The Seminar Directors
Susanna Fein is Professor of English at Kent State University. David Raybin is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. We directed a similar NEH Summer Seminar on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 2008, and it was one of the most stimulating experiences in our many years of teaching. Our other joint projects include editorship of The Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism, two books on Chaucer—Rebels and Rivals (1991) and Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (2009). Each of us has a long-standing commitment to working with school teachers, and as humanists who are drawn to the communal study of poetry, we eagerly look forward to the seminar experience.
Statement by Susanna Fein
Teaching Chaucer is integral to my life, and it has been for thirty years, ever since I studied at Harvard with Larry D. Benson while the monumental Riverside Chaucer was in production under his editorship. I’m now editor of The Chaucer Review and an elected Trustee of the New Chaucer Society. Both these posts set me at the forefront of Chaucer studies. I teach Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to undergraduates every spring term, and to graduate students on a regular basis. Early in my teaching career, in 1989, I co-directed an invigorating four-week NEH-sponsored Institute for High School Teachers on the Canterbury Tales held in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and I have been working with teachers ever since. My most recent graduate classes (on Chaucer, on Arthurian texts) have attracted a good contingent of high school teachers, in part because my department maintains an active M.A. for teachers. In my scholarly life, I conduct research on medieval literary manuscripts and their contents in verse and prose. This past year, I have published extensively on the rare manuscript that contains the works of fifteenth-century writer John Audelay, producing an edition of his poems and carols, and a collection of essays treating his poetry.
Susanna Fein’s CV
Statement by David Raybin
My interest in working with teachers is deep and long-established. In the autumn of 1987, freshly returned from an NEH Institute on Chaucer, I applied to the Illinois Humanities Council for support to organize a springtime conference for school teachers on the Canterbury Tales at Eastern Illinois University. I thought of the conference as a one-time event, a way to share my experiences with a larger community. As it turned out, I have now organized an annual EIU Literature Conference for over twenty years. The distinguishing characteristic of each conference is our focus on understanding, discussing, and appreciating a major author and text. I find my work with teachers to be extremely satisfying and entirely natural, perhaps for the simple reason that I am passionate about teaching. I have been granted EIU’s two principal teaching honors: the Distinguished Honors Faculty Award in 1993 and Faculty Laureate in 2002. Though I occasionally return to the medieval French studies that were the subject of my graduate degree at Columbia, Chaucer is the main focus of my scholarship. I am now editor of The Chaucer Review, and I teach and write about the Canterbury Tales regularly.
David Raybin’s CV
