About me
I’m an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, where I write and teach about the literature of Western medieval Europe, particularly the regions now known as England and France. Broadly conceived, my research concerns genre, translation, and manuscripts. I ask questions about how the physical forms that stories take can inform us about medieval thought.
I have just completed a monograph, Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past, forthcoming in 2024 from Cornell University Press. In this book, I demonstrate that high medieval histories of Britain used interpolation (the insertion of foreign material into a pre-existing text) as an indispensable tool to think about philosophies of history and time. Drawing on material from specific surviving manuscripts, I make the case that the characteristic modularity and often-discussed mixing of genres in medieval writing about the past served a theoretical purpose for readers and writers of medieval history: it allowed them to explore how different time-schemes interacted in lived human experience.
My next book, tentatively entitled Latinizing the Vernacular: Retrotranslation in Europe, 1200–1500, uncovers an unexplored site of literary exchange and contact. From 1200 to 1500, a strange phenomenon kept happening across Europe: histories, cross-cultural encounters, and story cycles would be translated from Latin to a European vernacular and then, surprisingly, back to Latin –– even as the original Latin source remained available. These retrotranslations demonstrate vibrant interaction between languages that endured long past the moment when the vernacular supposedly superseded Latin and began long before the humanist reclamation of Latin as an aesthetic choice. They bear witness to a desire to literalize the wide-ranging circulation of texts, people, and ideas in this period through the act of translation itself. With its commitment to better understanding linguistic pluralities and the affordances of the vernacular, this book will further the larger shared goal of revising the popular picture of the Middle Ages from one that can be mobilized in service of hegemonic whiteness to one that is more global, nuanced, and diverse.
My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in in New Literary History, New Medieval Literatures, JMEMS, Viator, and other journals, and I have also co-edited a special issue of The Medieval Globe called Medieval Re-Creation: Acts of Recycling, Revision, and Relocation (with Joseph Shack). You can find more information on my CV (below).
I’m also a teacher committed to experimentation and innovation in the college classroom. You can see me discuss one of my Covid-era assignments in this presentation for Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning (2021).
Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions about my research or teaching. I can be found at hmw2147@columbia.edu.