interdepartmental faculty
Sarah M. Anderson
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Emmanuel C. BourbouhakisAssistant Professor 34A East Pyne As the department's designated Byzantinist, I am charged with surveying the vast reaches of Greek culture beyond the perimeter of Homer to Hadrian, to which I nevertheless enjoy returning frequently. My first, and still formative, university education was in Liberal Arts and History at the universities of Concordia and McGill, in Montréal. I went on to teach at a classical Gymnasium in the newly liberated Czech Republic before moving to Greece and two years of energetically unfocused study of the longue durée of Greek language and literature. Penance then came in the form of a disciplined M.A. in Classical Philology at the University of Western Ontario under rather generous tutelage. A preternatural delight in palaeography along with an abiding curiosity about what else had been said in Greek led to a Ph.D. in Byzantine Literature at Harvard University's Classics Department, supplemented by a year at the Byzantinisch-Neugriechisches Seminar of the Freie Universität Berlin and a dissertation completion idyll at the Dumbarton Oaks research center. After a stint as a lecturer at Harvard University I took up a post as a research-teaching fellow at Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, whence I come to Princeton. |
MARINA BROWNLEEProfessor (Ph.D., Princeton) 342 East Pyne Marina Brownlee is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Professor of Comparative Literature with an emphasis on the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Before joining Princeton’s faculty in 2002, she taught at Dartmouth College (1977-88), and the University of Pennsylvania (1988-2001). She has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her current research explores the nature and impact of 16th-century tabloid literature in Spain, cultural interactions between Spain and the New World, and issues of periodization in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Recent Publication. The Poetics of Literary Theory: Lope and Cervantes (1981); The Status of the Reading Subject in the ‘Libro de Buen Amor’ (1985); The Severed Word: Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ and the ‘Novela Sentimental’ (1990); The Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas (2000). She has also co-edited volumes on Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes (1985); Boundary and Transgression in Medieval Culture (1990); The New Medievalism (1991); Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain (1995). |
MARK COHENProfessor (Ph.D., Columbia) 306 McCormick I regularly teach the department’s course in medieval Jewish history (under Islam and under Christendom), as well as graduate seminars dealing with Near Eastern Jewish history or Judaeo-Arabic (mainly Geniza documents). I have been instrumental (along with Professor Udovitch) in training graduate students to use the Geniza for general Islamic social and economic history. Representative Publication. Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt: the Origins of the Office of Head of the Jews, ca. 1065-1126 (Princeton, 1980); Al-mujtama’al-yahudi fi Misr al-islamiyya fi’l-‘usur al-wusta (Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt, 641-1382) (Tel-Aviv, 1987); The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah (Princeton, 1988); Jews Among Arabs: Contacts and Boundaries, co-edited with A.L. Udovitch (Princeton, 1989); Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1994). |
Andrew ColeAssociate Professor (Ph.D., Duke University) 31 McCosh Halll Before coming to Princeton in 2010, Andrew Cole was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford, a Bloomfield Fellow at Harvard University, and an associate professor at the University of Georgia, where he received a teaching award in the college of arts and sciences. His research concerns heresy, humanism, literature of all kinds, medieval manuscripts, and intellectual history. He is author of Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge University Press, 2008). His recent articles on medieval formularies, humanist books at Oxford, and the manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales draw from his work in progress, The Humanist Institution of Literature in Medieval and Early Modern England, which recovers the medieval humanist practices that establish the Renaissance. Undergraduate and graduate students alike have, under Cole’s supervision, undertaken funded work on medieval manuscripts in Princeton’s own collection and in libraries in England. Cole also researches ancient, medieval, and continental philosophy, a combination of fields represented in his forthcoming The Birth of Theory. He often offers courses in theory that examine its roots in premodern thought. He has edited (with D. Vance Smith) The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, with an afterword by Fredric Jameson (Duke University Press, 2010), The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (with Andrew Galloway, 2013), and eight volumes of the Yearbook of Langland Studies. His articles appear in Speculum, ELH, JMEMS, YLS, Rome and the North, After Arundel, Form and Reform, Lollards and Their Influence, The Middle Ages at Work, and Twentieth-Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, among other places. |
Michael CookProfessor 101A Jones Hall Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies. Before joining the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton in 1986, he taught for twenty years in the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1990 and received a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002. His field is the history of the Islamic world. His books include The Koran: a very short introduction (2000); Commanding right and forbidding wrong in Islamic thought (2000); A brief history of the human race (2003); and Studies in the origins of early Islamic culture and tradition (2004). He is the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010). |
GILES CONSTABLEProfessor Emeritus |
