Medieval Studies Faculty
Members of the Executive Committee
- Nicholas Paul, Director
- M. Christina Bruno, Associate Director
- Christopher Cullen
- Sarit Kattan Gribetz
- Matthew McGowan
- Thomas O'Donnell
- Brian Reilly
The Center for Medieval Studies is committed to:
- Teaching students about the religious, racial, ethnic, geographical, and cultural diversity of the Middle Ages
- Encouraging students to conceive of the medieval past as being in active dialogue with—and as sophisticated and complicated as—the cultural, social, political, and religious systems of our own day
- Empowering students to acquire the knowledge and disciplinary tools to combat racism and the misappropriation of the medieval past
To adapt the mission statement of Fordham University's School of Arts and Sciences: we seek to foster rigorous and creative study of the past for the common good.
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Andrew Albin, Dept. of English; Medieval Studies; Medieval Studies Undergraduate Chair 2016-2019 (Ph.D., Brandeis; LMS, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies). | Late medieval English literature, drama, and culture; aurality and sound studies; manuscript studies; historical phenomenology.
Selected Publications: Richard Rolle’s Melody of Love: A Study and Translation, with Manuscript and Musical Contexts (2019); “Canorous Soundstuff: Hearing the Officium of Richard Rolle at Hampole,” Speculum 91.4 (2016); “Listening for canor in Richard Rolle’s Melos amoris” in Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe (2015); “The Prioress's Tale, Sonorous and Silent,” The Chaucer Review 48.1 (2013); “Aural Space, Sonorous Presence, and the Performance of Christian Community in the Chester Shepherds Play,” Early Theatre 16.1 (2013).
Current Projects: “The Sound of Rollean Lyric,” an essay theorizing Richard Rolle’s understanding of the capacities of the sonorous lyric through his vernacular epistle Ego Dormio, for What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? eds. N. Watson and C. M. Cervone. “The Manuscript is an Instrument and We Must Play,” a short monograph developing theoretical frameworks and methodological tools that reconceive the medieval manuscript as an interactive sonorous instrument. “Singing Angels, Sounding Self: Hearing Canor in Late Medieval England,” a monograph examining the diffusion of Rollean angelic song as textual matter, spiritual praxis, social politics, and meaningful aural experience during the English late Middle Ages.
Featured Stories: Albin's Undergraduates Produce Innovative Website; Sound Studies Scholar Andrew Albin
Susanna Barsella, Dept. of Languages and Cultures; Comparative Literatures; Medieval Studies (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins ). | Medieval Italian literature; philosophy of work; Dante; Boccaccio; Petrarch; Renaissance Humanism.
Selected Publications: “Boccaccio, i tiranni e la ragione naturale,” Heliotropia (2015-16); “Petrarch and Boccaccio’s Bucolics: a Pastoral Dialogue on Poetry” in Boccaccio Veneto. Settecento anni di incroci mediterranei a Venezia (2015); “Ars and Theology. Work, Salvation, and Social Doctrine in the Early Church Fathers,” special issue of Annali di Italianistica (2014); “The Scriba and the Sculptor. Art of Poetry and Theology of Work in Dante’s Commedia,” in New Voices in Dante Studies, special issue of Dante Studies CXXXI (2013-14); The Humanist’s workshop: essays in Honor of Salvatore Camporeale, co-ed. with F. Ciabattoni, special issue of Italian Quarterly (2012); In the Light of Angels. Dante's Angelology and the Role of Beatrice in the Divine Comedy (2010); editor of a section in Artes Renascentes; member of the Editorial Board of the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America (EBDSA); referee for Heliotropia (the Journal of the American Boccaccio Association); referee for article submissions to Italianistica, journal of the University of Pisa.
Current Projects: Giovanni Boccaccio: the Humanist Educator (forthcoming). Lectura Boccaccii. Day 9, co-ed with S. Marchesi (forthcoming 2020). An article titled “The Sacred and the Artifice of Illusion. A Reconsideration of Boccaccio’s ‘Realism’ in Decameron I,” in Categories of the Decameron.
Scott Bruce, Dept. of History (Ph.D., Princeton). | Monasticism; hagiography; medieval reception of the classical tradition.
Selected Publications: The Penguin Book of Hell, ed. (2018). The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, ed. (2016). The Relatio metrica de duobus ducibus: A Twelfth-Century Cluniac Poem on Prayer for the Dead, co-ed. and trans. with C. A. Jones (2016). Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet: Hagiography and the Problem of Islam in Medieval Europe (2015). Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition (c. 900-1200) (2007).
Current Projects: a book entitled The Lost Patriarchs Project, treating the reception of Greek patristic authors in the medieval Latin tradition; another, Cluniac Nights: Miracles, the Devil, and the Dead in Twelfth-Century Monasticism, on Abbot Peter the Venerable’s De miraculis; and The Penguin Book of Dragons (forthcoming from Penguin Classics in 2020).
