The Program in Medieval Studies combines the best aspects of an interdisciplinary program with the focused training required for academic careers in a variety of traditional disciplines. The program’s faculty members are drawn from nearly every humanities department at Cornell, offering expertise in disciplines and area studies spanning more than a millennium of languages and cultures—from Old and Middle English literature to Byzantine monuments, from Icelandic sagas to Andalusian architecture, from medieval Latin literature and philosophy to Islamic legal history.
Work in primary archival materials—including Latin and vernacular paleography, textual criticism, and codicology—is well supported by abundant library resources, as well as by faculty dedicated to these fields. Work in gender studies, medieval and modern literary theory, and the post-medieval reception and construction of the “Middle Ages” is also well supported by program faculty and by the full array of other departments and programs at Cornell. Resources for studying Latin and most medieval vernacular languages (including Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavonic, Semitic and East Asian languages) are a mainstay of the program. All of these offerings are encompassed within a flexible curriculum tailored to the needs of individual students.
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. They also enjoy the benefits of carefully mentored training in pedagogical techniques and classroom skills. Students from many other doctoral programs at Cornell are closely involved in the Program in Medieval Studies, and they contribute to a lively and varied community of medievalists that spans Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Department website
Selected Journal Articles (Peer-Reviewed)
“German Media Studies: A Critical Update.” New German Critique 150 (2023): 5–24.
“Zeitlupe: Cinematic Technique and Literary Form in the Weimar Republic.” German Studies Review 44.3 (2021): 469–488.
“Some Omissions in the Universal Library: Kurd Lasswitz and the Emergence of Science Fiction.” Monatshefte 110.4 (Winter 2018): 529–551. doi: 10.3368/m.110.4.529
“Media Archaeology, Cultural Techniques, and the Middle Ages: An Approach to the Study of Media before The Media." Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 52.2 (2016): 107–133. doi: 10.3138/seminar.52.2.2
Selected Book Chapters
“What was Time Axis Manipulation?” In Friedrich Kittler: Neue Lektüren, edited by Jens Schroeter and Till Heilmann. Berlin: Springer, 2022.
“Cinema Panopticum: Wax, Work, Waxworks.” In ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni, edited by Martin Norden and Erica Tortolani. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
“Notation: From Scrolls to Scores.” In Hans Richters Rhythmus 21. Schlüsselfilm der Moderne. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012.
Selected Web-Based Publications
“Going Wireless in the Belle Époque.” Continent 7.1 (Spring 2018): 5–16.
“The Promise of Television.” The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933. Companion Website (October 2017).
Selected Translations
Florian Sprenger. “Environments of Experimentation and Epistemologies of Surroundings: John Scott Haldane’s Physiology and Biopolitics of the Living.” Grey Room 75 (Spring 2019): 6–35.
Timon Beyes and Jörg Metelmann, eds. The Creativity Complex. Translated by Erik Born and others. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018.
Kurd Lasswitz, “The Universal Library.” Mithila Review: The Journal of International Science Fiction & Fantasy 9 (September 2017).