PIETRO FRASSICAProfessor (Ph.D., Boston College) 328 East Pyne Professor in Italian at Princeton since 1976, during which time he has been instrumental in developing and overseeing the Italian undergraduate program. He is also director of the interdepartmental Program in Italian Studies, and serves on the committees for Medieval Studies and Renaissance Studies. His scholarship has been in the early Renaissance, the 18th century, and contemporary literature and theater. He has held positions in the American Association of Italian Studies, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Association of Italian Teachers, and serves on several editorial boards including Rivista di letteratura italiana and Gradiva. In 1998 Frassica was the recipient of the Italian-American Hall of Fame award, and in 2001 received an “I migliori” prize from the Pirandello Society of Boston. He acts as the liaison and the undergraduate contact for the Princeton summer program at the Università di Macerata, Italy, where he has also taught courses. Over the years he has taught as a visiting professor at several other universities in the U.S. and abroad. He teaches courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels, has taught interdisciplinary seminars in conjunction with the music department, and currently teaches a seminar, popular with students, on the literature of Italian gastronomy. In the wider Princeton community Frassica serves as a trustee at the Dorothea van Dyke McLane Association, and as a consultant for the Princeton Public Library. Recent Publication. He has written over 60 scholarly and popular articles, and is the author of 5 books: Varianti e invarianti dell'evocazione (2004); Caro Maestro (letters by Marta Abba to Luigi Pirandello) (1994); Romanzo europeo tra Ottocento e Novecento (1992); A Marta Abba per non morire (1991); and his critical edition of Gian Mario Filfelfo's Chroniche de la città de Anchona (1979), which received the “Premio Internazionale Calabria di letteratura” in 1980. He is editor of the volumes Ercole Patti e altro Novecento siciliano (2004); Salvatore Quasimodo. Nel vento del Mediterraneo (2002); Studi di filologia e letteratura italiana (1992); Primo Levi as Witness (1991). In addition, he co-authored a first-year Italian grammar, Per modo di dire (1981); an anthology of 20th-c. Italian prose and poetry, Immagini del Novecento italiano (1986); and a second-year Italian grammar, Vivere in Italia (1992). Presently he is working on a new book on Guiseppe Parini, and another on Luigi Pirandello. |
John HaldonProfessor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies 220 Dickinson Hall John Haldon is Professor of Byzantine History at Princeton University. He studied in the UK, Greece and Germany, and is a Senior Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington D.C. and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the history of the early and middle Byzantine empire, in particular in the period from the seventh to the eleventh centuries; on state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times; and on the production, distribution and consumption of resources in the late ancient and medieval world, especially in the context of warfare. He is director of the Avkat Archaeological Project in N. Central Turkey. His publications include Byzantium in the seventh century (CUP: 1997), The state and the tributary mode of production (Verso: 1993), Warfare, state and society in Byzantium (Routledge 1999), Byzantium: a history (History Press: 2005) and The Palgrave Atlas of Byzantine History (Palgrave: 2006), and (with L. Brubaker) Byzantium in the iconoclast period c. 680-850: a history (CUP: 2011). |
ANDRAS HAMORIProfessor W11A Dillon CT Most of my publications have had to do with pre-modern Arabic poetry and prose. Some of the studies of poetry have dealt with the transformations in the poetic presentation of the world brought about by the end of paganism in Arabia and the development of early Islamic civilization. In other studies I have tried to uncover some of the implicit conventions of this poetic tradition that was so rich and self-assured, and so different in its structural assumptions from what the modern reader (in the Arab world or in the West) is accustomed to. For a long time my studies on prose were directed at narrative in the 1001 Nights. Recently I have become very interested in two areas of research in medieval Islamic literature: the use of folkloric elements in “highbrow” entertainment literature, and the artistic shaping of historical narrative. Besides the Department’s third year Arabic course, I teach graduate courses whose content varies according to the students’ needs. Some serve to introduce the student to various aspects of medieval Arabic writing (e.g., historical); some are intended as fairly advanced surveys (e.g., of the genres of pre-modern poetry) or research seminars in poetry or belles-lettres. I have supervised dissertations on such subjects as medieval criticism, textual variation in poetry, and the relations among genres in classical Arabic prose. Representative Publication. On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton 1974); The Composition of Mutanabbi's Panegyrics to Sayf al-Dawla (Leiden, 1992); “Notes on Two Love Stories from The Thousand and One Nights,” Studia Islamica, 43 (1976); “The Magician and the Whore: Readings of Qamar al-Zaman,” in The 1001 Nights: Critical Essays and Annotated Bibliography, (Cambridge, MA 1985); “Reading a Hebrew Lyric with a Hispano-Arabic Background,” Edebiyat, N.S. 3 (1989); “Love poetry,” “Ascetic poetry,” and “Al-Mutanabbi,” in Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, vol. 2 (Abbasid Belles-Lettres), Cambridge 1990; “Folklore in Tanukhi: the Collector of Ramlah,” Studia Islamica, 71 (1990); “Tinkering with the text: Two variously related stories in the Faraj Ba’d al-Shidda”, in Story-telling in the Framework of Non-fictional Arabic literature, ed. S. Leder, (Wiesbaden 1998). |
DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN Professor (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins) 12 East Pyne Daniel Heller-Roazen’s areas of interest include Greek and Roman letters; the transmission of classical learning to the Arabic world and to the Latin West; the vernacular literatures of the European Middle Ages; medieval Arabic, Hebrew and Latin philosophy; and twentieth-century philosophy. He is the author of Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Johns Hopkins 2003) as well as editor of Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford 1999). He has written articles on classical, medieval, and modern literature and philosophy published or forthcoming in Diacritics, Littérature, MLN, October, Paragraph, Parallax, Romania, and South Atlantic Quarterly. His next book, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, is forthcoming from Zone Books. Recent Publication. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.), Stanford University Press; Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press; The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.), Stanford University Press; Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society), Johns Hopkins Univ Pr; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books. |
WILLIAM C. JORDAN Professor (Ph.D., Princeton 1973) 232 Dickinson Hall William Chester Jordan is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies. He has been Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, from 1994 to 1999. He is the author of several books: Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership; From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Senonais in the Thirteenth Century; The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians; Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies; The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (awarded the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America); and Europe in the High Middle Ages. He has edited a one-volume encyclopedia of the Middle Ages for elementary school pupils and a four-volume version for middle school students. He is the editor in chief of the first supplemental volume of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages. His current research focuses on church-state relations in the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century. Recent Publication. Europe in the High Middle Ages: Penguin History of Europe; The Great Famine; Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies; From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Senonais in the Thirteenth Century; Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership. |
THOMAS LEISTENProfessor (Ph.D., Tübingen, Germany) 371 McCormick Thomas F. Leisten is a native of Germany and holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies and Islamic Art History from Eberland-Karls-Universität in Tübingen. His courses at Princeton include survey courses on early and later Islamic art, undergraduate seminars on the history of illustrated manuscripts and calligraphy in the Islamic world, and graduate seminars on medieval and pre-modern urbanism in the Middle East as well as various archaeological topics. Professor Leisten has worked on excavations in Syria, Pakistan and Iraq, and is director of the ongoing excavation of an eight-century palace complex in Balis, Syria, a cooperative project of Princeton University and the Syrian Directorate of Antiquities. Recent Publication. “Turba” for Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edition), vol 8; “The Architecture of Samarra. Results of the German Excavation in Samarra 1911-13,” Vol. 1: The First Campaign 1910-12 (Mainz); “Islamische Ikonographie,” Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart “Preliminary Report on the Excavation at Balis, 1996, 1999”, Berytosand "Baghdad um 800: Streiflichter auf das Leben in Palaesten und Huetten," in W. Dressen, G. Minkenberg and G. Oellers (eds.), Ex Oriente. Isaak und der weisse Elefant (Mainz, 2003) vol. 3, 80-95. |
SIMONE MARCHESIAssociate Professor (Ph.D., Princeton 2000) 324 East Pyne His special interest is in the influence of classical and late-antique Latin works on Italian medieval writers, in particular Dante and Boccaccio. Published work includes Stratigrafie decameroniane (Olschki, 2004), articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Giovanni della Casa, as well as on the tradition of the twentieth-century novel and contemporary Italian cinema. In the past, he has collaborated on the design and realization of Progetto Italica, a multimedia course of Italian language and culture accessible on the Web and hosted by the University of Notre Dame. |
SARA S. POORDirector, Program in Medieval Studies 211 East Pyne Sara S. Poor ("Sally") received her PhD from Duke University's Graduate Program in Literature in 1994. After holding positions at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (1995-96) and Stanford University (1996-2002), she joined the faculty at Princeton in September of 2002. While at Stanford, she was awarded a Mellon Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum, where she taught and did research from 1999-2000. And she currently holds the Charles G. Osgood University Preceptorship (2005-2008) from Princeton University. Her primary research interests are in the areas of Gender Studies and medieval German literature, interests which are reflected prominently in her teaching. Her first book, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority was awarded the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship's 2006 Prize for the best first book on a medieval feminist topic. Ittakes a historical approach to the complex theoretical issues surrounding the study of medieval manuscripts, women's writing, and canon formation and was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004. She is also at work on a second book project on women and medieval books, tentatively entitled Reading Compilations: The Contexts, Contents, and Owners of Fifteenth-Century German Devotional Books, as well as a series of articles on gender configurations in medieval German courtship narratives. Professor Poor has also recently completed two editing projects: a collection of essays, edited in collaboration with Jana K. Schulman (Western Michigan University) called Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity (forthcoming in December 2006 from Palgrave Press) and two issues of Medieval Feminist Forum (No. 38 and 39, Winter and Summer 2005). As part of efforts to foster the continued study of medieval German literature and culture in the United States, she has co-founded an association of American medievalists (YMAGINA) that is active in bringing young medievalists together at conferences, as well as in establishing more lasting and productive connections between medievalists and modernists in our field. |
