MEDIEVAL STUDIES - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Professor Emerita of French Literature
- Professor of French Literature
Alice Colby-Hall, Professor of French Literature, received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and, though officially retired, continues to teach courses on medieval French literature and to direct research in this area. Her interests include the Old French epic, courtly romance, the history of the French language, and Old Occitan (Old Provençal) literature. She is the author of The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature: An Example of the Stylistic Originality of Chrétien de Troyes (1965) and of many articles concerning the origins of the epics of the William of Orange Cycle. In 1997, she was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. At present, she is completing a book entitled Guillaume d'Orange et les légendes épiques de la basse vallée du Rhone.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Dale R. Corson House Professor and Dean, Hans Bethe House Program Director
- Corson House Professor and Dean, Hans Bethe House
- Director of the Program
- Director, Medieval Studies Program Associate Professor of Music and Medieval Studies
Hicks is the Director of the Program in Medieval Studies, a member of the Graduate Fields of Classics, Near Eastern Studies, the Religious Studies Program, affiliated with the Carl Sagan Institute, and the House Professor-Dean of Hans Bethe House on Cornell's West Campus. He regularly leads graduate seminars in the history of music theory, medieval Latin literature, Latin paleography and codicology, medieval cosmology, philosophical commentaries, and musical thought in medieval Arabo-Persian cultures, and he teaches undergraduate courses in music history and theory. He is co-editor of the Journal of Musicology, associate editor of the Journal of Medieval Latin, and is on the editorial board of TEAMS and the board of directors of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. He is the co-founder of the History of Music Theory Study Group of the AMS, is on the board of the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the AMS, and serves on the advisory board for Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures (an ERC funded project at the University of Oxford).
Job Titles:
- Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities Emeritus
- Professor of the Humanities
Arthur Groos is Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities, and is a member of the graduate fields of German Studies, Medieval Studies, and Music. In the former, his interests include Arthurian romance, the courtly love lyric, medieval science, early modern city culture, and the Age of Goethe; in the latter they focus on issues of music and culture, text-music relations, and opera, especially Wagner, Puccini, and modern opera. Founding co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal, he is also general editor of Cambridge Studies in Opera (Cambridge University Press), and co-editor of a monograph series on medieval/early modern literature and culture, Transatlantische Studien (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). A co-founder and Vice President of the Centro Studi Giacomo Puccini in Lucca, Italy, he also edits its periodical (Studi pucciniani) and monograph series. He held Guggenheim and Senior Fulbright Fellowships in Munich in 1979-80, and an Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis in Berlin in 2001-02. In fall 2007, he was Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford.
Benjamin Anderson, associate professor of the history of art and classics, studies the visual and material cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and adjacent landmasses, with a particular focus on late antique and Byzantine art and architecture. His first book, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (Yale University Press, 2017), addressed the reception of Greco-Roman astronomical imagery in the Byzantine, Frankish, and Islamic states. It received the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association (2018), and the Karen Gould Prize in Art History from the Medieval Academy of America (2020). He is currently writing The Oracles of Leo: From Byzantium to the Baroque, a study of the Byzantine tradition of oracular images and its reception in early modern Europe. He also publishes regularly on the history of archaeology and the urban history of Constantinople.
Anderson has been David E. Finley Fellow (2009-12) and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow (2019) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and has received fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut). From 2018 to 2020, he was President of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America; he currently serves on the executive committee of the US National Committee for Byzantine Studies (2022-27). At Cornell, he has been Director of Graduate Studies in Classics (2019-22) and History of Art (2022- ).
Job Titles:
- Professor of Romance Studies
At Cornell since 2003, Cary Howie received his B.A. in Literature from Bard College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University.
Cary's writing and teaching tend to put medieval literary and religious sources into conversation with modern practices and preoccupations. In courses such as "On Paying Attention," "On Practice and Perfection," and "The Art of Love," he attempts to give students the freedom to explore aspects of their intellectual and embodied lives that are usually overlooked in more traditional academic settings. He is interested in breaking down familiar boundaries between academic and literary languages, as well as cultivating new ways of asking old questions, especially questions about the body and the soul, in the variously rich vocabularies of English, French, Italian and Latin.
He is the author of essays on medieval gender and sexuality; on the difficulty of letting go; on meditation, mysticism, and saints' lives; and on a range of authors from Rutebeuf to Dante, Marie de France to Shakespeare. He is also the author of three books: Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (Palgrave 2007), Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (with Bill Burgwinkle, Manchester University Press 2010), and most recently Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body (Manchester University Press 2020).
Job Titles:
- Professor of Classics and of Philosophy
- Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters
Charles Brittain is a Professor of Classics and of Philosophy, specializing in ancient philosophy.