Elizabeth Comuzzi, Dept of History, (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles), social and economic history; women, family and demography; urbanization, artisanal labor and guilds; notarial culture; the Mediterranean; the Crown of Aragon/Catalonia
Selected Publications: “Mediterranean Trade in the Pyrenees: Italian Merchants in Puigcerdà 1300-1350” (forthcoming, 2021 in Pedralbes); "Guild formation and the artisanal labour market: the example of Castelló d’Empúries, 1260-1310" (forthcoming, 2022 in Journal of Medieval History).
Current Projects: Dr. Comuzzi is currently working on a monograph on the economic development of the Pyrenean town of Puigcerdà from 1260-1360, which examines the development of this town and its surrounding region around the time of the “situation of 1300” when the European economy transitioned from widespread growth towards prolonged recession, and on an article on women's participation and representation in notarial acts.
Christopher M. Cullen, SJ, Dept. of Philosophy (Ph.D., The Catholic University of America) | Bonaventure; Alexander of Hales; Augustinianism; Thomism; medieval political thought; medieval metaphysics.
Selected Publications: “The Metaphysical Center: Philosophical Foundations in Bonaventure,” in Deus summe cognoscibilis: The Current Theological Relevance of Saint Bonaventure (2018); “ Alexander of Hales,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy (2018); “The Thomism of St. Ignatius and the Spiritual Exercises: Predestination, Physical Premonition, and the Sovereignty of Grace," in Thomism and Predestination (2016); "The Doctrine of Analogy among the Thomists: A Debate Renewed," Nova et vetera (2014); "Bonaventure's Philosophical Method" in Companion to Bonaventure (2012); "Bonaventure on Nature before Grace," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2010).
Current Projects: The Discovery of Being: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on Thomas Aquinas, co-ed. (forthcoming 2019). “Bonaventure’s Aesthetic Imperative: Pulcherrimum Carmen” and “Alexander of Hales on the Divine Ideas.”
Brian Davies, Dept. of Philosophy (Ph.D., King’s College London) | Philosophy of religion; Aquinas; Anselm.
Selected Publications: Thomas Aquinas's 'Summa Contra Gentiles': A Guide and Commentary (2016); “Aquinas on What God is Not,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements (2016); “God,” in The Cambridge Companion to the ‘Summa Theologiae’ (2016); Thomas Aquinas's 'Summa Theologiae': A Guide and Commentary (2014).
Current Projects: Dr. Davies is currently working on the first English edition of Aquinas's ‘Quodlibetal Disputations’ (based on the critical Leonine text), with Turner Levitt. The book will be published in 2019 through Oxford University Press. Additionally, Dr. Davies edits the OUP series on “Great Medieval Thinkers.”
Robert Davis, Dept. of Theology (Ph.D., Harvard University) | Medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality; medieval scholastic theology; hermeneutics and Biblical interpretation; gender and sexuality; theories of affect and emotion.
Selected Publications: The Weight of Love: Affect, Ecstasy, and Union in the Theology of Bonaventure (2016); “Speech and Sense in Meister Eckhart’s Liber Parabolarum Genesis” Medieval Mystical Theology: The Journal of the Eckhart Society (2015); “Hierarchy and Excess in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum” Journal of Religion (2015).
George E. Demacopoulos, Dept. of Theology (Ph.D., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). | Late-Ancient and Medieval Christian History; East and West; asceticism, papacy, war and violence.
Selected Publications: Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First-Man of Rome (2015); The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity (2013).
Current Projects: Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (forthcoming). Dr. Demacopoulos has recently been installed as the first Meyendorff/Patterson Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies. Along with Aristotle Papanikolaou, he recently received $610k in a pair of grants for a five-year project investigating Orthodox Christianity and Human Rights.
Emanuel Fiano, Dept. of Theology (Ph.D., Duke University) | Syriac and Coptic traditions; history of Christian-Jewish relations in Late Antiquity.
Selected Publications: “Adam and the Logos: Aphrahat’s Christology in Demonstration 17 and the ‘Imponderables of Hellenization,’" Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum (2016); “The Construction of Ancient Jewish Christianity in the Twentieth Century: The Cases of Hans-Joachim Schoeps and Jean Daniélou,” Patristic Studies in the Twenty-first Century: Proceedings of an International Conference to Mark the 50th Anniversary of the International Association of Patristic Studies (2015); “The Trinitarian Controversies in Fourth-Century Edessa,” Le Muséon 128 (2015); "From ‘Why’ to ‘Why Not’: Clem. Recogn. III 2-11, Fourth-Century Trinitarian Debates, and the Syrian Christian-Jewish Continuum,” Adamantius 20 (2014); Syriac Encounters: Papers from the Sixth North-American Syriac Symposium (2011), co-ed.;The History of the Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa, co-ed. (2010).
Current Projects: An article-length examination of the ‘theory of names’ developed in the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, and a study of Shenoute’s dealings with Judaism.
Featured Stories: Dr. Fiano in the Faculty Spotlight.
Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Dept. of Theology (Ph.D., Princeton). Ancient and medieval Judaism; rabbinic literature; Jewish-Christian relations; time and calendars; women and gender; biblical interpretation; religious polemics.
Selected Publications: "A Matter of Time: Writing Jewish Memory into Roman History," Association for Jewish Studies Review (forthcoming); "Between Narrative and Polemic: The Sabbath in Genesis Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud" in Genesis Rabbah: Text and Contexts (forthcoming); "Pregnant with Meaning; Women's Bodies as Metaphors for Time in Biblical, Second Temple, and Rabbinic Literature" in The Construction of Time in Antiquity (forthcoming); "Take to Heart these Instructions: The Shema in the Second Temple Period, a reconsideration," Journal of Ancient Judaism (2015); Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity, co-ed. (2013); "Jesus and the Clay Birds: Reading Toledot Yeshu in Light of the Infancy Gospels" in Envisioning Judaism (2013); "Rabbis and Others in Conversation," Jewish Studies Quarterly (2012); "Hanged and Crucified: The Book of Esther and Toledot Yeshu" in Toledot Yeshu Reconsidered (2011).
Current Projects: A monograph on constructions of calendrical and ritual time in rabbinic sources, and a project on the use of imagination in the study of late antiquity.
Fordham News: "Scholar Takes Unvarnished Look at Jewish Texts"
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Susanne Hafner, Dept. of Languages and Cultures, German (Ph.D., University of Hamburg). | Medieval German literature and culture; Arthurian literature; codicology; gender.
Selected Publications: "Of Monsters and Men: The Power of Female Imagination in Les Quatre Sohais Saint-Martin," in Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux, ed. H. A. Crocker (2006); "Erzählen im Raum: Der Schmalkaldener Iwein," in Visualisierungsstrategien in mittelalterlichen Bildern und Texten, ed. H. Wenzel and C. S. Jaeger (2006).Maskulinität in der höfischen Erzählliteratur (2004).
Current Projects: a monograph on Virgilian Masculinities: Medieval Readings of the Aeneid, an article on the Middle English Sir Percival of Gales: " 'He ne wiste nother of evyll ne gude': A Prelapsarian Perceval," and an article on Abbot Ellinger of Tegernsee and his autographs. See article on Dr. Hafners research from Inside Fordham.
J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Dept. of Theology; Medieval Studies (DPhil, Oxford). | Heresy and orthodoxy in late medieval Christianity; Lollardy and the Reformation; dissenting movements in the history of Western Christianity; affiliation, identity, and deconversion in contemporary Roman Catholicism; religion and the law.
Selected Publications: Europe after Wyclif, ed. (2017); A Companion to Lollardy (2016); More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church, 2 vols. (2014); Wycliffite Spirituality, ed. and trans. (2012); Wycliffite Controversies, ed. (2011); What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (2010).
Current Project: Remembering Wolsey (forthcoming). A study of the relationship between religion and law in various U.S. denominations, with special attention to religious exemptions from generally applicable laws.
Featured Stories: An article from Inside Fordham on Dr. Hornbeck's research , and an article by Dr. Hornbeck on the "Top 10 Heresies".
Javier Jimenez-Belmonte, Dept. of Languages and Cultures (Ph.D., Columbia University). | Medieval and Early Modern Spanish literature and culture; material culture studies; early modern orientalisms; Cervantes.
Selected Publications: Estetizar el exceso: Cleopatra en la cultura hispánica medieval y del Siglo de Oro (2018); From Muses to Poets: New Approaches to Women and Poetry in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America, co-ed., special issue of Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 22 (2017); “Contra molinos y maestros: la Difesa di Dulcinea de Gherardo Marone y el quijotismo italiano,” Cervantes 35.2 (2015); “History of a Bite: Cleopatra in 13th Century Castile,” La Corónica: Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures 40.1 (2011); “Monstruos de ida y vuelta: gitanos y canbales en la mquina antropologica barroca," Hispanic Review (2011); Las Obras en Verso del príncipe de Esquilache: amateurismo y conciencia literaria (2007).
Current Projects: “Islam in Imperial Spain: New Approaches,” a special issue of eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies, editor, (forthcoming, 2019). “Non est hic: Ephemeral Loci of the Spanish Imperial Memory,” article in progress. "The Land Remembers: Vicente Pérez de Culla's Expulsión de los moriscos (1635),” article in progress."Translating Dante's Mahomet in Late Medieval Castile," article in progress.
Gyula Klima, Dept. of Philosophy (Ph.D., Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest). | Logic and Metaphysics; Anselm; Aquinas; Ockham; Buridan.
Selected Publications: Questions on Aristotle’s ‘On the Soul’ by John Buridan, co-ed. (2018) [1] “Buridan on Knowledge, in Lagerlund, H.” Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy (2018); Questions on the Soul by John Buridan and Others, ed. (2017); “William Ockham” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion (2017); The Metaphysics of Personal Identity, Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, vol. 13, co-ed. with A. W. Hall (2016); Intentionality, Cognition and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy (2015).
