What are you currently reading?

• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
  
• I'm With the Band by Pamela Des Barres (it's for research, honest!)
  
• Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin
  
• Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
  
• The Knife Man (a biography of eighteenth-century surgeon & comparative anatomist John Hunter) by Wendy Moore
• Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari (it's for research, honest!)

What are your five favourite texts?

It is obvious that I like British Romantic literature, so I'll cheat and name anything but.

• Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
  
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  
• Classic crime novels, especially Jim Thompson or the Martin Beck books (wish there were more; I've been devouring Le Carré like dark candy)
  
• Anything by Baudelaire
  
• Beowulf

What are the top five texts that you find to be the most useful for teaching?

Useful? Like The Little Brown Handbook or Grammar To Go? Useful isn't usually what I go for (And what could be more exciting than grammar? I'm being serious!)

A few texts that I enjoy teaching that students tend to enjoy too:

• Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion. In many ways a completely impenetrable poem, but once we figure out what, if anything, happened, it makes for some great debates on sex, violence, empirical philosophy, all that good stuff!
  
• Similarly, Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen. One of my favourite books, and, weirdly experimental and hilariously offensive as it is, I think either you love it or you don't know what planet it came from. The students who get it really get it, and the rest of the class looks at us like we must have come from that mysterious planet too. At least everyone learns who Charles Atlas was.
  
• 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti
  
• 'The Nightingale's Nest' by John Clare

What texts have you had the most fun researching?

William Hunter's obstetrical atlas (yes, it's called an atlas) Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus from 1774 doesn't sound like fun, but... the very idea of a sumptuously engraved book of dead pregnant women cut open is fascinating to me. It is strangely aesthetic: one of the illustrations shows a reflection, in the glistening flesh, of the light from the window. It is an enormous tome (I think you'd call it an elephant folio), and the British Library copy is crumbling at the spine, so it makes for a wonderful experience of the materiality of books: the heft of it, and having to stand up to turn the pages; the smell of it, and the dusty mould getting all over my hands and my clothes. Not getting my hands dirty quite the same way the anatomists did...

Looking at, and even touching, original Blakes -- particularly the King's College copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, with its gorgeous, rich colouring, complete with gold leaf -- that was okay!

I'm currently working on an article about Blake and Jim Morrison. Don't think I need to explain why that's fun.

What would you be if you weren't an English professor?

A rock star! Or a poet. Being an English professor was my practical option (ha!)

Click here to view an image of Dr. Connolly on the Faculty of Arts 50th Anniversary website.

Department Of English Language and Literature
University of Waterloo
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