His research is primarily concerned with Hellenistic philosophy (especially epistemology and ethics), Cicero, Augustine, and the Platonic tradition from Plato to Simplicius.
David S. Powers (Ph.D., Princeton, 1979) is a native of Cleveland, Ohio and long-suffering fan of the Cleveland Guardians . He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1979 and began teaching at Cornell in the same year. He currently holds positions as a Professor in the Department of Near Eastern, an Adjunct Professor at the Cornell Law School. His courses deal with Islamic civilization, Islamic history and law, and classical Arabic texts, and his research focuses on the emergence of Islam and Islamic legal history. He is founding editor of the journal Islamic Law and Society.
Courses Taught
Introduction to Islamic Civilization
The Search for the Historical Muhammad
Law, Society, and Culture in the Middle East
Qur'an & Commentary
Seminar in Islamic History: The Beginning of Islam 600-750
Theory and Method in Near Eastern Studies
Islamic Law and History
Job Titles:
- Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities
Economie et religion dans l'Antiquité tardive. Edited by Éric Rebillard and Claire Sotinel. Special issue of Antiquité tardive 14 (2006): 15-116.
Job Titles:
- Herbert and Stephanie Neuman Associate Professor and Director of Jewish Studies Program
Jessica Rosenberg's research and teaching examine the literature and culture of early modern England, with additional focus on science and literature, the history of material texts and media forms, and the aesthetic dimensions of everyday life. She is the author of Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), as well as articles on husbandry, hospitality, poetry and plants, and the poetics of practical address. Her writing has been published in ELH, postmedieval, Philological Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book about how small epistemic forms, like knacks, devices, recipes, and techniques, shaped early modern comedy and everyday life.
Kim Haines-Eitzen (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997) is a Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions with a specialty in Early Christianity, Early Judaism, and Religion in Late Antiquity in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her most recent book is Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton University Press, 2022), a project that traces how desert sounds shaped early Christian monasticism and includes field recordings she has made in desert environments. She is the author of Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2000), a social history of the scribes who copied Christian texts during the second and third centuries; and The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity, which deals with the intersection of gender and text transmission (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is a member of the programs in Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, Medieval Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell. To learn more about her recent work and her media appearances, visit her website: http://kimhaineseitzen.wordpress.com
Courses Taught
History and Literature of Early Christianity
Gnosticism and Early Christianity
Introduction to Christian History
The New Testament/Early Christian Literatures
Sound, Silence, and the Sacred
Theory and Method in Near Eastern Studies
Reinventing Biblical Narratives
Sensational Religion
Desert Monasticism
Job Titles:
- Curator and Adjunct Associate Professor
Laurent Ferri currently serves as Curator of the pre-1800 Collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, aka "RMC". Before joining Cornell as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2006, he was "conservateur du patrimoine" at the French National Archives (2000-5). He also taught regularly, especially as Visiting Professor at the Ecole nationale d'administration in Rabat, Morocco, and at the Ecole nationale des chartes in Paris. At Cornell, he is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and a Member of the Graduate Field in Medieval Studies. A former student of Michel Pastoureau, he has authored one book and eighteen articles.
Born in Lyons, the city that received his Italian paternal grandparents, Laurent Ferri knows some French, English, German (which he tends to speak with an Austrian accent since an internship in Vienna), Latin and ancient Greek (which he rarely speaks, indeed), Italian (quite well), and even a bit of Rumanian. An avid pianist and recreational alpinist, he is interested in diplomacy, and collects ties.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Romance Studies, Kappa Alpha Professor in Literature
Job Titles:
- Administrative Manager, Graduate Field Assistant
Job Titles:
- Professor of Judeo - Islamic Studies & Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow
Education
Ph.D., Classics, University of Southern California, 2014
B.A., Political Science and Latin, Vassar College, 2006
Job Titles:
- Professor in Christian Studies
Job Titles:
- Director, Viking Studies Minor / Professor of History
- Professor
Ross Brann studied at the University of California-Berkeley, the Hebrew University-Jerusalem, New York University, and the American University in Cairo. He has taught at Cornell since 1986 and served nineteen years as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Brann is the author of The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, 2002). He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Brann is also the editor of four volumes and author of essays on the intersection of medieval Jewish and Islamic cultures. In 2019 he completed Iberian Moorings: Al-Andalus, Sefarad and the Tropes of Exceptionalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In 2007 Brann was appointed Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and in June 2010 he stepped down as the faculty co-chair of the West Campus House System Council after six years of service as the founding Alice Cook House Professor-Dean. He recently completed Moses Maimonides: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) which will appear later in 2024. In 2023 The Medieval Academy of America elected Ross as a Fellow.