Current Projects: A monograph titled "After Form: an essay in historical-analytical metaphysics," for the series Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature.
Kathryn Kueny, Dept. of Theology (Ph.D., Chicago). | Qur'anic studies; medieval Islamic law, literature, and exegesis; Abrahamic traditions.
Selected Publications: Conceiving Identities: Maternity in Medieval Muslim Discourse and Practice (SUNY Press, 2012); "Reproducing Power: Quranic Anthropogonies in Comparison" in The Lineaments of Islam: Studies in Honor of Fred McGraw Donner (2012); The Birth of Cain: Reproduction, Maternal Responsibility, and Moral Character in Early Islamic Exegesis, The History of Religions 48:2 (2008); The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam (2001).
Current Projects: A monograph on how medieval Muslim medicine, both traditional and non-traditional, charts an ethical understanding of human life. See article on Dr. Kueny from Inside Fordham.
Rev. Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, Dept. of Theology (Dr. Theol. Habil., University of Freiburg). | Greek and Latin patristics; Origen; Augustine; fourth-century Trinitarian theology; Paulinus of Nola and early western monasticism.
Selected Publications: “Questions on the Heptateuch,” “Expressions in the Heptateuch,” “Notes on Job,” and “Eight Questions from the Old Testament,” trans., in St. Augustine: Writings on the Old Testament (2016); “‘Faith of our Fathers’: The Fathers of the Church and Vatican II,” in Divine Promise and Human Freedom in Contemporary Catholic Thought (2015); Splendors of the Creed: Meditations by Fr. Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J. (2013); Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, ed. (2001; trans. into Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Korean). Splendors of the Creed. Meditations by Fr. Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J. (2013); Editor of Traditio.
Wolfgang P. Mueller , Dept. of History (Ph.D., Syracuse; Dr Phil Habil, Augsburg). | Medieval legal and ecclesiastical history; history of penance and medicine.
Selected Publications: The Criminalization of Abortion in the West (2012); Huguccio: The Life, Works, and Thought of a Twelfth-Century Jurist (1994).
Current Projects: A Monograph on Canonical Marriage during the Pastoral Age of the Western Church, 1215-1517; and a collection of essays, co-edited with C. R. Lange and C. K. Neumann, Islamic and Western Jurisprudence of the Middle Ages in Comparison, to be published (in German) at Tubingen, Germany, 2018.
Featured Links: Dr. Mueller's website.
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Thomas O’Donnell, Dept. of English; Co-Director of Comparative Literature (Ph.D., UCLA). | Literature during the central Middle Ages; English, Latin, French; religious and community writing.
Selected publications: “Talking to the Neighbours: Language Contact,” in High Medieval: Literary Cultures in England (forthcoming, 2020); Whose Middle Ages? A Reader, co-ed. (forthcoming, 2019); “Monastic History-Writing and Memory in Britain and Ireland: A Methodological Reassessment,” New Medieval Literatures 19 (forthcoming, 2019); “The Gloss to Philippe de Thaon’s Comput and the French of England’s Beginnings,” The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (2017); “Carmen de Hastingae proelio and the Poetics of 1067,” Anglo-Norman Studies 39 (2017 for 2016); “The Old English Durham, the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto and the Unreformed in Late Anglo-Saxon Literature,” JEGP 113 (2014); Editorial board for Viator and for Studies in the Early Middle Ages (Brepols Series).
Current Projects: a book and several articles on changing ideas of the monastic common life in central medieval England.
Nicholas Paul, Dept. of History; Director of the Center for Medieval Studies (Ph.D., University of Cambridge). | Political culture and aristocratic society in high medieval Europe; the history of the crusades and the crusader states of the eastern Mediterranean; historical narratives, commemorative practices, and social memory.
Selected Publications: The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean, co-ed. (2018); "Origo Consulum: Rumors of Murder, A Crisis of Lordship, and the Legendary Origins of the Counts of Anjou," French History (2015); "In Search of the Marshal's Lost Crusade: The Persistence of Memory, the Problems of History, and the Painful Birth of Crusading Romance," special issue of the Journal of Medieval History 40:3 (2014); To Follow in Their Footsteps: Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (2012); Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, co-ed. (2012); "Warlord's Wisdom: Literacy and Propaganda at the Time of the First Crusade," Speculum 85:3 (2010).
Current Projects: Dr. Paul is currently working on a monograph related to the uses of the crusading frontier as a performance space by medieval aristocrats. Together with Professor Wolfgang Mueller he is preparing an edition and translation with commentary of a thirteenth-century text from the Benedictine abbey of Brogne describing the translation of a major relic of the True Cross from the principality of Antioch in Syria to the county of Namur in modern southern Belgium. Dr. Paul supervises several digital humanities projects at the Center for Medieval Studies, including the Oxford Outremer Map, the Independent Crusaders Project, and the Siege of Antioch Project. He is the editor of the Crusader States website
Giorgio Pini, Dept. of Philosophy (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy). | Medieval philosophy; late medieval intellectual history; Duns Scotus; Giles of Rome; Henry of Ghent.
