Timothy Braun

My teaching is rooted in problem-based learning and experiential design. I treat the classroom as a laboratory for creative risk, where students learn by doing, writing, performing, analyzing, revising. Each course I teach requires students to take an active role in their own creative growth. I guide them through projects that challenge assumptions, frame creative problems, and build collaborative teams. I believe in meeting students where they are, both intellectually and technologically; I regularly use tools like discussion boards, social media, and visual platforms to extend the classroom beyond its walls and into the communities where their stories resonate.

Whether I am teaching playwriting, screenwriting, or creative writing at the introductory level, I aim to design courses that blend theory with practice. I often assign unconventional texts, Albert Camus’ Notebooks, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Bagombo Snuff Box,” or Charlie Chaplin films, not simply for what they say about writing or performance, but for how they model structure, tone, and discipline. Alongside these, I incorporate contemporary models of adaptation, such as the works of Charles L. Mee, as well as classical sources. This cross-temporal, interdisciplinary approach helps students understand that structure is fluid, voice is earned, and art is always in conversation with history.

In directing student work, I focus on ensemble-driven processes and horizontal criticism. My goal is not to shape students into “correct” playwrights or screenwriters, but to help them become more honest, more disciplined, and less wrong in their creative choices. We work together to develop a vocabulary of curiosity, rigor, and respect. I often reference Aristotle’s Poetics, Pixar’s rules for storytelling, and Patton Oswalt’s Montreal Address to help students locate their voices, and more importantly, to understand the context of those voices in collaborative and cultural spaces.

Teaching in a liberal arts environment has shown me that students thrive when challenged to synthesize artistic form with ethical inquiry and personal identity. At St. Edward’s University, I have mentored students from their first year to capstone, and beyond, supporting LGBTQ+, Latino, African American, and first-generation students as they move toward graduate study, publication, or professional creative work. This mentorship reflects my belief that creative writing is not simply an academic subject but a practice of resilience and belonging. As Oscar Hammerstein once said, “Through your students, you will learn.” That is not just a philosophy but the reason I teach.

Signature Courses

Every classroom is an experiment. Some involve plays. Some involve impossible problems. Most involve discovering that the rules are not quite what we thought they were.

The Kobayashi Maru, or The Art of Failure An experimental honors seminar inspired by Star Trek's famously unwinnable scenario. Students investigate failure, resilience, creative risk, and the strange possibility that learning how to lose might be one of the most important things a university can teach.

Slow(ness), or The Paradox of Time Co-taught with artist Alexandra Robinson, this honors seminar asks students to reconsider their relationship with time, attention, and place. Through walking, listening, observation, and creative experiments, students discover what happens when slowing down becomes an act of making.

Playwriting A hands-on exploration of dramatic writing in which students build characters, create conflict, break structures, and discover how stories come alive through performance. From ten-page plays to collaborative experiments, the classroom becomes a workshop where nothing is quite finished until someone else reads it aloud. This course includes an introduction to Fornés technique.

Stage and Screenwriting An exploration of storytelling across theatre, film, and television, examining how narratives change when they move between mediums. Students write, adapt, experiment, and discover that what works beautifully on a stage might be a disaster on a screen, and vice versa.

The Play Is the Thing A first-year seminar that uses theatre, storytelling, performance, and popular culture to investigate identity, community, and the stories we tell about ourselves. Students encounter plays, create original work, and learn that a classroom can be both an intellectual laboratory and a place to belong.

DIY Dramatic and Visual Writing A creative laboratory devoted to building stories across forms, including scripts, visual narratives, and experimental projects. Students explore what happens when the boundaries between writer, performer, designer, and audience begin to disappear.

Austin's Storytelling Culture An investigation of Austin as a living archive of stories, performances, places, and communities. Students explore how a city tells its own story, who gets to participate in that telling, and what happens when its competing narratives collide.

World Building Designed for emerging visual storytellers and game creators, this course explores the architecture of imaginary worlds, from their histories and cultures to their conflicts and unwritten rules. Students learn that a believable world is not simply a place where a story happens, but a place capable of generating stories of its own.

Theatre History I and II An exploration of theatrical traditions across cultures and centuries, from ancient performance to contemporary experimentation. Through creative research, historical investigations, and projects that invite students to steal, adapt, and reinvent theatrical conventions, history becomes something students actively make rather than simply memorize. This leads to The Theatre History Project a growing collection of interactive websites that bring theatrical traditions, artists, and movements from across centuries and cultures to life. Designed as creative laboratories rather than digital textbooks, these experiments invite students to explore, question, and discover that theatre history isn't something we simply study. It's something we continue to make. For each Unit I have built a four-tiered interactive website you can find after this picture of a student during then Commedia dell’arte unit:

Click the title of the unit, and you will be magically transported to the corresponding website

Theatre History I

Unit 1: Who Gets to Write History? Before studying theatre's past, we investigate how history is constructed, whose stories are preserved, and whose performances have been erased from the archive.

