Review of Ellen D. Haskell, Mystical Resistance: Uncovering the Zohar’s Conversations with Christianity (Oxford UP 2016), originally published in Speculum 94.4 (2019), 1167–1168.

The Iberian Peninsula during the Latin Middle Ages was home to large populations of Muslims and Jews. During the period we like to call the Middle Ages, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire peninsula was under Christian rule, and Judaism and Islam were officially banned.…[Read more]

IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.

A description of how I employ video games and RPGs, especially open-world online games, to harness student curiosity and foster an interest in research-based assignments in literature and humanities courses. Talk was presented to a K-16 audience with emphasis on K-12 teaching, but assignments work well at 9-12 and undergraduate university levels.

A description of how I employ video games and RPGs, especially open-world online games, to harness student curiosity and foster an interest in research-based assignments in literature and humanities courses. Talk was presented to a K-16 audience with emphasis on K-12 teaching, but assignments work well at 9-12 and undergraduate university levels.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

Exemplaria review essay by Sarah Elliott Novacich of recent books by Simon Gaunt, Jonathan Hsy, and Shirin Khanmohamadi on medieval contact zones.

“Notre-Dame in Jean Fouquet’s Hours of Etienne Chevalier, ca. 1452-52” is a book excerpt of May Spangler’s “Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art,” recently published at Peter Lang. Designed for an interdisciplinary course in Cultural Studies, the book capitalizes on the little exposure liberal arts students have to architecture, and the wid…[Read more]

In the 16th century most of Russia is still a terra incognita with a highly dubious and mostly mythologized geography, anthropology, and sociology. In this article we look at some texts of the Early Modern period – Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605), Peter Mundy’s Travel Writings of 1640–1641, and The Voiages and Trave…[Read more]

A course (MA level) I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, the research for which culminated in my book Freedom Readers (Notre Dame 2011).

This paper links the medieval and early modern production of parchment and paper with modern electronics manufacturing, in order to examine some of the occluded ecological and political dimensions of archival study.

In his fiction, journalism and letters, Dostoevsky recurrently mentions ethnicity of his protagonists. Russians, Poles, Englishmen, Germans, Turks, Greeks etc. never act as individuals with their personal life but rather as ‘carriers’ of some national idea. Amidst the nations represented in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, there are some Jews. The fashi…[Read more]