Students and Teachers: An Interview with Aranye Fradenburg Joy

Abstract

This piece highlights Aranye Fradenburg’s formidable pedagogic talent as an undergraduate instructor in medieval English studies, and especially Chaucer. After sharing some of the rewards of serving as a teaching assistant during the ‘90s at the University of California at Santa Barbara for a large lecture course on the Canterbury Tales taught by Aranye, I summarize a recent exchange with Berkeley professor Maura Nolan, who experienced Aranye undergraduate training first-hand during the 80s, when Maura was a student at Dartmouth. I then turn to the centerpiece of this contribution, my interview with Aranye on August 5, 2022, in which she comments on both the thinking that informed her UCSB undergraduate pedagogy and the lessons she gleaned as both a student and as a teacher of literary, cultural, and historical criticism.