We tend to assume that a direct link between teaching and research is inevitably a good thing, but which comes first? Do you teach a course because it bears some relation to your research area, or do you research a topic because you are required to teach it? In a period of increasing specialisation (partly driven by the requirements of the RAE) we are perhaps more likely to give research the priority and to try to keep our teaching, as far as possible, within the same broad area or period as our research.
This can be a very positive experience, both for us and for our students. I am fortunate in that my research area (Shakespeare studies) is popular with students both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. I am currently teaching a new option on 'Hamlet and its afterlife' in the MA on 'Shakespearean Studies: Text and Playhouse' that King's College offers jointly with Shakespeare's Globe, and I could not ask for a more exact fit with my current research which is co-editing Hamlet for the Arden Shakespeare. So far it seems to be working well: I can, for example, offer the students guidance through the very extensive relevant bibliography, and suggest rewarding and manageable topics for their essays and dissertations. In return, I am confident that they will discover things I didn't know about the theatrical, cinematic, critical and cultural afterlife of the play.
But this link is not always so desirable or beneficial. I find when I am teaching Hamlet at undergraduate level that I know it almost too well for the purpose: it is virtually impossible for me to imagine what it must be like to read the play for the first time, and I am capable of becoming impatient with students' perfectly reasonable desires to discuss topics which have for me become tedious through over familiarity. I am in danger of teaching to my own interests at the expense of theirs.
From this point of view, there is much to be said for teaching outside one's research area and even for sharing the students' experience of reading a text at high speed the night before the class! Moreover, I know many colleagues who have allowed their teaching to lead or to redefine their research. This has happened, for example, in relation to women writers: the pressure to include some women on many period-based courses has resulted in the discovery of new research topics by people who were not necessarily in favour of this kind of expansion of the canon in the first place. Similarly, the pressure to include 'theory' in our teaching has made many of us see (and then write about) old texts in new ways.
I think then that the 'either/or' implication of my title is misleading: although current rhetoric gives research priority, there is productive traffic in both directions: this isn't a one-way street.
