Recent ncs_pedagogyandprofession items

Developing a Teaching Collection of Manuscript Fragments at a Regional Comprehensive Institution

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This essay shares the author's experiences of developing a teaching collection of medieval manuscript materials at a state school whose Special Collections library is relatively small, recently established, and modestly funded. Focusing on specific tips and strategies for collection development and for using these materials in the classroom, this essay offers practical advice for instructors wishing to provide students with a basic understanding of medieval textuality, and to add a meaningful experiential component to classes in medieval literature.

Medieval Sex Ed: Hermeneutical Injustice and Forms of Resistance in and Beyond the Medieval Classroom

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores the challenge — and importance — of teaching gender- and sexuality-focused medieval studies in the undergraduate classroom. It particularly considers pedagogy in the Southeastern United States and teaching students who come from backgrounds with a strong focus on censoring practical and non-normative knowledge about gender, sex, and sexuality. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice, this essay argues that medieval literature provides a crucial space for students to recognize and resist the silences and distortions surrounding their own sex education. By exploring the inventive, playful, and creative ways that medieval texts approach sex and gender, students learn to see the unjust limits of their own education and are invited to see and explore — through traditional and creative class projects — alternative ways, new and historical, of understanding sex, gender, and sexuality.

Going Local

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explains what happened when I began to pay attention to comics culture in the region where I live. Through conversations with students and with area artists, I learned that a massive printing facility that generated millions of comics and other texts used to occupy the land across the street from my university. In addition to helping me understand my surroundings in a new light, my forays into local history and comics studies have sent me back to medieval studies with a renewed sense of purpose. In response to corporate and institutional pressures to adopt new technologies uncritically, we humanities scholars need to foreground the collaborative processes by which both medieval and contemporary texts are made, distributed, consumed, and revised. We should emphatically and persistently explain why it is important for students — and indeed, for all of us — to communicate fluently, creatively, and independently.

Premodern Perspectives, Disability Studies, and Public Writing

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As part of a cluster of pieces on "the whole medievalist," this essay challanges conventional boundaries between academic and public writing by demonstrating how my scholarly expertise in premodern literature and culture was instrumental to the arguments and ethos of my recent book Right from the Start: A Practical Guide for Helping Young Children with Autism. Specifically, the essay discusses The Ancrene Wisse and The Book of Margery Kempe to reveal how medieval conceptions of rules and social non-conformity inform my writing about autism, understood as a form of life that warrants both a compassionate response from the neurotypical community and structured accommodations that support autistic people in the practice of self-regulation and self-advocacy. Even though Right from the Start does not explicitly say anything about early English writers, the book’s most central insights — and its ethical commitments — derive from my explorations...

Introduction: Who Needs a Whole Medievalist?

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Describes the editors’ and contributors’ various efforts to decompartmentalize our lives as medievalists: both to explore different ways of being a “whole medievalist” in the rapidly-changing landscape of higher ed; and also to consider what we as academic medievalists might have to offer beyond the confines of our fields.

"Being a Whole Medievalist Both Inside and Outside the Academy"

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As the new Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University and the author of The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton (Brown 2026), I am a different kind of medievalist from when I started my career in 2003. The story of that journey is not just about me but also about the massive shifts in our profession.

"Personal Circumstances": Why I Left Academia

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This piece details the author's reasons for leaving her tenured position eight years previously. It argues that the rigid and hierarchical system of tenure no longer serves its purpose of preserving freedom of speech. Using her own experience, the author argues that the tenure system shuts out members of marginalized groups by entrenching labor practices and working conditions that are unfriendly to them.

Introduction: Opening the Conversation on Access

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This issue opens with a reflection on the urgent theme of access in the humanities and continues with essays that address inequities, pedagogy, and global classrooms, alongside creative and experimental contributions that expand the possibilities of teaching medieval studies today.

Students Becoming Participant-Observers in the Arthurian Tradition

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The author presents and critically examines a few strategies to promote learning by doing in an Arthurian Traditions course. The focus is on how to introduce creative writing students to writerly inquiries as a means to read medieval texts, and at the same time, how to introduce critical literary students to creative-criticism. Concepts of the auctor and the process of imitatio become central in analysing the mechanics and craft of texts and of the place for repetition and revision in the literary Tradition. The assessment brief is shared in detail, which tasks students to create an Arthurian text and then to edit that text. Developing editorial skills requires students to become alert to features from punctuation to paratext and ensures critical creativity in developing students to be writerly readers.

Access to Equal Pay

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay examines the gender pay gap among faculty in American higher education. After reviewing her experience with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, the author offers some reasons, having to do with academic culture, for the persistence of the pay gap.

