Call for papers, Issue 4.1 (March 2023)
The editors at New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession are soliciting essays (3,000-5000 words) that recover and explore a useful but largely invisible history, the continuous (but generally overlooked) conversations between classroom practices and published research. Our interest in this particular topic was prompted by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s recent book, The Teaching Archive (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and we suggest authors take that book as their starting point. We are especially interested in articles that
explore the ways Medieval Studies has been shaped by classroom practices,
identify the ways pedagogical practices at non-elite institutions shape (or have shaped) our field,
consider how classrooms became the laboratory for scholarly innovation (for instance, how did classroom practices advance or contribute to scholarship focused on women authors, racial studies, medievalism, and the global turn in published scholarship?),
rescue, share, and analyze teaching documents of retired, emeritus, or deceased medievalists whose boxes and files of syllabi and teaching notes still exist.
These exploratory topics draw on both The Teaching Archive’s overall argument as well as the book’s chapters on Caroline Spurgeon (who wrote the indispensable 500 Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion) and Edith Rickert (who co-edited an 8-volume edition of The Canterbury Tales as well as compiled the Chaucer Life-Records).
Authors: we are interested in alternatives to the traditional essay. Some possible formats:
a written conversation with syllabi and assignments you have saved from classes you took as a student,
interviews with late-career or retired colleagues at your institution, or
an account of the archives preserved at libraries to which you have access.
New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, an on-line open-access journal for medievalists, seeks to foreground aspects of our working lives that tend to be ignored, undervalued, or forgotten. Because our fundamental purpose is to provide a forum for sharing “brief essays on teaching, service, and institutional environments and cultures geared toward teachers and scholars of Geoffrey Chaucer and his age,” we recognize the importance of understanding and preserving our field’s research, pedagogical, and institutional history. We look forward to reading your contributions to this endeavor.
Essays need to be submitted by 1 September 2022 through our on-line platform. Please see General Guidelines and Guidelines for Authors. As always, we encourage collaborative authorship.
If you have questions prior to submission, please contact the editors at ncs.pedagogyandprofession@gmail.com.