Courses Taught
History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Jews and the Classical Age of Islam
Judeo-Arabic
Theory and Method in Near Eastern Studies
Zionism and its Discontents
Maimonides
Islamic Spain: Culture and Society
The Middle East in the News
Holy War, Crusade, and Jihad from Antiquity to Present
Samantha Zacher received her PhD from the University of Toronto, and taught at Vassar College before joining the English Department and Medieval Studies Program at Cornell. Her research and teaching interests include Old and Middle English literature, with a special interest in poetry, sermons, and biblical literature. She is the author of Preaching the Converted: the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). She has also published two collections of essays: New Readings in the Vercelli Book, co-edited with Andy Orchard (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and A Companion to British Literature, 4 volumes, co-edited with Robert DeMaria, Jr. and Hesok Chang (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). Samantha is currently preparing a new volume of essays for publication, entitled Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press). Her recent research investigates the treatment of Jews in medieval literature and culture, and the role of the animal in medieval literature and jurisdiction.
Simone Pinet received her PhD from Harvard University. Her teaching and research focus on medieval and early modern Spanish literatures and cultures, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, especially in relation to spatiality, economics, poetics, and translation, with an eye, especially in her teaching, to the long-term connections between the medieval and the modern, both in contemporary Spain and Latin America. Related areas of interest include visual studies, cartography, and political economy. Her book, Archipelagoes: Insularity and Fiction from Romance to the Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) examines literature and cartography in Spain in the transition from the medieval to the early modern through the figure of the island. A second book, The Task of the Cleric (University of Toronto Press, 2016), takes the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre as a focal point for the discussion of cartography, translation, and political economy in different archives and texts. She is currently at work on a book on economic metaphors and rhetorical strategies traced through canonical works of the Iberian Peninsula from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.
Prof. Pinet was a fellow of the Society of the Humanities in 2008-2009, and a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow for 2010-2011.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Classical Archaeology
Job Titles:
- Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters
Tom Hill was educated in private schools in Florida, received his BA from Harvard University in 1961, his MA from the University of Illinois in 1963, and his PhD from Cornell University in 1967. He has taught at the University of Illinois and Cornell University and at NEH Summer Programs at Harvard University. He is a medievalist who works on Old and Middle English, Old French, Old Norse-Icelandic and Medieval Latin literature. Among his current interests are patristic and medieval Biblical exegesis, medieval folklore, and Old English and early Germanic legal texts.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Historian of Song
TJ Hinrichs is a historian of Song era (960-1279 c.e.) Chinese medical, political, and cultural history. Her forthcoming monograph, Shamans, Witchcraft, and Quarantine: The Medical Transformation of Governance and Southern Customs in Mid-Imperial China (Harvard East Asia Series), examines how the Song dynastic government made medicine an instrument of social reforms, and the ramifications of those policies for political and medical practice, knowledge, and authority. Other recent projects include exploration of the recently discovered tomb of an eleventh century Shaanxi pharmaceuticals merchant, and Song-Yuan (10th-14th century Chinese) commercial and itinerant cultures. With Linda Barnes (Boston University) she co-edited the volume Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Belknap/Harvard, 2013), which brings together contributions from fifty-eight leading scholars from around the world.
Harbert's main interests center around the syntactic structures of the Germanic languages (especially the older ones) and the Celtic languages (primarily Welsh and Scottish Gaelic), and what they can tell us about the principles of syntactic organization operating in natural language. He also has a developing interest in aspects of the phonology of these languages. His research is carried out within the general framework of Government-Binding Theory. Problems on which he has worked recently include apparent cross-linguistic and historical variation in the syntactic domain of anaphor binding, relative constructions, the syntax of negation and the syntax of agreement and case assignment. Harbert's publications include a systematic construction-by-construction comparison of the grammatical structures of both the modern and premodern members of the Germanic language family. In addition, he has developed an interest in language endangerment and minority language issues.
Job Titles:
- Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities
William J. Kennedy, Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, taught the history of European literature and literary criticism from antiquity to the early modern period. His publications focus on Italian, French, English, and German texts from Dante to Milton. Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (Yale University Press, 1978) studies interactions of genre, style, and mode in lyric, epic, and prose narrative. Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (University Press of New England, 1983), recipient of the MLA's Marraro Prize, traces the rise of modern pastoral from ancient models. Authorizing Petrarch (Cornell University Press, 1994) explores the canonizing imitations of that poet's work throughout Europe. The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) tracks the rise of national styles and political identities in Renaissance poetry. Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 2016) examines issues of professionalism and its economic consequences in sixteenth-century European poetry. Kennedy has co-edited a rhetoric textbook, Writing in the Disciplines (Prentice-Hall, seventh ed. 2012), and has contributed over fifty articles on literature, rhetoric, and literary theory to various journals and critical collections. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Liguria Foundations and has served as President of the Renaissance Society of America in 2008-10. He is currently working on a study of Shakespeare in global contexts.