First call for participation in TEAMS sponsored sessions at ICMS 2027

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First call for participation in TEAMS sponsored sessions at ICMS 2027

In 2025, academia in general faced dramatic, profound changes to what was once normal. Grants, international students, DEI—gone. 2026 began with other assaults: demands for names of Jews and campus activists; lowered student-loan caps; shrinking enrollments; further assaults on tenure and academic freedom; accreditation and endowment rules shifting; medieval imagery supporting racism and totalitarianism spreading; and GenAI everywhere. Faculty across disciplines will share how teaching medieval studies/medievalism has changed and/or how their departments and administrations have responded to these challenges—realizing that by May 2027, the world will have changed in ways we can't yet imagine.  What experiences and insights can you share?

Increasingly, universities and states have been impinging upon academic freedom by forbidding the inclusion of specific subjects, deemed "controversial," in syllabi and courses. These restrictions directly affect the teaching of medieval topics, as any consideration of the Middle Ages must account for differences in attitudes and beliefs around religion, gender, sexuality, and race. This panel invites papers from scholars willing to discuss the ways in which their own teaching, or teaching at their institutions, has been impacted by these restrictions. Possible topics include aspects of institutional or political pressure, adjustments made to teaching, and potential modes of resistance.

In this panel honoring Dr. Gale Sigal, we seek papers that address some aspect of her research in female voice and lyric poetry, including but not limited to multilingual lyric, troubadour and trobairitz poetry, pastourelles and the pastourelle tradition, etc. We are particularly interested in papers that offer reassessments of earlier scholarship, genre distinctions, and comparative studies, inspired by Dr. Sigal’s groundbreaking Erotic Dawn-Songs of the Middle Ages: Voicing the Lyric Lady.

In this roundtable honoring Dr. Gale Sigal, we invite participants to share their experiences teaching medieval topics and developing medieval programming on campuses small and large. Inspired by Dr. Sigal’s leadership of TEAMS (including The Once and Future Classroom) and the “Medieval and Early Modern Studies” program at Wake Forest, as well as her long-time support for WFU undergraduates studying at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, participants might reflect on: the challenges of establishing medieval studies programs; developing innovative pedagogy and curricula, study abroad programming, and community outreach; or the role of publishing in medieval studies pedagogy.

  • Playful Pedagogies Clint E. Morrison, Jr., Univ. of Wisconsin–Whitewater, Arielle C. McKee, Wake Forest Univ.

Games offer a unique opportunity for cultural analysis of historical and topical content in popular media. The ludic experience relies upon local interaction between human agents. Yet educators frequently comment that the use of games in classrooms poses significant risks, in terms of time spent and objectives achieved. We invite papers that share approaches that have worked – and not worked – in view of future lesson designs for High School and University instruction. This panel seeks to bridge the pragmatic pedagogical use of games with cultural game theory.

PhDs, by definition, are awarded by research universities, and yet most academic jobs are at institutions where the primary focus is teaching. This roundtable addresses strategies for pursuing research at smaller, under-resourced, and teaching-oriented institutions, where time and money for scholarly endeavors are scarce. Participants will discuss their own experiences, lessons, and strategies for conducting research at teaching-oriented institutions, with the goal of helping scholars pursue meaningful research alongside heavy teaching loads.

While many of us research saints in their medieval contexts, we teach about them in the 21st century. This panel solicits considerations of how we, as teachers, connect medieval saints with modern audiences, i.e. our students. Topics might include comparative devotional practices across time; medieval and modern material culture of saints (e.g. churches, icons, manuscripts); 21st century hagiographic texts and media; and/or classroom exercises that connect modern students with medieval saints. Papers that provide concrete examples of pedagogical practice are encouraged.

This roundtable invites short presentations on how and why to teach sources from any of the nine TEAMS Classroom Texts series published by Medieval Institute Publications for the Teaching Association for Medieval Studies. Editors of volumes (who are of course also instructors) as well as any and all colleagues who make use of TEAMS sources are welcome to share their insights regarding the intriguing aspects of a given source, as well as their approaches to engaging students. A primary objective is to prompt an exchange among panelists and attendees that will explore possibilities across sources and disciplines in medieval studies.