Hundreds of books line the walls of his third floor office, and posters of The Clash and Talking Heads hang above. Casual in a white t-shirt and black pants, Jules Law waits before his Monday class starts.
“I see my mission as a teacher to make better citizens as well as better students,” says Law, who has been a professor at Northwestern for 22 years. Law specializes in Victorian literature, but he also teaches one of the better-known English classes that students urge their friends to take – Introduction to Fiction.
Law attended the University of Toronto for his undergraduate degree. His mother was a high school English teacher, and though he never took her class, he dated one of her students. It was the closest he got to being in her class, he says laughing.
After earning his graduate degree at Johns Hopkins University, he taught at Princeton University before coming to NU.
Law became a professor in the 1980s, when the job market was ripe for English Ph.D’s. He describes the decline of English as a professional field as “very disturbing.” Each year he cautions students who wish to become employed as university professors that the career choice has since become more of a rarity than realistic. “Luckily or unluckily, there are statistics to hide behind, so it doesn’t sound like I’m passing judgment on their abilities, which are usually really first rate,” says Law.
A member of the Northwestern Faculty Honor Roll, Law keeps his students entertained with a mix of pop culture references like music and movie clips in class.
“It’s important to get students to reflect on contemporary as well as historical problems. Popular culture is a way of pointing to that.”
Law says he spends a lot of time thinking about the music for the course.
“If I just imposed my own musical taste, I think I’d just play the same 25 or 30 songs over and over again. I’d just play Led Zeppelin,” he laughs.
Law has two children: a son who recently graduated from Northwestern as a jazz student and an eight-year-old daughter. She is an avid reader who only sometimes takes her father’s advice on what to read.
“She doesn’t like being made to read,” he says. “But if we leave her to her own devices that’s the thing she enjoys the most.”
Not only has he spent time teaching in Central America, but Law also spends his free time cooking and volunteering. He says he’s spent nearly 25 years honing his techniques in Chinese cuisine.
“I have no idea why. It was the cuisine I liked eating most when I was growing up.”
One of Law’s current projects is working on his next book about Victorian virtuality. While his field of study and class provoke many intellectual questions, he’s always careful to teach students the tools of interpretation rather than dictate his own opinion. “I don’t think we look to Dickens or Dostoevsky for an answer about the human mind or human morality,” he says, “But rather to a particularly beautiful expression of some largely irresolvable problem.”