Selected Publications: Ioannis Duns Scoti Notabilia super Metaphysicam, ed. (2017); "Two Models of Thinking: Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus on Occurrent Thoughts" in Intentionality, Cognition, and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy (2015); "What Lucifer Wanted: Anselm, Aquinas, and Scotus on the Object of the First Evil Choice," Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 1 (2013); "Can God Create my Thoughts? Scotus's Case against the Causal Account of Intentionality," The Journal of the History of Philosophy 49:1 (2011); Categories and Logic in Duns Scotus (2002).
Current Projects: a book on selected topics in Duns Scotus's metaphysics; a multi-authored collection of essays on Duns Scotus (as editor); a study on medieval theories of miracles.
Brian J. Reilly, Dept. of Languages and Cultures, French (Ph.D., Yale). | Old French language and literature; science and literature; French theory.
Selected Publications: Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Medieval Interventions: New Light on Traditional Thinking, series edited by S. G. Nichols (2018); “Invisible Translator, Visible Author: Medieval Authorship Verification Through Modern Translation” Digital Philology 7.1 (2018); “Irony and Cognitive Empathy in Chrétien de Troyes’s Gettier Problem,” Philosophy and Literature 41.1 (2017).
Current Projects: “Portentous Forest: An Interactive Translation of Joseph Bédier’s La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’ombre : réflexions sur l’art d'éditer les anciens textes,” Dr. Reilly is currently preparing an article titled “The Phenomenal Grail” on the cognitive science behind the Holy Grail in Old French Literature.
Featured links: Dr. Reilly’s website, Meet a Medievalist: Brian J. Reilly
Nina Rowe, Dept of Art History (Ph.D., Northwestern). | Medieval art, with particular expertise in the high and late Middle Ages of northern Europe; illuminated manuscripts; art and urban life; Jewish-Christian relations.
Selected Publications: “Devotion and Dissent in Late-Medieval Illuminated World Chronicles,” Art History (2018); “Shrugging at the Sacred: Dreams, Punishments, and Feasting in the Daniel-Nebuchadnezzar Cycles of Illuminated Weltchroniken, circa 1400,” Gesta (2018); Medieval Art History Today: Critical Terms, ed., a special issue of Studies in Iconography (2012); The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (2011); “Synagoga Tumbles, a Rider Triumphs: Clerical Viewers and the Fürstenportal of Bamberg Cathedral” Gesta (2006); Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction, co-author with S. Hindman, M. Camille, and R. Watson (2001); Professor Rowe is on the editorial board of the journal Traditio and serves as Vice President of the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), 2017-2020.
Current Projects: Professor Rowe’s current book on illuminated World Chronicles from Bavaria and Austria, ca. 1330-1430 has been supported by year-long fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Cristiana Sogno, Dept. of Classical Languages and Literature (Ph.D., Yale). | Late Antiquity.
Selected Publications: “A Critique of Curiosity: Magic and Fiction in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses” in Cultural Crossroads in the Ancient Novel, edited by B. MacQueen, D. Konstan, M. Futre-Pinheiro (2017); A Critical Introduction and Reference Guide to Letter Collections in Late Antiquity, co-ed with B. Storin and E. Watts (2016); “The Ways of veritas: Historiography, Panegyric, Knowledge,” co-authored with M. Formisano, in Spätantike Konzeptionen von Literatur, edited by J. Stenger. “The Library of the Other Antiquity,” Universitätsverlag (2015).
Current Projects: articles on curiosity in ancient literature; the biography of a Late antique power couple.
Richard Teverson, Dept. of Art History and Music (Ph.D.. Yale University) | Roman Art, Hellenistic Art, the art of Rome's allies, the art and material culture of ancient diplomacy.
Selected Publications and Activities: “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey,” Israel Museum exhibition (Review). Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture (2014); Managing Editor of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture (2013-2015).
Current Projects: Book Manuscript: Connected Kingdoms: The Networks of Roman Allied Monarchies During the First Century CE.
Learn more about Dr. Teverson’s research in his Faculty Spotlight.
Current Projects: Monograph, Women, Multilingualism, and Literate Culture in Late Medieval England ; new graduate course on Piers Plowman and the Poetry of Social Justice in Late Medieval England (Spring 2019).
Featured Links: The French of Medieval England Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Suzanne M. Yeager, Dept. of English; Medieval Studies (Ph.D., Toronto ). | Late medieval literature in England and France; pilgrimage and crusade narrative; social memory and community formation.
