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Medieval Studies

Field Description

The Graduate Field of Medieval Studies provides students with interdisciplinary training in the broad geographical, chronological, and disciplinary expanse of medieval cultures, languages, and literatures, while providing discipline-specific training characteristic of more traditional departments. The Program features a flexible curriculum tailored to the needs of individual students; minimal shared degree requirements include a seminar on research methods, reading knowledge of a medieval language (generally Latin but Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, or other non-European are included) and two modern research languages (other than English), and paleographical training in the requisite medieval language. See our Procedural Guide for more detailed information.

Our diversity of faculty attracts exceptional graduate students from all areas of Medieval Studies and guides them to dissertations on a broad range of literatures, disciplines, contexts, and approaches. Work in primary archival materials—and the related fields of paleography, codicology, and textual criticism—is well supported by abundant library resources, as well as by faculty dedicated to these fields. Work in gender and sexuality studies, issues of race, ethnicity, and class, medieval and modern literary theory, archaeology and material culture, and the post-medieval reception, use, and abuse of the “Middle Ages” is also well supported by Program faculty and supplemented by the full array of other Departments and Programs at Cornell.  Resources for studying Latin and most medieval vernacular languages (including Celtic, East Asian, Germanic, Romance, Semitic, and Slavonic languages) are a mainstay of the Program.

Students from many other doctoral programs at Cornell are closely involved in the Medieval Studies Program, which cultivates a lively and varied community of medievalists that spans Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. In turn, students in Medieval Studies may work with any faculty members in Cornell’s Graduate Field and pursue any courses pertinent to their training and research. Traditional coursework and seminars are supplemented by formal and informal reading groups, independent studies, regular lectures and workshops from visiting scholars, and the annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium.

The program does not ordinarily admit students seeking a terminal M.A. degree. Ph.D. degree candidates are granted the M.A. degree after successful completion of course work and the general field exams.

Contact Information

Website: http://www.medievalstudies.cornell.edu
Email: medievalst@cornell.edu
Phone: 607 255-8545

259 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853

Data and Statistics

Subject and Degrees

Medieval Studies

Concentrations by Subject

Medieval Studies

  • medieval archaeology
  • medieval art
  • medieval history
  • medieval literature
  • medieval music
  • medieval philology and linguistics
  • medieval philosophy

Faculty

Olaoluwatoni Alimi

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval philology and linguistics
  • Research Interests: History of philosophy; Intellectual History (esp. concerning freedom and slavery); Philosophy of Religion

Benjamin William Anderson

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval archaeology; medieval art; medieval history
  • Research Interests: Byzantine art; architecture, and visual studies; architecture and archaeology of late antique and medieval Anatolia

Erik Christopher Born

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: middle high German, manuscript culture, Medievalism

Ross Brann

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: Judeo-Arabic culture, especially medieval; Hebrew poetry and poetics; Islamic Spain

Charles Francis Brittain

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval philosophy
  • Research Interests: early medieval philosophy (Christian and pagan); Platonism; intellectual history

E Wayles Browne

  • Campus: Ithaca - (Graduate School Professor)
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval philology and linguistics
  • Research Interests: Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian; historical and comparative Slavic philology

Oren Falk

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval history
  • Research Interests: medieval, cultural, and Norse history

Laurent Ferri

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval history; medieval philology and linguistics
  • Research Interests: European cultural and political history; art history; witchcraft; history of the book

Andrew Scott Galloway

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature; medieval philology and linguistics
  • Research Interests: Old and Middle English literature and its contexts; medieval historiography

Nicole Julia Giannella

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval history
  • Research Interests: Roman legal history; slavery, freedom, and ownership; Latin literature; ancient history

Kimberly Joy Haines-Eitzen

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval history; medieval literature
  • Research Interests: early Christianity and early Judaism; religion in Late Antiquity; text transmission in Late Antiquity; asceticism and monasticism

Andrew Hicks

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature; medieval music; medieval philosophy
  • Research Interests: history of music thought and theory; pythagoreanism and platonism; medieval Latin philology and manuscript studies; medieval Persian literature

T. J. Hinrichs

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval history
  • Research Interests: medical history; Chinese government policies to educate southern peoples in medicine; suppression of southern "shamans"

Cary S. Howie

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: medieval French and Italian literature; critical theory; gender studies; queer studies; medieval literature

Cat Lambert

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: Latin and Greek literature; book history; gender; queer studies

Jonathan Robert Lawrence

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: Sexuality, gender and emotions in literature and thought in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world

Scott C MacDonald

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval philosophy
  • Research Interests: medieval philosophy and theology

Sturt W. Manning

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval archaeology
  • Research Interests: archaeology (especially Mediterranean, Near Eastern, and European); archaeological theory; complex societies; dendrochronology (and dendroarchaeology); climate and history; archaeological science

Marilyn Migiel

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: medieval and Renaissance Italian literature

Jason Sion Mokhtarian

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval history
  • Research Interests: rabbinics, the Talmud, Zoroastrianism, Iranian studies, magic, and medicine

Judith Ann Peraino

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval music
  • Research Interests: medieval music

Simone Pinet

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature; medieval philology and linguistics
  • Research Interests: medieval and Renaissance Spanish; books of chivalry; Golden Age poetics; cartography; theories of space; mester de clericia; romance

Masha Raskolnikov

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: Middle English literature, especially allegory, rhetoric and translation studies; contemporary critical theory; feminist and queer studies

Eric Rebillard

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval archaeology; medieval history
  • Research Interests: medieval history; Saint Augustine; late Antiquity/early Christianity

Cynthia Robinson

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval art
  • Research Interests: medieval Mediterranean visual culture, 1000-1500A.D. (Islamic and Christian); courtly culture; religion and art

Courtney Roby

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval history
  • Research Interests: Professor Roby%u2019s research interests focus on the literary aspects of scientific and technical texts from the ancient world, the interaction of verbal and visual elements in those texts, and the definition and dissemination of scientific work. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, which traces the literary techniques used in the textual representation of technological artifacts from Hellenistic Greece to late-ancient Rome. Other recent, current, and forthcoming projects address Ptolemy%u2019s use of ekphrasis to appeal to the %u201Cscientific imagination,%u201D the challenges of describing pain as presented by Galen, the Roman reception of Greek science, and the reworking of mathematical texts by the Roman surveyors.

Jessica M. Rosenberg

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: early modern literature and culture; history of science; history of the book; media studies; poetry and poetics; plant studies

Matthew C. Velasco

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval archaeology
  • Research Interests: archaeology and material culture; biological anthropology

Ding Xiang Warner

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: Chinese literatures and literary thought from Han through early Song; medieval Chinese intellectual history; text production and text culture in pre-modern China

Michael L Weiss

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval philology and linguistics
  • Research Interests: Indo-European linguistics; old Irish

Samantha Zacher

  • Campus: Ithaca
  • Concentrations: Medieval Studies: medieval literature
  • Research Interests: Old English literature with a special interest in prose homilies and biblical poetry; Middle English literature; manuscript studies; rhetoric; studies in orality and literacy; history of the English language