Helmut Reimitz
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PETER SCHAEFERProfessor (Ph.D., ) 1879 Hall, Rm 236 Peter Schaefer joined the faculty in 1998, appointed as the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religion. Schaefer’s research interests include Jewish History in Late Antiquity, the religion and literature of Rabbinic Judaism, Jewish Mysticism, 19th and 20th century Wissenschaft des Judentums and Jewish Magic. Recent Publication. The author of numerous books and articles, his 1998 book (Harvard University Press) Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, has been translated into several languages. His latest books are: Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God From the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton 2002), The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: Archaeological, Historical, and Literary Perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (Tuebingen 2003), and Der Triumph der reinen Geistigketi. Sigmund Freud's “Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion,” Berlin and Wien 2003. Since 1993, co-editor of Jewish Studies Quarterly. |
D. VANCE SMITH Associate Professor (Ph.D., Univ of Virginia 1993) Recent Publication. Essays on Piers Plowman, historiography, the medieval masculine body. Co-ed. New Approaches to Medieval Studies. Currently working on possession, exchange, and aristocratic signification in the Middle Ages. New books: The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century and Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary. |
RONALD E. SURTZProfessor (Ph.D., Harvard) 344 East Pyne Ronald Surtz is a Professor in Spanish specializing in medieval and Golden Age literature. He has directed dissertations on such topics as the Libro de miseria omne, Pedro de Corral’s Crónica sarracina, and censorship in 17th-century Spain. He currently serves the Department as Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish. Recent Publication. He has written The Birth of a Theater (1979), The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534) (1990), and Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of St. Teresa of Avila (1995). Professor Surtz has edited Teatro castellano de la Edad Media (1992), and Juan Pastor’s Aucto nuevo (1981). He is co-editor of a collection of essays entitled Creation and Re-creation: Experiments in Literary Form in Early Modern Spain (1983). |
ROB C. WEGMANAssociate Professor (Ph.D., Univ of Amsterdam 1993) 218 Woolworth Center Professor Wegman is a musicologist whose research centers on the musical aesthetics and sociology of late-Medieval and Renaissance music. |
Anna ZayaruznayaAssistant Professor 222 Woolworth Center Professor Zayaruznaya is interested in the relationship between music and its texts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her research brings the history of musical form and notation into dialogue with medieval literary theory, the history of ideas, and iconographic and codicological trends. Recent papers and publications have focused on the motets of Guillaume de Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, Milanese chant, Isorhythm, and musical resonances in the poetry of John Gower and Jean Molinet. Currently she is working on a book that explores the roles played by the monstrous and hybrid in fourteenth-century musical aesthetics. |
Nino ZchomelidseAssistant Professor (Ph.D., University of Tübingen, Germany, 2001) 304 McCormick Hall
Nino Zchomelidse specializes in medieval art, with an emphasis on theoretical, historiographical, and political aspects; the role of the arts for the construction of civic identity; representation and mimesis, and on movement and the performance. She just completed her second book entitled The Word in Action. Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval South Italy, forthcoming with Pennstate University Press. Her new book project focuses on the notion of the “authentic” and the processes of authentication in medieval art. She has held academic positions at the University of Tübingen (Germany) and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen) and received fellowships and grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation (Copenhagen), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She has been named the George H. and Mildred F. Whitfield Preceptor in the Humanities for a term of three years. PUBLICATIONS (selection): Santa Maria Immacolata in Ceri: Sakrale Malerei im Zeitalter der Gregorianischen Reform (Rome, 1996); Fictions of Isolation: Artistic and Intellectual Exchange in Rome in the First Half of the 19th Century, co-edited with Lorenz Enderlein, Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, Supplementum 37 (Rome, 2006); Meaning in Motion. Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art and Architecture (co-edited with Giovanni Freni) published by the Department of Art and Archaeology with Princeton University Press, 2011); "Deus - homo - imago. Representing the divine in the twelfth century," in Looking Beyond. Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. by C. Hourihane (University Park, 2010), 107-127; "The Aura of the Numinous and Its Reproduction: Medieval Paintings of the Savior in Rome and Latium," in: Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 55, (2010), 221-262; "Descending Word and Resurrecting Christ: The Exultet Rolls in Southern Italy," in Meaning in Motion, 3-34. |