, this was a profoundly gratifying intellectual experience," Pease said.
Dombro said The Teaching Company based its selection process on students' course evaluations, as well as "networking and talking to a lot of people."
Cook and Pease's series of lectures is essentially a college-level course on American literary history on video tape.
Their melange of lecture topics combines the classical texts in American literature with those of varying cultures, genders and classes, according to an explanation of the course written by Cook and Pease.
"The course is designed to provide an overview of the literary history of the United States from the Colonial period to the threshold of the modern," they wrote.
Those who purchase the tape will read classics like "The Last of the Mohicans" and "The Scarlet Letter" in addition to others like a newly cannonized version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the less well-known "Life in the Iron Mills" to supplement the lectures.
Cook and Pease wrote that students who follow their series should acquire "an understanding of the remarkable complexity of United States literary cultures."
Cook highlighted the academic importance of discussing new texts.
"It's an interesting question of recovery," Cook said, referring to the non-traditional texts. He noted the "different kinds of conversations you can have when you add texts, many of which were just not available a decade ago."
Cook said it is important to acknowledge newer texts to bring them to the attention of professors as well as students.
"There's a lot of professionals out there who have realized they might have missed a lot of texts," Cook said.
Dombro said the lectures would be marketed towards "life-long learners," those feel they might have missed something during their college educations.
"They're pitched at a general readership," Cook said. "They're not necessarily pitched at a Dartmouth audience."
Pease called the royalties he and Cook will receive a "princely sum.".
English Professor Peter Saccio has also worked with The Teaching Company in the past, Dombro said.
And Cook and Pease may not be the last Dartmouth professors to participate in the series.
"We are looking at some other Dartmouth professors right now," Dombro said.
