Neil Gaiman to Teach at Bard College in Spring 2014

We’d like to take a moment to congratulate Professor Neil Gaiman on his new class at Bard College! Gaiman, author of, well, everything, but specifically The Sandman, Ocean at the End of the Lane, and most recently Fortunately, The Milk, will be joining Bard’s Theater and Performance faculty in Spring 2014. He’s already demonstrated his inspirational teacher abilities, and we’re going to assume his ratemyprofessor page comes pre-loaded with a pepper. His first class will be an advanced writing course (you don’t pawn off Freshman Comp on Neil Gaiman) which will “explore the history of the fantastic, approaches to fantasy fiction, and the meaning of fantasy today.” So, in his first work as an academic, he is embracing speculative fiction!

Here’s the Bard College announcement:

Bard College announces the appointment of Neil Gaiman as Professor in the Arts. Gaiman, who joins the College in the spring semester of 2014 as a member of the Theater and Performance faculty, will teach courses across the Division of the Arts and the Division of Languages and Literature. His first course will be an advanced writing workshop exploring the history of the fantastic, approaches to fantasy fiction, and the meaning of fantasy today, taught through the Written Arts Program and the Experimental Humanities concentration. 

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While the college’s press release praises Gaiman’s work for crossing genres, and lists film and television adaptations including Stardust, Coraline, and his Doctor Who episode, it’s still interesting to note that a small liberal arts college is ecstatically announcing a (primarily) genre writer for a genre writing teaching position. Even though genre work has been studied and psychoanalyzed nearly out of existence, the craft of genre writing still doesn’t get much respect. So it leaves us wondering—is this simply a mark of Gaiman’s (Rolling Stone approved) “rockstar” status, or is this a sign that genre work is gaining a whole new level of academic acceptance?

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The appointment of Gaiman to Bard raises many questions, chief among them being 1.) Who’s babysitting your dogs, Neil Gaiman? and 2.) Can we babysit your dogs?