By Gardner Rees '25
Dr. Allie Gamble.
In his introductory interview with the Radar, Dr. Allie Gamble, College Prep’s newest member of the English Department, shares his views on the universal and individual dichotomy of literature and his personal approach to teaching.
Dr. Allie Gamble was hired this summer to replace departing English faculty member Alicia Mosley. Dr. Gamble holds a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Stanford University, an MPhil in Comparative Literature from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in Italian Studies from University College London.
Dr. Gamble’s academic work focuses on “the novel, masculinity, marginality, feminist and political philosophy, writing for others, and reading for oneself,” particularly in 19th and 20th century literature. He describes his wider interests as including “science and speculative fiction, modernism, romanticism, the epic, art and transgression, marginality, heroism and individuality, and genre studies.”
Dr. Gamble also has significant experience teaching, including as the director of a language school and ESL (English as a second language) instructor. At Stanford, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses on global contemporary cinema, modern Italian literature and culture, and Italian language. Dr. Gamble speaks English, Italian, French, and German. At College Prep, he teaches English II as well as the seminar, Kindred Spirits.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Radar: Tell us about your background and childhood.
Dr. Gamble: I’m from Europe I guess—England specifically. I was born in London, then moved to Brussels, then back to England, then off to Rome—that's where I got my football team from and my obsession with ruins and such—and then back and forth. Vienna was the last city I lived in outside of the UK as a young teenager. My dad worked for the British Government in the Foreign Office so we moved around a lot. He’s a big linguist and I also really loved growing up in different cultures and learning different languages—it's a lot of what I still really enjoy doing. I like talking to people so the more languages I can speak the wider range of people I can speak to.
I went to boarding school in the UK for high school at Winchester College. It’s the oldest high school in the UK, founded in the 14th century. It is very posh, very traditional, all-boys, and an interesting experience culturally and anthropologically. I am delighted to be in a completely different atmosphere here at CPS—the differences speak well to this place.
Radar: Did you play any sports at Winchester College?
Dr. Gamble: Yeah. At our school we had our own sports which is kind of a classic feature of all the really old posh English schools. Actually Rugby is named after the Rugby School where it was invented. We had our own version of football called Winchester College football. If you’ve ever seen the movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks, there is this scene where a bunch of animals play football and someone gets injured every three minutes and nobody knows the rules. That was pretty much my experience with the sport—nobody knew the rules and it was very complicated.
Radar: What subjects interested you in high school?
Dr. Gamble: English. English, literature, history, languages—the humanities. In the UK we can specialize at 16 so I haven't been in a maths class since. I was delighted to be able to just go with what I was really into. But yeah, it was the humanities.
Radar: What drew you to Italian Studies rather than literature as an undergraduate?
Dr. Gamble: It's hard to say because it was such an impulsive decision. One thing to bear in mind was that, because I already spoke Italian, I didn’t have to study the language so I was able to just study the culture and literature. The way I saw it was that I really liked studying literature, I really liked studying Italian, and I really liked studying Italian art, literature and culture. So why not just study what I like doing already, which is studying literature in Italian.
I think psycho-analyzing myself a little more, there is a part of me that has always cherished the personal relationship I had with Italy when I came back from England because it was something that was my own: this is why I never changed my football team—I’m still a Roma fan no question about it. But yes, it was because it was something of my own—a way of relating to myself, and that is how I perceive reading a lot of the time—as reading for oneself.
Radar: Do you find anything unique about Italian Literature?
Dr. Gamble: I would say that in general, what I really like about literature is that it is pretty universal. But both universal and specific in that it is interpersonal and inter-relational with myself.
Because of my primary associations, I want to resist answering that question a little bit because I feel like ascribing too many specific qualities to an entire literature tradition risks losing that sense of all books being essentially an opportunity to discover yourself and to discover another person. That being said, Italian culture has particularities and one of the things I really love about the Italians and their relationship with literature and culture is that they really do take pride in it. And I think they have an affection for it that at least when compared with the UK, with exception to Shakespeare and maybe a few others, isn’t as strongly felt. It can get a little bit sentimental sometimes, and it can get a little bit provincial sometimes, but I think that in general just really loving your own national culture or your own national cultural objects can be a very powerful thing. I appreciate that Italians really love talking about Italian literature.
