UCLA MEMSA Graduate Student Conference:
Pedagogical Approaches to Medieval and Early Modern Studies
The last two decades have seen radical revisions to curricula at universities and colleges around the world. But have curricular changes been accompanied by pedagogical developments? When it comes to teaching, graduate students often learn by doing. By virtue of their experiments and their proximity to the undergraduate curriculum, they are among the most innovative educators on their campuses. The Medieval and Early Modern Students Association at UCLA invites graduate students to share their experience at a conference on June 7 that deals with teaching Medieval and Early Modern material in the undergraduate classroom. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics and lines of inquiry:
- Methodological approaches that lend themselves to Medieval and Early Modern Studies
- Classroom conditions (ideological, practical, technological, social/cultural, financial, theoretical) that shape approaches and assumptions in literary study
- Accessibility of older material to today’s undergraduates
- Student-directed learning and the canon
- The learning goals of an historical curriculum
- Presentism and productive anachronism
- Reception history and the critical heritage
- Challenges and opportunities of teaching older material
- Textual criticism and the literary archive
- Digital approaches and 21st-century technology in the Medieval and Early Modern classroom
- Surveying the survey course
- Transformative pedagogy and Medieval and Early Modern studies
- Creating dialogues across the curriculum
- Performance studies
- Synthesizing research and reading with other undergraduate disciplines
- Seminar learning vs/and lecture learning
- Teaching writing in the Medieval and Early Modern studies
- Translation and multilingualism (teaching in translations vs. original languages)
- New Historicism and student learning
- Politics and pedagogy (teaching race, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern studies)
- Theory in Medieval and Early Modern studies
We welcome abstracts from a variety of fields within or adjacent to Medieval and Early Modern studies. While specific teaching techniques are encouraged, we’d like papers that include a broader theoretical and pedagogical scope. Abstracts of less than 500 words for 20-minute papers should be emailed to memsa.ucla@gmail.com by March 15 with the subject line CONFERENCE ABSTRACT. Papers should be timed to less than 20 minutes.
