Desanctifying Scholarship

Classroom Beginnings

Luke Clossey

Concerned about history’s standing among potential students and their future employers, I’ve long been on the lookout for specific, experiential, and marketable life skills to teach in the classroom—and for exciting ways to present them. As a history nerd, though, I don’t have many such skills to share beyond the usual abstractions of analysis and communication.

But there is one skill that I and most other historians share: writing history.

In 2008, I got serious about researching my new book on Jesus and the 15th century. Concurrently, I decided to show students the side of the job that they don’t often see, the research, writing, and revising process. That fall, I taught the first of many “Global Jesus Seminars” at Simon Fraser University, courses that helped me to develop a pedagogical practice I call “publication-informed learning.”

These courses offered a variety of ways to engage with the developing book project. Some years, students delivered presentations and composed essays on primary sources I had found. They also collected their own sources, which we then categorized and sorted collectively. Assigned readings brought scholarly debates—from art history, religious studies, musicology, and other fields—into our classroom, allowing me to formulate my responses even as students worked out their own. In more open-ended creative projects, students applied my medieval-epistemology theoretical apparatus to topics unrelated to Jesus history. One aspiring elementary school teacher even reworked it as a children’s book.

In the first seminar’s first week, even before turning to the Gospels, we read a markedly nonsacred text: a failed grant proposal I’d written. This took some courage, but I was keen for feedback on the proposal itself. More broadly, I wanted to create a course framework wherein subsequent work would be done in the context of my research. I hoped that this would be mutually beneficial: I’d be more invested in teaching as it directly impacted my research, and students would be more invested in learning, contributing as they were to a “real” ongoing research project.

One student in that first seminar was Kyle Jackson, now a history professor himself. His work that semester earned him an A+ and the invitation to travel as my research assistant to India. Over the next two years, we worked together “hunting Jesus” in 10 more countries across Africa and South America.

Failure and Flexibility

Kyle Jackson

That first Global Jesus Seminar was formative for me. Seeing the failure, but also the ambition, of Dr. Clossey’s grant proposal encouraged us students to attempt big things without fear of embarrassment or setbacks. I experimented that semester, in one project raiding my grandmother’s basement for 1960s Sunday-school materials. Today, much of my risk-taking in the classroom—and the big swings I might take in seminar topics—is inspired by that revelation. Failure isn’t a big deal.

Previously in my world history major, I’d encountered primary sources only as printouts or pixels: curated, easy to access, ephemeral, intangible. In the field, I was shown a different reality. Access to historical sources could be denied by histories still unfolding. We arrived in Ecuador amid a nationwide protest of mining on Indigenous lands. Four of our five research sites were closed off behind brass bands, riot police, and problems that really mattered. In Kerala, India, we discovered that the crucifix we sought had been long ago relocated from our destination church to a distant museum. In the rural outskirts of Axum, Ethiopia, we located research treasures in darkened churches, one a cross-legged Jesus sitting with four evangelists represented in animal form yet with angel wings and human fingers—but photography was consistently forbidden. Though the work could be frustrating and sources elusive, failure was to be expected and even embraced, not feared.

I learned to devise work-arounds on the fly. Ethiopian priests unreceptive to church and museum photography were happier, we discovered, with old-school pencils and inks. Using headlamps and a notepad, I pressed my dormant artistic skills into service of a history project. Sometimes our “solutions” were unnecessary. Believing ourselves locked out of a compound in Gondar, Ethiopia, we defaulted to a military-style “boost” up a nearby wall for a photo of a cross at the Mentewab-Qwesqwam Palace—before a puzzled security guard pointed us to the open front door.

These journeys were academically transformative too. In India, I encountered the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP). With Dr. Clossey’s support, my digitization experience led to a major EAP proposal on Northeast India that profoundly shaped the next stages of my career. Today, I take the next generation of history students to local archives to challenge their sense of the immateriality and “ease” of source work. Regional fieldwork expeditions challenge them to read the landscape. I teach recent histories of Asian investment in African infrastructure with photographs snapped between Jesus targets in Ethiopia, of workers’ roadside accommodations scrawled with numbers in Chinese.

My global history classroom is oriented toward experiential learning and undergraduate research because I was once invited to learn and research—and take risks—through global experiences. A decade later, my teaching remains steeped in these early experiences and the idea that, sometimes, the best move to make in a history classroom is to get outside of it.

Development over 15 Years

Luke Clossey

That seminar and research residence in India both proved to be the first of many. Subsequent trips happened intermittently, often benefiting from assistants’ language skills or other familiarities with foreign countries. Ultimately, students traveled with me to two dozen countries. I funded these trips mostly through university and external grants, with my salary covering gaps in that support. Former students also sent back Jesus images from their own travels, as far afield as Iceland and Mongolia.

The undergraduate Global Jesus Seminar series developed alongside our research, as field notes coalesced into drafts that evolved into a manuscript. Narrowing focus as the book found its own, the seminars began on Jesus, then early modern Jesus, then finally 15th-century Jesus with a focus on epistemology. Often, topics zigzagged: from pacifism and vegetarianism to Renaissance art to manuscript critique, with Jesus remaining a protagonist. Sometimes, I had to backpedal: one disastrously theory-heavy opening week overwhelmed all but a few keen students and stymied our following discussions. Shaped by copious feedback, the next year’s seminar began more gently. Attracting grant funding, the art course led to a database of Jesus images for which students—in class and as paid research assistants—developed some of the metadata. The final seminar, held in 2023, had just one required reading: the completed book manuscript.

