New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

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.

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.

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.

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 access to medieval studies but also foster connections between the past and present through inclusive and socially responsive teaching practices.

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 medieval English literature. 

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 fandom. 

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 certain expressions of feeling. The paper concludes by arguing for the importance of learning to tolerate frustration, and with a redefinition of the reparative as a forward-looking, preparative mode.

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.

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 similarities between Chaucer’s era and today.

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.