Radar: A lot of your work has been around marginality and masculinity in literature. How do different literary traditions express masculinity, marginality and feminism?
Dr. Gamble: In terms of masculinity, I tended to focus more on specific historical moments than necessarily on national divides. So I find the way in which masculinity is represented in a crisis of masculinity in the early 20th century in Europe as particularly fascinating. You see that a lot in literature in writers such as Thomas Mann and James Joyce. But you also see it in the politics and the culture more generally: I mean, obviously women are coming into the world in a way that up until then, men didn’t have to reckon with. But also, just so much is changing with man’s relationship with nature, culture, and with history, and it is all really destabilizing for this old archetypal idea of what masculinity entails. And I think that literature is such a fascinating place for exploring that problem because so often the great characters of literature are these flawed, slightly middle of the road individuals—at least in our modern literature. Heroic, epic literature has a slightly different set of characters, but from Quixote onwards, in novels, it's very often one of these slightly compromised, disappointed individuals.
I got into feminism from an academic standpoint from looking into masculinity. I began researching it more and more mostly to try to find answers to my questions about why I feel such tenderness towards these weak, often rather unlikeable male characters in these novels, and I found the answers mostly in feminist philosophy from the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Radar: What drew you to study French literature, language, and culture?
Dr. Gamble: There are several more profound answers, but honestly I just found the language easier to speak and learn.
From an academic perspective, a lot of the interlocutors that I was interested in exploring with what I was reading in English and Italian literature were French. Decadent writers, symbolist writers—it's really fun to read Baudelaire in French. Marcel Proust is one of my favorite writers—talking about these great sprawling sentences, like Melville, Proust is up there for his ability to write in metaphor that lasts for pages.
Radar: Earlier, you mentioned “reading for oneself.” What does that mean for you and how does it incorporate into your teaching style?
Dr. Gamble: Well, I think it's hard to phrase in a single way. In part, academic writing looks for snappy titles and so I enjoyed the false imagery of writing for others and reading for oneself. I could have happily inverted it as reading for others and writing for oneself, because in some ways that is closer to how I actually understand the act of reading. I do think that it involves an inclination towards the other—the book wants to be read, the book calls out to be read. One thing I really enjoy thinking about is how dependent these characters are on reading as a form of necromancy—you are raising them up. But it is also a reflection on yourself. It's time spent alone. In the seminar I’m teaching on friendship, some of the students have had these brilliant observations about the ways in which it's possible to be “friends” with the book or with the author. To some extent, to lesser or greater, they are all projections of your imagination. You are using the film of another person's words, but you are the light and you are the screen. And so, in that sense, every character that you read is filtered through you and to suggest some internal social company. I also think it's good for the brain: it chills you out or winds you up—both of which are good things because the brain is an elastic thing.
Radar: What differences have you seen in teaching high school students versus undergrads and grad students?
Dr. Gamble: So far, it's been great because I haven’t had to dilute things very much at all. I think that speaks to how well prepared, how smart, and how generous the kids here are. Perhaps the only major difference I’ve noticed is that the kids here seem to have a little bit more energy and confidence. I really appreciate the intellectual atmosphere here as well. I can ask similar questions and get pretty much as good if not better uptake from the intellectual community both inside and outside the classroom. It's been great.
Radar: How do you approach teaching?
Dr. Gamble: I would say one thing that I would really be heartbroken if I didn’t succeed in conveying is real enthusiasm and love for the basic activities that we do in an English classroom. Thinking with energy and commitment about other people and about oneself, and trying to find precise and sensitive ways to express those thoughts is the basic fabric of being a human being. I want to help teach people how to do that more effectively in practice, but I also think that it is really important to model joy, curiosity, and enthusiasm in doing that: people don’t just see what they want, they see what others love and they want that too—joy, curiosity, and enthusiasm are infectious things. I really don’t want kids to come away from my class and go: “I don’t know why we're doing this. My teacher doesn’t even know we’re doing this.” Always starting from a place of excitement is probably my most important pedagogical tenet. Beyond that, encouraging students to take pleasure in reading and writing, and finding their voice and practicing that—it's a craft, it takes work. Like sailing, it's a craft, it involves labor, but you get to sail out on the sea, you get to harness the wind, you get to see whales, and it's exciting.
