Join Prof. Shannon Gayk (University of Indiana) and Prof. Christina Laffin (University of British Columbia) for an informal lunchtime discussion of their experiences using recreations of premodern pilgrimage routes in Europe and Japan to foster students' engagement with the premodern world.
Shannon Gayk is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Medieval Studies Institute at the University of Indiana. She is a scholar of late-medieval religious writing and culture and teaches widely, including courses in poetry and poetics, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, visual and material culture, and service-learning. She is also committed to experiential learning and occasionally leads courses on walking and pilgrimage (for the student blog from her most recent pilgrimage course, see https://iucamino2019.blogspot.com/).
Christina Laffin is Associate Professor in Premodern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include medieval travel diaries; women’s education and socialization before 1600; poetic practices and waka culture; theories of travel, gender, and autobiography; noh theatre; and comparative approaches to medieval literature. With curators, librarians, and graduate students, she is cocreating an online visual narrative of a seventeenth-century poetic journey to Mount Yoshino https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/jsc/items/1.0418470. In May 2022, she followed the same travel route, collecting relevant sound and images, together with a mountain ascetic (yamabushi).
