Interdisciplinary Pedagogy and the Global Middle Ages
Bio
Nancy Haijing Jiang is ascholar of pre-modern English literature with a research focus on the intersection of literary studies, religious culture, economic history, and early globality. She ispassionate about teaching and has taught a range of courses at both Northwestern University and the University of Warwick, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Bible as Literature, the Seven Deadly Sins, Introduction to Shakespeare, History and Textuality, Writing History, Arthurian Literature, Academic Enrichment, and the Global Middle Ages in Literature. In 2019-20, she won the Northwestern Graduate Student Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2022-2023, 2023-2024, and 2024-5, she was shortlisted for the Warwick's WATE Faculty Teaching Awards (Arts and Humanities) and, she is co-winner of the ECLS teaching awards 2023. Nancy is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Case Study Summary
Nancy’s case study focuses on her year of pedagogical experimentation at Warwick in 2024-5 during which she solo-designed and delivered a module on the ‘Global Middle Ages in Literature’: the first of its kind to be taught in Warwick’s English and Comparative Literary Studies department. Drawing on innovative interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches, as well as the global turn in pre-modern scholarship, Nancy demonstrates not only the necessity of teaching the early world with a global view but to do so with an interdisciplinary framework.
Her case study narrates her design and the term of module delivery. First, Nancy lays out the importance of interdisciplinarity in the study and teaching of the global Middle Ages. Her study illuminates that it is only through the breadth of methodologies and knowledge gained through the mindful cohesion of disciplines that the complexity of early globality can be fully appreciated. Second, Nancy examines the challenges to interdisciplinary teaching while delivering a module that is designed specifically for the English literature department, with a predominantly single-degree student cohort. Here she highlights how she consciously wove trans/interdisciplinary approaches in every seminar—from the structure of the assessment and discussion content to the layout of the teaching space.
In the final portion of her case study, Nancy proposes an innovative new module to be delivered for IATL based on the module delivered for ECLS. She entitles it ‘Tracing Global Cities’, with the view of encouraging students to examine four major global epicentres—Xi’an, Ciaro, Baghdad, and Istanbul—that can ‘trace’ the origins of their globality to the pre-modern periods.
This module invites students to study early globality through a framework that is both transhistorical and transdisciplinary. By foregrounding the city itself as the exploratory space rather than particular texts, epochs of time or methodologies, this module encourages students to think not along disciplinary lines but rather to consider the city as a dynamic site of exploration that transcends boundaries of a single discipline. By emphasizing the act of ‘tracing,’ students will see this module as an invitation to explore the narratorial, historical, cultural, and material processes of how a ‘global city’ came to be. Rather than simply studying a city’s past, looking purely at ‘modern issues’ in the city’s present, this module asks students to make the intellectual leap of exploring how the representations of the past and present continually resonate, challenge and inform each other. It does not encourage students to disregard periodization but rather equips them with the tools to challenge the strict boundaries of periodization: of what they think it means to be ‘modern’ or ‘premodern’.