Accessible Futures: On Failure, Inclusion, and the Not-Yet

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This short essay reflects on the incomplete and often inconsistent nature of access in academic spaces. It shows how, despite good intentions, access often fails in practice and argues for more thoughtful, flexible approaches to building accessible futures. The essay concludes with additional suggested reading on the topic of access.

How I Teach: Shenanigans are allowed

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Incorporating thinking pulled from creativity research and comics theory, this essay explores the value of play and creativity in learning environments. The essay is constructed in two parts: the main body is presented in comic form and then followed by a second section containing instructions and relevant worksheets for an adaptation exercise designed for classroom use.

Accessing Videogames for Medieval Studies Course Plans: Four Points of Entry

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From Crowther and Wood's 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure to the top games of 2024, the virtual worlds of videogames have been commonly set in worlds based loosely or closely on European history and literature dated 500-1500 CE. Modern subjects have long instrumentalized the symbolic vocabulary of medieval history and romance for representing to themselves the embodied, affective experience of inhabiting virtual, mediated environments, which videogames have also taken up as one of their major subjects. Studying this medievalism in videogames does not only provide instructors and students with a way of accessing medieval history, but also with a way of contextualizing the importance of that history in relation to a major twenty-first century expressive form. This essay identifies four points of entry for instructors, including the narrative concept of adventure, the interrelationship between videogame death and the gothic, and the lore recorded in the rogue archives of videogame...

Literature, Media, and Medievalism in the Non-Anglophone Classroom: The Case of Taiwan

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Teaching medieval English literature in a non-Anglophone classroom presents challenges, as students are often unfamiliar with the cultural context of medieval Europe. This paper discusses how the subject is taught in Taiwan, highlighting how students in my classroom explore medieval elements in modern media and adaptations as they conduct research on topics of their own choice. Three student-selected topics are shared: the film The Green Knight, the Japanese mobile game Fate/Grand Order, and Arthurian-themed tarot decks. While the analyses of these papers may not be fully developed and mature, they show students’ critical thinking and creativity as they engage with contemporary media. Through these explorations, medieval studies become more accessible and relevant. By sharing this teaching experience, the paper aims to demonstrate how modern media and entertainment can motivate students in the non-Anglophone classroom to think critically and creatively about...

Increasing Accessibility and Access to the Medieval through Open Textbooks

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay considers how open educational resources (OER), particularly open textbooks, can address barriers of cost, representation, and access in teaching medieval literature. Beginning with the adaptation of existing free digital materials, the author outlines the benefits and challenges of curating resources that emphasize disability studies and diverse cultural perspectives. The discussion then turns to the creation of original open textbooks, such as Heritages of Change, which integrate Universal Design for Learning principles and cultural heritage frameworks into first-year writing and literature courses. These initiatives expand the accessibility of medieval content by eliminating financial burdens, embedding multiple perspectives, and offering flexible pedagogical approaches. The essay argues that the labor of developing OER is offset by the ability to provide equitable, inclusive, and up-to-date course materials. Ultimately, open textbooks not only increase student...

On Frustration: Reading The Book of Margery Kempe in the Classroom

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article thinks about the role of frustration in pedagogical encounters with texts. Taking as my case study the frequently frustrating (and frustrated) The Book of Margery Kempe, I ask: Why might this text elicit negative responses from first-time readers? What is so frustrating about Margery Kempe? And to what extent should we—as teachers, students, and scholars—attempt to repair our frustrated feelings about the text? Answering these questions involves some investigation into the much-discussed tension between reading symptomatically or sympathetically, and how we can learn (and teach) a permissibly affective response within the parameters of the discipline. I propose that, in fact, moments of frustration can act as “teaching moments” both for the student and the educator, because they remind us of the ways that the medieval text might elude or vex us, and of the expectations we place upon ourselves, as scholars, to respond in certain ways and with or without...

An Interview with Kim Zarins, author of Sometimes We Tell the Truth

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this interview conducted by Mohamed Karim Dhouib, author and medievalist Kim Zarins discusses her young adult novel Sometimes We Tell the Truth (2016), a contemporary retelling of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The novel reimagines Chaucer’s iconic pilgrims as modern teenagers on a bus trip to Washington, D.C. Zarins reflects on the process of adaptation, such as portraying the Pardoner as intersex—while emphasizing the pedagogical value of retellings in making medieval literature more accessible. She advocates for inclusive approaches to teaching and explains how her own novel has inspired student engagement with Chaucer. The conversation also delves into Zarins’ interactive classroom strategies that help students form meaningful connections with premodern texts. The interview ultimately reveals how creative adaptations and innovative teaching methods can help contemporary audiences access, discover, and appreciate both the striking differences and surprising...

