New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

Matt Clancy writes about how the pandemic shaped his career choices on completing his PhD, and argues that the present challenges facing the profession mean that we should reconsider how we define ourselves as medievalists. He affirms that it is possible to finish a PhD in a pandemic and tentatively begin a career, and that an apparent lack of correspondence between experience as a medievalist and seemingly non-medievalist employment diminishes neither his identity as a medievalist, nor his engagement with the field the enforced change from teaching in person to teaching online is well-suited to the skills medievalists have already developed through teaching Chaucer and other medieval texts, since both present a strange version of the familiar.