Call for Papers: Access, Volume 6 2025, edited by Lisa Lampert-Weissig

Medieval Studies cannot survive and thrive unless we create and support access. The pandemic and its aftermath not only underlined problems of access, but also provided us with some possible solutions. How can we, as a profession, ensure that students outside a few well-funded institutions have access to our field? How can we make our field more inclusive both within our own institutions and globally? What prevents students and faculty from studying the Middle Ages and how can these obstacles be challenged? What kinds of projects and collaborations can create and maintain access? 

For this issue we invite brief essays (3,000–5,000 words maximum) that explore the theme of access. 

Potential lines of inquiry are as follows:

• Discussion of projects or organizations that foster inclusive access. These could be, for example, digital projects, but also outreach programs, organizations and collaborative partnerships among institutions. We are especially interested in learning about how such projects were created and how-to’s (and how-not-to’s) for building sustainable programming.

• Strategies and methods of inclusive pedagogies. This pedagogy is not limited to the classroom. It can include the ways that medievalists advocate for the relevance of their field within their own institutions, professional organizations, and communities.

• Personal or general reflections on access and the ways that structural racism, sexism, ableism, and income/resource inequality impede access.

We are also accepting open topic submissions for this issue.

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 15 January 2025 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 Lisa Lampert-Weissig at llampert@ucsd.edu