Jonathan Hsy

"Bans O' Killing" by Louise Bennett

An audio recording of "Bans O' Killing" by Louise Bennett, performed by Aisha Ricketts.

Chaucer adaptations in the classroom

Modern adaptations can transform the way students read Chaucer. These classroom activities pair The Canterbury Tales with contemporary poetry, performance, and translation to help students explore how race, language, identity, and belonging shape both medieval texts and their modern reinterpretations.

Language, race, and Chaucer adaptations

A reading list for teaching Chaucer through modern adaptations. This list focuses on scholarship for reading and understanding Chaucer from a premodern critical race studies lens, including global Chaucer adaptations to help students explore how medieval texts continue to inform questions of identity, power, and belonging.

Chaucer's Englishes

Jonathan Hsy traces how a humble 14th-century London dialect became the "standard," and what Chaucer, a Jamaican poet, and a 2025 executive order all reveal about who gets to belong.

Teaching The Wife of Bath's Tale through adaptations

Chaucer's most outspoken pilgrim gets three modern makeovers: an animated film, a spoken-word performance, and a poem staged in a London market. Jonathan Hsy shows how these adaptations open fresh classroom conversations about gender, power, and justice.