Unit 2: Before the Curtain: Ritual, Storytelling, and the Origins of Theatre We explore the relationship between ritual, community, mythology, and performance, asking when storytelling becomes theatre and whether that distinction matters.

Unit 3: Sanskrit Theatre: The Art of Feeling Through Bharata's Natyasastra and classical Sanskrit drama, we discover a theatrical tradition built around emotion, aesthetics, and the extraordinary relationship between performers and audiences.

Unit 4: The Greeks and Romans: Tragedy, Comedy, and the Birth of Spectacle From Aristotle's theories of tragedy to the theatrical entertainments of Rome, we examine how performance became a space for politics, philosophy, laughter, and public identity.

Unit 5: Japanese Noh: Ghosts, Memory, and the Theatre of the Unseen Through Zeami and the traditions of Noh, we encounter a theatrical world where the dead return, memory becomes performance, and silence can speak louder than words.

Unit 6: African Performance: Ritual, Community, and Living Traditions Exploring Yoruba festivals and performance traditions, we investigate how theatre connects communities to ancestors, spiritual beliefs, cultural memory, and the living world.

Unit 7: Medieval Theatre: Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between From Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum to European liturgical drama, we examine how religious performance transformed sacred stories into theatrical experiences.

Unit 8: Mesoamerican Performance: Theatre, Conquest, and Cultural Survival We explore Indigenous performance traditions of Mesoamerica and investigate how theatre became a site of cultural preservation, resistance, and transformation during colonization.

Unit 9: Commedia dell'Arte: Masks, Mischief, and the Art of Improvisation We enter the unruly world of traveling performers, stock characters, physical comedy, and improvisation, discovering how theatrical traditions can survive by constantly reinventing themselves.

Unit 10: Shakespeare's England: Power, Celebrity, and the Invention of a Nation Through Henry V, Elizabethan performance culture, and Shakespeare's growing celebrity, we examine how theatre helped construct national identity, political mythology, and the modern idea of the famous playwright.

Theatre History II

Unit 1: The World Is a Stage: Baroque Theatre, Spectacle, and Power From Molière and French neoclassicism to Spanish Golden Age drama and the elaborate stages of the Baroque, we explore how theatre entertained, challenged, and reinforced the political and social order.

Unit 2: Reason, Revolution, and the Rise of the Individual Through Enlightenment drama, Romanticism, and the revolutionary theatrical experiments of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we investigate how playwrights began challenging authority, tradition, and the rules of dramatic storytelling.

Unit 3: The Trouble with Reality: Büchner, Ibsen, and the Birth of Modern Drama Beginning with Georg Büchner's Woyzeck and moving into Henrik Ibsen's revolutionary realism, we examine how ordinary people, social injustice, and uncomfortable truths transformed the modern stage.

Unit 4: The Art of Doing Nothing: Chekhov, Stanislavski, and Psychological Realism Through Anton Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theatre, we discover how silence, subtext, disappointment, and the things characters cannot say became some of the most powerful tools in modern drama.

Unit 5: Breaking the World Apart: Symbolism, Expressionism, and the Avant-Garde From Alfred Jarry and August Strindberg to the theatrical experiments of Symbolism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, we explore what happens when playwrights abandon realism and invite dreams, nightmares, and the unconscious onto the stage.

Unit 6: Theatre as a Weapon: Brecht, Artaud, and Political Performance Through Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theatre, Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, and other radical experiments, we investigate theatre's power to challenge audiences, confront ideology, and disrupt the comfortable relationship between performer and spectator.

Unit 7: Waiting for Something: Existentialism and the Theatre of the Absurd From Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco to Jean Genet, we enter a theatrical universe where language collapses, meaning becomes unstable, and waiting for something to happen becomes the entire point.

Unit 8: The American Dream Is Having a Nightmare: Modern American Theatre Through Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, and August Wilson, we examine how American playwrights transformed family conflict, identity, race, class, and national mythology into dramatic confrontations.

Unit 9: The Revolution Will Be Performed in a Basement: Off-Off-Broadway and Experimental Theatre, or The Lunitics Have Taken Over the Theatre. No Money. No Problem From the Caffe Cino and La MaMa to the Living Theatre, the Open Theater, and the Wooster Group, we explore how artists rejected commercial conventions and reinvented the possibilities of performance, collaboration, and theatrical space.

Unit 10: Everyone Is Invited (Some Assembly Required): Contemporary, Global, and Immersive Theatre From postdramatic and devised performance to contemporary global playwrights, digital storytelling, and immersive theatre, we investigate what happens when the boundaries between performer, audience, and the world outside the theatre begin to disappear.

You can download my CV here.