Collaborative Humanities Research and Pedagogy

This edited collection of essays brings together scholars across disciplines who consider the collaborative work of John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, philologists, medievalists and early modernists, cryptologists, and education reformers. These pioneers crafted interdisciplinary partnerships as they modeled and advocated for cooperative alliances at every level of their work and in all their academic relationships. Their extensive network of intellectual partnerships made possible groundbreaking projects, from the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940) to the deciphering of the Waberski Cipher, yet, except for their Chaucer work, their many other accomplishments have received little attention. Collaborative Humanities Research and Pedagogy not only surveys the rich range of their work but also emphasizes the transformative intellectual and pedagogical benefits of collaboration.  

Katherine Ellison is Professor of English at Illinois State University, USA. She is author of A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals (2017) and Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (2014),and co-editor of A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers (2020) and Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Defoe (2017). Ellison has published widely on cryptology and its intersections with the humanities.  Susan M. Kim is Professor of English at Illinois State University, USA. She is co-editor of A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers (2020) and co-author of This Language, A River: A History of English (2017) and Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013), winner of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists biennial Best Book award (2015). Kim has published widely on Old English literature and the history of English.