What I most enjoy about teaching is sharing ideas. Teaching literature is a challenge and a treat because it is much less about communicating facts than developing interpretations. Preparing for classes, I often discover some gem of an idea I never saw before, even in poems and novels I've read and taught many times. Best of all is when students really get into the readings and come up with fresh insights neither I nor their classmates would have thought of – then we're off!

How do your research and teaching activities intersect? To my surprise and delight, my students find my research interesting. It's partly the content. I've done a lot of work on eighteenth-century medical books, especially anatomy and midwifery. Being born and living in a body, that happens to everyone so everyone is interested. But it is fascinating that what is so universal can be so mysterious. (One of my favourite poems to teach is one by Anna Barbauld, about pregnancy, with the charming title, "To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible".) It is not a matter of what they didn't know then and we do know now, but rather the fact that medical and cultural understanding, even of basic bodily experiences, are intertwined, and change through history. In the Romantic period, arts and sciences were not separate, and the medical writing can get quite poetic!

But it's mainly the books themselves that cause the wide-eyed wonder. It's gratifying to see that, in this digital age, many students are as in love with books as I am. I can combine the benefits of past and present, using digital reproductions, and Waterloo's own collections, to share the experience of working with rare books. The best example is my speciality, William Blake's combination of poetry and visual art in his illuminated books. I can show students high quality digital images online, and beautiful hand-printed reproductions in our library, but I can also describe elements of original Blakes that are inimitable – such as gold leaf, its texture and its glitter. And I can describe the techniques Blake and his wife Catherine used to etch, print, and colour each of these books, so that the pages (in all their variation) come to life as something created by real and unique human beings.

How would you describe your approach to teaching? My teaching methods in themselves are not very unconventional – I like good old fashioned lecture and discussion – and the material I teach is often very traditional. But I like to put the respectable dead writers next to less revered ones and see what happens: it changes our view of both. What causes different kinds of writing to be judged and valued differently – and whether it always has been that way – are intriguing and important questions. Challenging the inviolability of Great Literature helps students respond candidly to what they read, and opens the door to creativity: they're writers too, and writers can experiment and invent, joke and argue, record and imagine... As much as I want my students to imagine themselves into the very different culture of the past, I also want them to sympathize with the human experiences of long dead writers, and see how literature from a few hundred years ago still lives and echoes and is re-created now in popular culture.

What is your main learning goal for your students, particularly as they graduate and set off into the world? The world needs more intellectual encouragement: confidence and interest in one's own creative ideas and considered opinions. This goes hand in hand with my main learning goal, critical thinking. Constantly testing assumptions and prejudices and seeking new perspectives is the best way to keep ourselves and our society on our toes – to keep us honest. I would be proud if my students carried with them the simple conviction that active reading, creative writing, and independent thinking are of great importance, and should be part of the daily fabric of individual and social life.