Selected Publications: "Racial Imagination and the Theatre of War: Captivity and Execution in the Imaginative Literature of the Premodern Period" in The Blackwell Companion to British Literature (2014); Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, co-ed. with N. Paul (2012); "Jewish Identity in The Siege of Jerusalem and Homiletic Texts: Models of Penance and Victims of Vengeance for the Urban Apocalypse," Medium Aevum LXXX (2011); Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (2008); "The World Translated: Marco Polo's Le Devisement dou Monde, The Book of Sir John Mandeville, and their Medieval Audiences" in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West (2008); "Jerusalem and the Medieval Pilgrimage," in Pilgrims and Pilgrimage: Journey, Spirituality and Daily Life through the Centuries (2007); and articles in Literature Compass and The Chaucer Review.
Current Projects: Articles on the development of pilgrim persona and direct discourse in the writing of twelfth-century Jerusalem travelers; and a monograph on late medieval pilgrimage and performance in the near East.
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Martin Chase, SJ, Dept. of English; Medieval Studies, Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., Toronto). | Old Norse; Old and Middle English; medievalism; myth.
Selected Publications: Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway (2014); A critical edition of “Lilja,” in Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, vol. 7 (2007); Einarr Sklason's Geisli: A Critical Edition (2005); "The Refracted Beam: Einarr Sklason's Liturgical Theology," in Verbal Encounters: Festschrift for Roberta Frank (2005); "True at Any Time: Grundtvig's Subjective Interpretation of Nordic Myth," Scandinavian Studies 73.4 (2001); member of the editorial board of Traditio.
Current Projects: a critical edition of the medieval Icelandic poem Sibt.
Mary C. Erler, Dept. of English (Ph.D., University of Chicago), Professor Emerita | Medieval and early modern literature; women’s reading and book ownership; early English printing.
Selected Publications: Reading and Writing During the Dissolution: Monks, Friars and Nuns 1530-1558 ( 2013); Records of Early English Drama: Ecclesiastical London (2008); Gendering the Master Narrative, co-ed. with M. Kowaleski (2003); Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (2002); Robert Copland: Poems, ed. (1993); Poems of Cupid, God of Love, co-ed. with T. Fenster (1991); Women and Power in the Middle Ages, co-ed. with M. Kowaleski (1988); "Devotional Literature" in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, 1400-1557 (1999).
Current Projects: Dr. Erler is co-editor of the Fordham Series in Medieval Studies, and a member of the editorial board for Traditio. She is currently writing a biographical article on the devotional writer and Syon monk Richard Whitford (d.1538), and developing a new course on medieval ghosts.
Featured Stories: English Faculty Receive Fellowships; Erler Named Distinguished Professor.
Thelma S. Fenster, Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures, Professor Emerita (Ph.D., Texas, Austin). | Old and Middle French Language and Culture, including Anglo-Norman; Christine de Pizan.
Selected Publications: Arthurian Women: A Casebook (repr. 2000); translations with Jocelyn Wogan-Browne of Matthew Paris's History of Saint Edward the King; Paris's Life of St. Alban. Co-editor of the French of England Translation Series.
Current Projects: New editions and translations of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu dAmours and Dit de la Rose, with up-to-date critical essay; with co-editors Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Delbert Russell: an anthology of texts in the "French of England."
Maris G. Fiondella, Dept. of English, Professor Emerita (Ph.D., Fordham). | Medieval western drama/theatre; Japanese Noh drama; Augustine.
Selected Publications: "The Conversion of the Sign in the Towneley Passion Plays," in New Approaches to Medieval Textuality, ed. M. Ledgerwood (1998); "Derrida, Typology, and The Second Shepherds Play,"Exemplaria 6 (1994).
Current Projects:A study of sexual symbolism in St. Augustines language-theory; an article on theatrical signs (e.g. costume, gesture) and Eucharistic theology in the Fleury Easter plays.
Richard F. Gyug, Dept. of History; Medieval Studies, Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., Toronto). | Medieval liturgy; religion and society; codicology; Spain and Italy.
Selected Publications: Missale ragusinum: The Missal of Dubrovnik (1990); The Diocese of Barcelona During the Black Death: The Register Notule communium 15 (1994); ed., Medieval Cultures in Contact (2003); co-editor with Kathleen G. Cushing, Ritual, Text and Law: Studies in Medieval Canon Law and Liturgy presented to Roger E. Reynolds (2004); most recently: "Bibles, Biblical Books, and the Monastic Liturgy in the Early Middle Ages," in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (2011); and editor with Roger Reynolds of the series Monumenta liturgica beneventana.
Current Projects: An edition and study of a liturgical-legal manuscript from Kotor in southern Dalmatia, preparation of a handlist of the Compactiones fond of Montecassino, and participation in a teaching consortium on Pilgrimage Studies.
Joel Herschman, Dept. of Art History and Music, Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, NYU). | Medieval architecture; history of technology; history of photography.
Selected Publications: Co-author with R. Mark, Architectural Technology up to the Scientific Revolution (1993); co-author with C. Robinson, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photographing of Building (1987, 1988, 1990); The Norman Ambulatory of Le Mans and the Chevey of the Cathedral of Coutances, Gesta (1981).
Current Projects: A book on the abbey church at Jumieges with James Moranstern, forthcoming in the series Monuments Historiques de France.
