Current Issue
In this special issue of Text & Type, we present student-authored translations of William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Written in the fourteenth century, the poem follows a searching, dreamlike journey, taking up ethical, political, and deeply human questions that continue to invite reinterpretation across time and place.
Guest editors Michael Calabrese and Katie Rocio Luna bring this text into contemporary focus through a collaborative project rooted in engaged English pedagogy and translingual approaches to writing. Drawing students from across undergraduate and graduate English major courses, the project reflects sustained encounters with the poem at multiple stages of study. Students approach translation as both a critical and creative practice, one that encourages them to connect their studies in medieval literature to their cultural and linguistic identities.
The work collected here demonstrates how students can produce socially grounded scholarship that is at once rigorously analytical and richly imaginative. By reworking a canonical text through their own perspectives and experiences, these student authors are participating in collective inquiry and knowledge making in ways that align with the journal’s commitment to innovation, inclusion, and student-centered approaches to writing.