Conversations: Candace Barrington Interviews Patience Agbabi, author of Telling Tales

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Candace Barrington interviews Patience Agbabi about her relationship to Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales.

Afterword: Psychoanalysis across Medieval Studies

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this short afterword, I speculate about two scenarios in other disciplines where thinking through psychoanalytic categories might afford new historical sensitivities. In experimenting with the possibilities of psychoanalysis, I draw examples from fields that are non literary or at most adjacent to literary studies. The provocative contributions to this colloquium, "The Time of Psychoanalysis," showcase the advantages of psychoanalytic perspectives in the study of medieval literature, whether in teaching or in further research. How might we imagine these advantages in other disciplines, and indeed, how might those literary scholars who work inside the frame of psychoanalysis demonstrate its value to colleagues in other linguistic and disciplinary traditions, persuading scholars in other fields to use it?

Introduction: Teaching and Research in Twenty-first-century Higher Education

Mon, 9 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This issue includes two special clusters: “Teaching v. Research,” edited by Katie Little, and “The Time of Psychoanalysis,” edited by Ruth Evans and R. D. Perry. It also includes three essays on teaching and contributions to three of our columns: “How I Teach,” “Conversations,” and “Histories.”

Editors’ Introduction: The Time of Psychoanalysis

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the Introduction to the cluster of essays on The Time of Psychoanalysis.

Teaching The Legal Culture of Icelandic Sagas In a First-Year Writing Seminar

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Reading Icelandic Sagas against a medieval legal background in a First-Year Writing Seminar is a useful way to teach students the bones of academic argument. When the classroom is transformed into a courtroom through re-enactments of the legal struggles at the Althing, all students participate, and some exploratory students sign up for English and creative writing.

Psychoanalysis after Affect Theory: The Repetitions of Courtly Love in Chaucer

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For a time, if one wanted to capture the emotional landscape of late medieval literature, psychoanalysis appeared to be the most acute and persuasive analytic tool. From the subjectivity of courtly love to the identification with a suffering God to the defenses against the pleasures of others and neighbors, psychoanalysis offered illuminating frameworks in startling sympathy with medieval texts. With the ascendance of affect theory and its associated (if varied) attention to the non-discursive, the biological or natural, and the conscious or self-understood, the role of psychoanalysis has become less clear. My essay explores the productive intersections between psychoanalysis and affect theory, and especially Lauren Berlant’s suggestion that we think again about sex and sexual desire as possible sites of individual and cultural transformation. The phenomenon of repetition is a focus shared by psychoanalysis and affect theory, and I propose the reiterative conventions of courtly...

Persistence

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay surveys the continued persistence of psychoanalytic theory and practice over the past decades. It argues that the psychoanalytic understanding of “ambivalence” has been crucial (and underappreciated) in key developments in both affect theory and in the use of psychoanalysis in critical race studies. Such ambivalence, moreover, still has the capacity to prod critical conversations in more nuanced, less antithetical, directions.

Sigmund Freud’s Allegories of Psychic Self-Discipline

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay places Sigmund Freud in a long tradition of allegorists who portray the psyche as self-disciplining. While Freud’s writings on the ego, id, and superego are reminiscent of premodern allegories, however, Freud is considerably less willing than many of his predecessors to encourage conscious self-discipline. Though he conceived of the superego as a disciplinary agent, Freud believed that analysis often calls for “the slow demolition of the hostile superego.” Psychoanalysis, in other words, entails a counter-confession: an intersubjective asceticism through which analyst and analysand discipline the discipliner within. The conclusion posits that the uncanny resemblance between Freud’s allegories and those of his premodern predecessors presents us a pedagogical opportunity to teach our students the long history of psychological allegory and help them appreciate the dynamic complexity of both Freud’s works and the archive of premodern allegory—bodies of writing...

Logistics, Cultural Capital, and the Psychic Zone of Contamination

Mon, 27 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper reads the Man of Law’s Tale at the intersection of logistics, cultural capital, and psychoanalysis. It argues that Custance’s acts of religious observance participate in the late medieval culture of good wifely conduct and private devotion. Conduct is an embodied state of cultural capital in which self-improvement is indistinguishable from self-investment. In Custance’s case, her wifely conduct becomes a racialized cultural capital that she brings to distant lands and effects conversion. Her ship is the space of the Lacanian Imaginary, and her body and flesh are what Anne Anlin Cheng would term a “zone of contamination,” a psychic space in which subjecthood and objecthood are merged. As a form of governance, conduct is an effect of capitalism on the self and the collective. The racialized cultural capital that Custance traffics in, rather than offering any pure and stable technique of self-making, is at best a symptom awaiting analysis.