John Ryle Kezel, Director of the Saint Edmund Campion Institute For the Advancement of Intellectual Excellence and Director of the Office of Fellowship Advising (Ph.D., Fordham). | Old English language and literature; Gothic language and literature; Old Norse language and literature; Benedictine and Franciscan studies.
Selected Publications: Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary in New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement (2010); Priests, Prophets, and Kings: Ecclesiology in Newman and Tolkien. Member of the Board of Directors of Flax Trust/USA.
Current Projects:Two books, The Franciscan Crown: A Medieval Devotion and Reading the Rood: An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Language, Literature, and Studies, as well as assisting the Smithsonian Institution with cataloguing and studying their rosary and medal collections. Transcript of his address at the Newman Beatification Conference sponsored by the Tau Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and The Spiritual Family: The Work on October 23, 2010.
Maryanne Kowaleski, Dept. of History, Professor Emerita (Ph.D., Toronto ) | Economic and social history; women and family; urban and maritime history; England.
Selected Publications: Medieval Towns: A Reader (2005); Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge, 2008), co-ed.; Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge, 1995); The Haveners Accounts of the Earldom and Duchy of Cornwall, 1287-1356, ed. (2001); Women and Power in the Middle Ages, co-ed. with M. Erler (1988); and articles on demography, women and work, urban families, shipping, mariners, and marine fisheries. She serves on the editorial boards of Journal of British Studies, Boydell and Brewer's Working in the Middle Ages Series, and the Anglo-American Legal Tradition.
Current Projects: an edition of medieval accounts for a volume on Medieval Maritime London for the London Record Society; articles on "Foreign Immigrants in Medieval Exeter," Gender, Gossip, and the Economy in Late Medieval England, "Black Death Bodies," and a book study, Living from the Sea: An Ethnography of Maritime Communities in Medieval England.
Joseph F. O'Callaghan, Dept. of History, Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., Fordham). | Medieval Spain ; medieval kingship and parliaments.
Selected Publications: The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (2011); Electing Our Bishops: How the Catholic Church Should Choose Its Leaders (2007); Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (2003); Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: A Poetic Biography (1998); Alfonso X, the Cortes, and Government in Medieval Spain (1998); The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (1993); The Cortes of Castile-Len, 1188-1350(1989); The Spanish Military Order of Calatrava and its Affiliates (1975); A History of Medieval Spain (1975); The Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile, trans.(2002); The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola, trans. (1992). Editorial board of En La Espaa Medieval; a former Director of the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham and a past president of the American Catholic Historical Association; Honorary Associate of the Sociedad Espaola de Estudios Medievales.
Current Projects: A monograph, The Last Crusade in the West: Castile and the Conquest of Granada.
Elizabeth Parker, Dept. of Art History and Music, Professor Emerita (Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, NYU). | Romanesque art in England and Italy ; Byzantine art; Gothic art; medieval art and liturgy; women and art.
Selected Publications: The Descent From the Cross: Its Relation to the Extra-Liturgical Depositio Drama (1978); The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning, co-author with C.T. Little (1994); "Architecture and Liturgy," in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church (repr. 2004); The Gift of the Cross in the Liber Vitae, in Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, ed. E. Sears and T.K. Thomas (2002); Editing the Cloisters Cross, Gesta (2006); Modes of Seeing Margaret of Antioch at Fornovo di Taro, in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, ed. E. S. Lane, E. Pastan, and E.M. Shortell (2008). Former editor of Gesta and Traditio; on the editorial board of TEAMS.
Current Projects: Antelamis Deposition in Parma Cathedral.
George W. Shea, Dept. of Classics, Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., Columbia ). | Latin poetry; Late Latin.
Selected Publications: The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus (1997); The Iohannis of Flavius Cresconius Corippus(1998); Delia and Nemesis, The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (1998).
Current Projects: A commentary on the Iohannis of Corippus.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Dept. of English (Ph.D., Liverpool). Linguistic diversity in medieval England, especially the Frenches of England: medieval women’s texts and writing; medieval ‘utility’ writing.
Selected Publications: Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120-1540 (2016); Rethinking the South English Legendaries (2011); Matthew Paris: The Life of St Alban, co-trans. and introduction (2010); Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100-c. 1500, ed. (2009); Matthew Paris: The History of St Edward the King, co-trans. (2008); Women, Households and Christianities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, co-ed. (2005); Saint's Lives and Women's Literary Culture: Virginity and its Authorizations (2001); French of England Translation Series (FRETS), co-ed.; formerly General Editor of York Medieval Press and co-founder Brepols Medieval Women Texts and Contexts series. Speculum Editorial Board.
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John P. McCaskey is an intellectual historian who was Fordham's Medieval Fellow in 2017–18. His research focuses on the history of the scientific method across the full span of Western philosophy. He is currently completing a book on the history of induction from Plato to Popper. He is the editor and translator of Jacopo Zabarella’s On Methods and On Regressus, published in 2014 by Harvard University Press in its I Tatti Renaissance Library. He has taught history and philosophy at Stanford University, Brown University, and Columbia University. Earlier in his career, McCaskey spent several years in the computer industry and since then has contributed to digital humanities projects at Fordham and elsewhere. Much of his work can be accessed at his personal website, www.johnmccaskey.com.
