Professor Gabriel Egan

National Teaching Fellow 2014 Professor Gabriel Egan is Director of the Centre for Textual Studies in the School of Humanities at De Montfort University. He is entirely paperless in all his teaching and research activities and pioneers electronic techniques in the study of English Literature. He has built and made freely available for all teaching and research purposes computer models of the theatre for which Shakespeare wrote (the 1599 Globe) and the printing machine from which his works were first published - a wooden hand press. Gabriel has also made available a large collection of digital materials including an interactive map of early modern London, a smartphone app and a hour of documentary film, collectively called Shakespearean London Theatres (ShaLT). His philosophy is that students at all levels and of all abilities are equally entitled to benefit from academics discoveries. Professor Edward Pechter, retired, from Concordia University, Canada, said: "Egan manages, while still keeping his eye on this professional audience and the graduate students training to enter it, to engage his subjects in a way that makes them immediately meaningful to the interests undergraduates bring to their work. He sees digital media, handled correctly, as a democratising force in pedagogy, levelling the differences between students and institutions that are well-resourced and those that are not." On his personal website Gabriel publishes, by Green Open Access, copies of every publication and conference paper he has produced and he has worked at the forefront of the open access movement in journal publishing and in the creation of institutional repositories. He is frequently contacted by readers of his online materials from overseas thanking him for providing access to what would otherwise be unavailable to them. Comments include: 'I have found all the information on your site very useful and relevant to my study. The series of films give a great deal of detail in a very accessible way. I especially enjoyed the performed excerpts.' (Overseas student, October 2013).