Teaching my translation of Piers Plowman: The A Version at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA)

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores how I taught, in its entirety, my Piers Plowman: A Translation of the A Version: Revised Edition (Calabrese 2023) for sophomore English majors, who had little or no prior experience with medieval literature. In the required, multi-sectioned English 3000 (called “tutorial”) students focus for an entire semester on one text of the professor’s choosing and read it slowly. No surprise that I choose Piers Plowman in my own translation, for Piers can teach students so much about genre, poetic form, voice, allegory, and a host of other devices and key literary concepts. Plus, its critical tradition and engagement in history are robust and thus perfect for introducing the students to academic research.

Mens, Manus, and Medieval Literature at MIT

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This brief essay describes a few things I've learned pedagogically from students and colleagues in STEM, with examples of how I've brought those perspectives in the classroom. It concludes with some reflections on how those pedagogical experiences have informed my recent research.

The Year of Living Decanally, or Non-Regular Research

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Traditional assumptions about the relationship between research and teaching are challenged by the trend of PhD-holding candidates with research agendas being hired into full-time non-tenure-track positions, jobs that generally lack a research component.

The Secret (Book) History of Dark Academia

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article describes the author's experience teaching the emerging literary genre and internet subculture called "Dark Academia" in the undergraduate classroom. The pedagogical successes and failures of this class take on new meaning when viewed in the context of the author's research on medieval manuscript culture and the reception and circulation of these books after the Middle Ages.

The Development and Significance of the International Anchoritic Society

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The International Anchoritic Society (IAS) celebrated its twentieth year in 2023. Despite its name, the IAS studies all forms of medieval religious reclusion, not just the titular anchorites, and not just within the Christian tradition. Starting in 1998, independently organized sessions at Kalamazoo gradually coalesced into a formal organization, recognized officially in 2003, that has always been inclusive and supportive of forward-thinking scholarship, with many members representing the queer community and medievalists of color.

The Once and Future Relevance of Medieval Studies

Tue, 2 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this essay, I discuss the relationship between my teaching and my scholarship in medieval studies as a lone medievalist at a public regional instituion in the South. I argue that their are many possibilities as well as limitations associated with this role, and I offer several suggestions about how the field as a whole might better reflect those experiences in our publication venues.

Writing a Teaching Book

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Various practical challenges deter scholars from writing single-author teaching books, but such books have particular virtues to offer pedagogy. This article describes some of the choices made in the writing of a teaching book, How to Read Middle English Poetry. It is presented not as a set of final rulings on best practice, but as an account of decisions made, to lift the lid on the work and support the creation of more pedagogical tools in future.

Mind the Gap: On Teaching One’s Research, Or Not

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores some of the difficulties in aligning one's teaching and research priorities when teaching at a small liberal arts college; it then reflects on textual editing for the classroom as one way of synthesizing these commitments.

The End of Chaucer Studies

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The essay explores a few strategies that the author has found effective for combining teaching and scholarship. First, broadly falling under the category of medievalism, adaptations, translations, and popular culture manifestations of medieval texts and authors work well in the classroom and have increasingly gained academic interest and a journal presence. Second, any aspects of digital humanities that one can manage to incorporate into teaching and scholarship benefit both students who need technical skills and graduate students/early-career faculty who may be considering alt-ac (alternaive academic) careers.

Chaucer's Literary Soundscapes in the College Classroom

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Chaucer's poetic works are full of references to sound and music, incorporated variously as part of thematization, characterization, and rhetorical structure. Attending to Chaucer's repeated interest in sound in his poetry allows scholars and students to consider how the field of literary sound studies can be applied to these works, providing another point of access for students as they become acquainted with and interrogate Chaucer’s poetry. For those interested in trying this approach to teaching Chaucer in the college classroom, this essay provides resources for instructors and students, including an overview of the field of literary sound studies, its intersection with Chaucer’s poetry, and two sample activities for use in both undergraduate and graduate courses.

Chaucer, Intertextuality, and Academic Integrity: What Medieval Studies Can Teach Composition and Rhetoric

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Scholars in the fields of medieval literary studies and composition and rhetoric are often separated from each other by their specialization. While knowledge of composition theory is necessary for many medievalists to thrive in English departments, if only with respect to pedagogy, the reverse is not often the case. Yet medieval studies, too, has much to teach critics of composition and rhetoric. In this essay, I describe a lesson on Chaucer’s House of Fame for a first-year composition course. Focusing on how students can look at the poem’s retelling of the story of Dido and Aeneas as an example of source use, I argue that medieval poetry can teach them how to combine sources with original material to create a new contribution to a critical conversation and teach us about our students’ anxieties about citation.

Editors’ Introduction: The Presence of the Medieval Past—Retellings and Social Value