"Imagined Encounters" Special Issue

This essay examines the multiple discursive intersections between the theories of perception and representation articulated by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) in the first two decades of the twentieth century. More specifically, it traces Kandinsky's latent interest in medieval visuality and resituates his well-known formulation of a new spiritual art in the form of abstraction within the realm of Orthodox theology and aesthetics as theorized by Florensky. This article thus proposes an entirely novel set of as yet unexplored interpretative possibilities for understanding Kandinsky's oeuvre on the one hand, and the broader dialectical relationship between medieval revivalism and avant-garde experimentation on the other.

This article considers facial expressions in the portrayal of peoples considered religiously or ethnically 'Other' in later medieval Christian cultures. It focuses on artistic representations of grins, grimaces, and gaping with open mouths, especially in relation to depictions of Jewish, Muslim, and Black African figures from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, before examining some portrayals of Mongol peoples in greater detail. In medieval cultures, to 'grin' with bared teeth was widely viewed in pejorative terms, and was understood less as a sign of happiness or friendliness and more as an indication of anguish, base character, or evil. The grin's connection to grimacing and gaping was more overt than in present Western societies. I contend that depictions of the facial expressions of Mongol peoples do not consistently accord with the looks characteristically associated with enmity towards Christianity. Instead, shifts in portrayals accord with the Mongols' changing and complex associations for Latin Christians over the period from the early thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016).

Snapshot of an ongoing crowdsourced bibliography on race and medieval studies, published open-access at postmedieval. More context for this bibliography with link to the Google doc here: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/06/morevoices-citation-inclusion-and.html with snapshot publication at postmedieval (dated December 2017) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41280-017-0072-0

When Anglo-Saxon warriors buckled on gem encrusted, intricately wrought gold arms and armor, they did not merely transform their appearance, but shifted their fundamental ontology. We consider objects from the Staffordshire Hoard as embodiments of fah and aelf-sciéne, specifically Anglo-Saxon ideas of visual splendor, and the modern notion of bling in order to excavate their role in the transformation of men into posthuman teratological wonders. We strive to imagine the hoard not as a series of objects but as embodied apparatuses inextricable from those who wore them and from the violence they were intended to fend off, yet accelerate.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2011

Reviews scholarship in medieval studies relating to animal theory.

Postmedieval, 2016

Epeli Hau‘ofa’s essay on a ‘sea of islands’ was intended to offer a bottom-up, corrective, and holistic view of Oceania. Instead of colonial images of the Pacific as a vast ocean with tiny isolated islands in it, he included the sea as part of what can constitute a home and reimagined Oceania as historically inflected ‘networks . . . integrated by trading and cultural exchange systems’ (Hau‘ofa, 1993, 7–9). From a perspective on the sea, a large landmass can be a haven, danger, or obstruction. Smaller islands might not only block travel, but they can also offer the interactive space of a shore combined with a more accessible interior. Islands may also reticulate in a variety of forms, sometimes presenting series of lands that offer waystations for sea travel. Seas additionally narrow and transition to rivers that can lead far inland. Although an idealistic strain in Hau’ofa’s and others’ visions of Pacific and other maritime networks has been criticized, the point remains that while some oceanic expanses can present a barrier, they tend instead to facilitate travel.

Shuttling back and forth from medieval to modern texts, this essay proposes an alternative vision of temporality and, in doing so, offers a glimpse into a queer (or non-normative) temporality. The purpose of this temporal travel is to reveal the systems deployed in constructing an outcast, a thing of hate and derision. This essay discusses a select number of medieval texts as the starting point for reflecting on the process involved in inventing a temporal outcast. The conversation about normative temporality mostly builds from The Passion of the Christ, which in this essay represents the end point in meditating on the making of a fantastical Other who materializes from fantasy as a thing outside time and humanity. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 147–160.