Why study the early modern period? Most academics of earlier periods have encountered this question in one form or another. This question seems especially pressing when it comes to teaching. For many of us, it is our goal to have monographs published by university presses and spend summers conducting research in archives. But the reality is that a large part of our day-to-day impact as scholars is on the undergraduate students we encounter as instructors, usually teens and young adults. This panel is interested in engaging in a conversation about how teaching undergraduate students impacts our scholarship in early modern studies. We will discuss how students “co-author” the early modern period and consider how the perspectives and ideas that our students bring to early modern texts can affect how we as scholars both teach and understand our fields of study. We hope to build on conversations began by those such as Kim Hall, who encourage us to listen to students – especially students of color – when it comes to how they themselves see early modern texts resonating within their own lives. The goal of this panel is to converse as scholars on how and why we present the early modern period to students. We will do this in hopes of reflecting together, as a community of early modern scholars, on the ways that we can make the early modern period meaningful to students by allowing them to “co-author” the texts we teach them. 

Please submit 250 word proposals for 10-minute talks on the topic of students coauthoring to mevinson@iu.edu by April 1. This panel will be submitted to Sixteenth Century Society & Conference '22 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.