Laura K. Morreale is a cultural historian of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian peninsula whose interests in medieval French-language writing extend to the Crusader States and beyond. Laura received an MA in Medieval Studies from Fordham in 1996 and a PhD in History from Fordham in 2004. She was the Associate Director at the Center for Medieval Studies from 2012 until 2018, during which time she initiated several digital projects, such as the French of Italy and French of Outremer websites and associated web-based studies, including the Oxford Outremer Map and Exploring Place in the French of Italy. Her English-language translation of Martin da Canal's Old French history of Venice, Les Estoires de Venise, appeared in 2009 (Padua: Unipress), and the essay collection she co-edited with Nicholas Paul, The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean, was recently published in Fordham's Medieval Studies Series (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). Among other efforts, Laura is currently working with the Center for Medieval Studies and Fordham University Library to design the Digital Documentation Process, a standardized citation and documentation system for born-digital projects, and has undertaken a new research initiative focused on the concept of Italy in the age of the comune.
Laurel Ann Wilson is a historian of dress and fashion in the Middle Ages. Her work includes studies of the emergence of fashion, the economic and social effects of changes in textile technology, the history and meanings of sumptuary law, and the use of clothing to embody status differences. Her most recent publications include "Common Threads: A Reappraisal of Medieval European Sumptuary Law,” in Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe (Arc Humanities Press, 2017) and “Status,” in A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018). She was involved in putting together the 2018 Fordham Center for Medieval Studies annual conference, “Inside Out: Dress and Identity in the Middle Ages,” and is currently working on an edited volume of papers from that conference on the construction of medieval masculinity through dress.
Marilyn Oliva spent several weeks last winter at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California looking for manuscripts that might help illuminate aspects of medieval English nuns daily lives. Three of the manuscripts she examined are the basis for the projects she is working on while an Affiliated Scholar at Fordham.
Caroline Smith Paul is an historian of the society and culture of the French nobility in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, with a particular interest in attitudes towards and experiences of crusading. The life and writings of John of Joinville are central to her research. Caroline studied history at the University of Cambridge, and completed a PhD in 2004 under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith. After teaching at St. Louis University (2005-2006), she was a Medieval Fellow at Fordham (2006-2007), during which year she worked on a study of Joinville’s ideas about aging and the elderly. That work will contribute to the larger project she is pursuing as an Affiliated Scholar of the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham: a broader study of Joinville’s life and the world he lived in. Her publications (under the name Caroline Smith) include Crusading in the Age of Joinville (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and translations of ‘The Conquest of Constantinople’ by Geoffrey of Villehardouin and ‘The Life of Saint Louis’ by John of Joinville in Chronicles of the Crusades (London: Penguin, 2008). She is currently completing a chapter on ‘Louis IX and the Seventh Crusade’ for inclusion in a multi-volume history of the crusades to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Janine Peterson is associate professor of history at Marist College in New York, USA. She received her BA and MA from Fordham University and her PhD from Indiana University in 2006. Her work focuses on gender, religious, and cultural history of Italy c. 1250-1500, and within these frameworks has also explored the medical traditions of the period. She has published articles on these topics in journals such as Past & Present, Viator, and Traditio. Her work has been supported by an NEH Summer Stipend and grants from the American Historical Association, the American Catholic Historical Association, and Notre Dame University. Janine has served on the awards committee of the Society for Italian Historical Studies and is serving her third term on the executive board of The Hagiography Society. She is currently completing a manuscript on The Struggle for Sainthood: The Papacy, Communities, and Contestation in Late Medieval Italy.
Staff
M. Christina Bruno
Associate Director, Center for Medieval Studies
Christina Bruno has been the Associate Director of Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies since 2018. She completed a History PhD that year at Fordham under Professor Wolfgang Mueller, writing her dissertation on fifteenth-century Franciscan Observants in the province of Bologna as practitioners of canon law. Her current scholarly interests center on medievalism in popular culture, digital humanities and immersive reality and technologies, and place-based learning. She teaches courses on the Franciscan Order and medieval economic ethics and their legacies; movie medievalism; medievalism in New York City; and a Study Tour on the Camino de Santiago. She is currently working on several projects, including an edited volume on teaching medieval law through film (co-edited with fellow Fordham alum Esther Liberman Cuenca and Anthony Perron (Loyola Marymount), forthcoming May 2025 from Fordham University Press; co-directing the Center’s Medieval New York Project, for which she and Katherina Fostano participated in the NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities on the Immersive Global Middle Ages (2021-2022); and an article on restitution for usury in Franciscan Observant thought and in canon and civil law.
Katherina Fostano
Digital Resources Director, Center for Medieval Studies