Lockdowns, cancellations, transitions to online learning: the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted higher education when it spread worldwide in 2020. Three years later, teaching and research continue to be immensely different from pre-pandemic times, according to scholar Debra Castillo.

“We knew COVID-19 was causing major stress for faculty and students, major fractures in our students’ learning, major challenges in continuing to think about how to engage actively with communities,” said Castillo, the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. “What we did not imagine or suspect was how dramatically the pandemic continues to affect our classrooms and our communities.”

Castillo documents this extended shift in “Scholars in COVID Times,” a volume she co-edited with Melissa Castillo Planas, associate professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY. The book, part of the Cornell University Press series Publicly Engaged Scholars: Identities, Purposes, Practices, brings together a range of texts, from research-based studies to self-reflective essays, reexamining what it means to be a publicly-engaged scholar in the era of COVID-19.

The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with the co-editors about the book. Read the full interview on the College of Arts and Sciences website.