The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning

Nick Monk is Executive Director of the Sheridan Center. In this role he oversees all the operations of the Center and the work of its Directors. Nick provides the link between the Center and the Provost’s Office.

Formerly the inaugural Director of the Center for Transformative Teaching at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where he served from 2019 to 2025, Nick was also a founding member of the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick in the UK and served as its Director from 2016 to 2019. Nick was a Professor in the Department of English at Warwick, and a Courtesy Professor in the Department of English at UNL. He is Affiliated Faculty in the American Studies Department at Brown.

Nick’s first job in higher education was as a postdoctoral researcher in a joint enterprise between Warwick’s Department of English and the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford. From this relationship emerged Open-space Learning, a transdisciplinary pedagogic method focused on embodied, active and experiential learning.

As a literary scholar Nick focuses on the American Southwest. The works of Leslie Silko and the novels of Cormac McCarthy are of particular interest. Other areas in which Nick has taught and/or published are cultural literacy and communication, identity, laughter, and the use of technology to simulate face-to-face experiences in distance learning. With colleagues from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia he co-authored a book on identity and how to teach it titled Reconstructing Identity.

Nick earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and holds an M.A. in Literary Studies from Rutgers University.