Dear members, Dr Helen Young (DECRA Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English University of Sydney), is conducting a survey about teaching and researching in medievalism, and is in search of volunteers. Please see the details below.

I write to ask for your participation in a short survey exploring medievalism in Australian and New Zealand universities. If you currently either teach or research medievalism, have done in the past, or plan to do so in the future, I would be very grateful for 10-15 minutes of your time to answer some questions online.

For the purposes of the survey I have defined medievalism as any research or teaching which examines a post-medieval work – literature, artwork, film, tv, architecture etc – which engages with the Middle Ages as long as the research and/or teaching is focused in some way on that engagement. For example, The Lord of the Rings – novels or films – could be considered a medievalist work, and is relevant to this survey if that medievalism is a topic for discussion in the course, but not if the focus is on, say, the films as adaptations of the novels.

I aim to gain some insights into how, where and why medievalism is researched and taught: in which disciplines, what kinds of courses, at what levels? My hope is to form a broad overview of the field as it exists at present, with an eye to where it may head in future. I will be talking about the results in a roundtable – ‘Medievalism and the Academy Today’ – sponsored by the International Society for the Study of Medievalism at the Kalamazoo ICMS in 2014, and also hope to write an article exploring current and possible future trends.

You can find the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TeachingMedievalism If the link doesn’t work, please copy and paste into the address bar on your browser window. You can give as much or as little information as you choose. If you don’t have time to complete the survey but would like to contribute to the research, you could email me any relevant course outlines on Helen.young@sydney.edu.au. If you do so, please let me know if you are happy to be identified by name, institution, or both, or if you would prefer to remain anonymous when the results of the study are made public.

Many thanks,
Helen