New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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 of medieval culture and its capacious perspectives on human identity, communal values, and ways of being in the world — topics that are integral to any discussion of autism today.

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. 

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.