At the same time, I was following scholarship on research-engaged teaching. The main differences between it and the “publication-informed learning” I had developed were that I had stretched this project across multiple cohorts of students and that I aimed to publish the book that grew across these courses. When teaching a more traditional Introduction to Historical Research course, I found students regularly struggled to find topics or felt overwhelmed by the overall process of writing history. In contrast, seminar students simply had to contribute to a project already in motion. For many of them, adding a few tiles to a larger mosaic was less daunting (and more fulfilling) than painting their own, smaller canvases.

For my own research, the most valuable aspect of these seminars was the consistent feedback I received from successive minicommunities of scholar-readers. Writing for students I knew proved easier than writing for an abstract and imagined audience. Their feedback helped a lot too. Commenting on the manuscript, students were quick (happy?) to flag everything from typos to missing links to confusing passages. Students helped me simplify, even to the point of renaming key terms. Between their responses and their own related research projects, they also gave me some good ideas. The published book cites three student assignments—papers on Melaka’s Islamization, Byzantine ecclesiology, and Eucharistic hashish.

During a break in last year’s last seminar meeting, I received Open Book Publishers’ acceptance of the manuscript. It was a fitting end to the semester and to the final Global Jesus Seminar. One of the most engaged students present was history major Isaac Schoeber, who also is pursuing a minor in print and digital publishing. Between a subsequent directed readings course and a paid research assistantship, he helped shepherd the manuscript into a published book, working on everything from copyediting to creative marketing strategies to cover design.

Revising and Reframing

Isaac Schoeber

I declined my first invitation to take a Global Jesus Seminar in December 2019. Having only just finished my first semester, I found the idea of critiquing a professor’s manuscript daunting and unseemly. I had come to university to learn; Dr. Clossey was there to teach—what could I, or any undergraduate, have to offer? As I know now, I made a mistake. Fortunately, the final seminar gave me a chance to fix it.

Taking other courses for three years helped me to better appreciate everything that this seminar did differently. I had been assigned my instructors’ own work before but had always found it awkward. Of course, my professors always encouraged us to engage critically, but I sometimes felt that we were just being humored. The historians and publishers and peer reviewers had had their say—what was left for us students? My deference to scholarship was normal for an undergraduate, but it was also obstructing my learning. Dr. Clossey’s invitation to “kick the [manuscript’s] tires, go rooting around through the trunk . . . and drive it to unforeseen places” was a shock to my system.

Each week before class, students read, highlighted, and commented on chapters from Dr. Clossey’s manuscript. Noticing small grammatical and syntactical errors reinforced for me that the work was not yet done and could truly benefit from our help. My classroom experience bolstered these feelings—Dr. Clossey jotted down critiques and new ideas eagerly and often during our group discussions. I remember his good-natured exasperation at our group decision that his manuscript was exactly the wrong amount of funny (some of us loved the occasional humor and wanted more, others found it jarring and improper). I realized that even though I could not evaluate his research, I could still meaningfully respond to how persuasively it was presented.

My time as a research assistant on this project further changed my conception of academic writing. Previously, I had seen articles and monographs as complete and authoritative, near sacrosanct. Seeing Dr. Clossey’s drafts helped me to appreciate the research, writing, and editing that goes into academic work. Seeing paragraphs and sections moved around in the manuscript taught me—more concretely than anything else—that structure is variable. Reading and disagreeing with his peer reviewers gave me the satisfaction of thinking that, in some cases, I’d understood the book better than they had.

Over time, I realized that I had absorbed a false distinction between my schoolwork and my professors’ publications. Seeing Dr. Clossey’s manuscript in 12-point Times New Roman—the submission standard for students—I recognized that, in writing history, both students and our instructors are doing the same thing. Scholarly articles are more rigorous, well researched, and revised than undergraduate essays, but both fall within the same genre. In critiquing Dr. Clossey’s work, and seeing him change it in response, I stopped enshrining scholarship and came to respect it instead.

These realizations helped with my future coursework too. The semester after the seminar, I was struggling with an article that I’d hoped to cite for an upcoming paper. Claims seemed disjointed and ill considered. Specific arguments were built on vague assumptions. Eventually, I figured out the problem: I just didn’t find it convincing. I wouldn’t have come to this conclusion before taking the Global Jesus Seminar.

Project’s End

Luke Clossey

In Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380–1520, I explain how 15th-century European thinkers embraced messiness. Historians soon followed suit, and today we value it as an indication of authenticity: frank failings in the sources enhance our confidence in them. Developing this book, I came to appreciate how chaotic and undignified historical research could be. In rural Slovakia, we politely asked a local farmer to unlock the village church. He replied that he’d prefer to continue shoveling manure. A church warden in Serbia dared us to defy the prohibition on cameras, warning that supernatural powers would render our photographs murky. Given the messy nature of history writing, it shouldn’t be surprising that my co-authors’ recollections here are linked by frustration and disenchantment.

Hearing about this project, some colleagues worried about the potential for exploitation, which prompted me to reflect, and to consult with students. Others were impressed by the courage involved in being vulnerable, in sharing my dirty academic laundry—a courage born from joy in teaching (and from wanting validation of my rejected grant proposals). Imposter syndrome makes us want to be experts in student eyes. In some ways, this pedagogy flows from the opposite impulse.

This experiment has informed my teaching in other courses too. A discussion question for my upper-division seminar: What should my next book be about? I’ll be taking notes.