One of the bedrock assumptions of our profession is that there is a necessary relationship between research and teaching: that research, which is often prioritized, shapes teaching and that being trained to research a field has the inherent benefit of training one to teach it. Indeed, for American faculty, job letters, reappointment materials, and performance reviews regularly require that faculty explain the link between their research and their teaching.  And yet, most faculty teach a great deal of material that falls far outside their research interests.  This gap is particularly large for medievalists, whose research, directed toward other medievalists, deals with languages and historical and cultural knowledge that are unfamiliar to many of the students in their classes. What kinds of intellectual and ideological shifts do faculty regularly make as they alternate between these two audiences? What are the kinds of problems, tensions, and contradictions that arise between the domains of teaching and research?

The editors are interested in brief essays (3,000–5,000 words) that explore the relationship between research and teaching from the perspective of teaching. Potential lines of inquiry are as follows:

●      opinions (even polemics!) on the way in which “medieval” is defined in teaching vs. research.

●      personal reflections on the institutional conditions and professional expectations that have shaped this relationship.

●      attempts to redefine research, such as outreach, and the theoretical trends in research that may be more or less helpful in this redefinition (such as post-critique, post-colonialism, or post-humanism)

●      explorations of the crisis of the humanities as a crisis of this relationship

●      how-to’s (and how-not-to’s) for negotiating and navigating the gap between teaching and research.

●      early career and graduate student reflections on how this link appears in graduate training and the job search and what reforms might be necessary.

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 2024 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 Katie Little at Katherine.C.Little@colorado.edu