M.J. Kidnie has been a passionate advocate of a humanities education for more than 15 years. Students and colleagues speak of her energy, passion and enthusiasm in the classroom and describe her as a “wonderfully dramatic, larger-than life teacher of Shakespearean drama.” Both her learning activities and her assessment methods engage students in performance daily.

The impact of Kidnie’s passion for education reaches far beyond the classroom. Her essays on reading Shakespeare have helped thousands of students at Western and other institutions navigate the challenging language of Renaissance plays, and make 400-year-old texts relevant and meaningful to today’s students.

Working with professor Kim Solga, Kidnie designed a new, interdisciplinary Theatre Studies Program and created a unique, experiential “destination theatre” course which takes students to London, England to attend seminars at the Royal Shakespeare Company, tour archives and theatres, write performance reviews and explore the intersection of place and theatre.

In her role as a graduate development and placement officer, she created a workshop series on professionalization that has been a model for other departments across campus, addressing preparation for both academic and non-academic careers for graduate students in English.

Dr. Kidnie was awarded the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Arts and Humanities Teaching Excellence Award (2012), the USC Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2012-13) and the USC Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence six times for her consistently outstanding performance as a teacher.