Jennifer Paxton and The Teaching Company

I’ve been a Teaching Company groupie for several years, taking courses on Greek history, Shakespeare’s kings, and how to listen to and enjoy great music. They’ve all been outstanding. Imagine, then, my joy and astonishment on Christmas when my daughter,Jennifer, presented us with a course in English history from the time of King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest––taught by her! (See her bio below) All I knew of this project, however, was a mention she made a few years ago of having done a trial lecture for The Teaching Company. Never another word did she utter until she laid the finished product in my hands on Christmas. Are my buttons bursting? As Sarah Palin would say, You betcha! My advice is to get the DVD version. Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest – Taught By Professor Jennifer Paxton, Ph.D., Harvard University.

Dr. Jennifer Paxton is Professorial Lecturer in History at Georgetown University, where she has taught for more than a decade, and Visiting Assistant Professor of History at The Catholic University of America. The holder of a doctorate in history from Harvard University, where she has also taught and earned a Certificate of Distinction, Professor Paxton is both a widely published award-winning writer and a highly regarded scholar, earning both a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and a Frank Knox Memorial Traveling Fellowship. She lectures regularly on medieval history at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and has also been invited to speak on British history at the Smithsonian Institution and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. Professor Paxton’s research focuses on England from the reign of King Alfred to the late 12th century, particularly the intersection between the authority of church and state and the representation of the past in historical texts, especially those produced by religious communities. She is currently completing a book, Chronicle and Community in Twelfth Century England, that will be published by Oxford University Press. It examines how monastic historians shaped their narratives to project present polemical concerns onto the past.