Radar: Did you always know that you wanted to teach? What drew you to teaching?
Dr. Gamble: I think I always knew that I wanted to get any opportunity I could to have conversations about books, and the classroom is where I got to do that most often. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to go to grad school and talk to people as much as I could. But the thing about writing academic work is that it is quite lonely. Writing is a conversation with oneself, but that's pretty slim company some of the time. I prefer being in a classroom. I also liked the idea of discussing more universally accessible texts, and a lot of the time in academia you end up working with relatively niche texts, putting you only in conversation with a small circle of specialists. Whereas here, I get to work with texts like 1984, which is an awesome pace for me. I also really like coming up with my seminars where I get to explore essential, huge topics like friendship—it's a dream.
Radar: How would you design an advanced English seminar?
Dr. Gamble: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it. I’m very interested in how literature can both represent and stage human relationships, so friendship was something that I was already thinking about before I even knew that I would get it. I was thinking about framing it down the lines of friendship versus rivalry, and I’ve found ways to sow seeds of rivalry into my friendship seminar.
For the future, I find metaphors just fascinating: the most essential human genius is connecting things and creating indirect connections is awesome. The great 20th century Argentine author Luis Borges said that: “every word is a dead metaphor.” The linking of two things in every word is an intermediary between ideas and the human brain. I would love to explore that, I think it would be really cool. I think there are creative avenues for it too: talking about ekphrasis in that context or activities where people use the maker space or 3D printers would be fun. The problem is removing nine-tenths of the books—killing your darlings—to produce a reading list that fits reasonably within a semester.
Radar: If you could assign every student at College Prep four books to read over the summer, what would they be?
Dr. Gamble: I think that Fictions by Luis Borges would be one of them. It's a collection of short stories and he is such a wonderfully original writer. It's not a book that I’m usually drawn to—I’m quite a sentimentalist, so I enjoy interpersonal relationships and such—but reading Borges feels like you’re playing 5D chess with someone who actually knows how to play 5D chess; it feels like trying to wrestle someone with eight limbs. He opens doors you didn’t even know were in the house and then takes you into the next room and then there are four more doors. His stories are little machines that he makes move in different ways. Just showing what you can do with an initial logical premise and then telling it as a story, I adore.
My instincts keep telling me to give really pretentious answers because that is what I tend to read, so I’m trying to think of books that wouldn’t be an absolute punishment for a freshman.
I think that The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende was the first book that made me fall in love with a set of characters. She's a Chilean writer and the novel is in sort of a magical realism style.
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino is another magical realist story. It's about an aristocrat in the 18th century who gets into a fight with his parents at around eight and goes up into a tree and promises he will never come down, and then never comes down. He ends up living in an estate in the forest that the tree is in. He has a lover who comes up into the trees with him, it's really fun and fanciful.
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve is a young adult novel, but it has my favorite opening of pretty much any novel. It's just such a wonderful introduction to the world. It's kind of cliché, but it's also kind of incredible: “It was a dark, blustery afternoon in Spring and the City of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried out bed of the old North Sea.” It's just like what the hell is going on. It's set in this post-dystopian world where all the surviving cities have adopted what they refer to as municipal darwinism where they all become locomotive cities on wheels, and they all go around chasing each other around and eating each other to survive. It's such a fun concept, so I would throw that in as a light read.
Radar: To end, what is your favorite book?
Dr. Gamble: Oh gosh. Right now I am getting such incredible pleasure from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
Of all time, I would say maybe Blood Meridian. The way that Cormac MaCarthy writes is just nuts. It's about a man and someone called “the kid” making their way across the South trying to escape this character called “the judge,” who is basically death. It is totally bleak.
I also really love this book called Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo which is very in the vein of these mediocre, bourgeois, 20th century men, just flailing around in their own conscience.
Radar: Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Gamble!
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