by Gina Marie Hurley

This year’s graduate manuscripts workshop focused on how to approach teaching with manuscripts while centering access and equity. Participants were asked to consider how they can facilitate student engagement with medieval material culture no matter where they end up teaching. The facilitators, each of whom taught hour-long interactive sessions, demonstrated a wide range of pedagogical techniques and considerations designed to address a diverse audience in terms of background and experience. Vanessa Wilkie led an introductory session on the institutional history of the Huntington, giving participants the chance to explore the exhibition space. The topics of each session were as follows: letting a manuscript and its materiality guide your inquiry (Ma), working with indigenous communities to preserve and protect sacred knowledge and materials (D’Arcens), teaching with digital manuscripts and correcting the editorial record (Whearty), and using a single manuscript to open up the study of medieval books more generally (Brantley). Each session concluded with a synthesis of the pedagogical approach by the organizers, Andrews and Hurley, and the culminating event of the day was a reception and hour-long discussion of how to activate medieval material culture in a range of classrooms. 

Facilitators were Jessica Brantley, Louise D’Arcens, Ruen-chuan Ma, Bridget Whearty, Vanessa Wilkie.

Organizers were Tarren Andrews and Gina M. Hurley.

Additional indispensable support was provided by Matthew Fisher, Alice Fulmer, Kate Ramsey and Vanessa Wilkie.

Sponsorship for this session was generously provided by the Huntington Library, University of California, Los Angeles (Alex Stern, Dean of the Humanities and the Department of English), University of California, Riverside (Archive, Museum, Manuscript, and Print Studies) and Yale University (the Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, the Institute of Sacred Music, and the program in Medieval Studies).