Regular Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Old French literature (12-13th century epic and romance), medieval Mediterranean Studies, medieval comparative literature; postcolonial theory. The Global Middle Ages, Marco Polo.

Research Interests

Intercultural relations in 12th- and 13th-century literature; Mediterranean studies; globalism; postcolonial theory; world literature and cultural studies

Biography, Education and Training

Though I was trained as a specialist in medieval French and Comparative Literature, my current work focuses primarily on Medieval Mediterranean Studies and the Global Middle Ages. With Brian Catlos, I co-direct The Mediterranean Seminar (mediterraneanseminar.org), an umbrella organization whose collaborative activities have included four National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institutes held in Barcelona, Spain; a five-year University of California Multicampus Research Project; an ongoing series of quarterly workshops; and a series, "Mediterranean Perspectives," housed at Palgrave Press. My own work in this area includes, in addition to many essays, a book project on “Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Medieval Mediterranean.” In 2016, I published a new translation of Marco Polo's Description of the World and am currently working on a companion volume tentative entitled "Marco Polo and the Global Middle Ages."

Honors, Awards and Grants

- “Negotiating Identities in the Christian-Jewish-Muslim Mediterranean,” NEH Summer Institute, Barcelona, 2015 (co-director)

-UC President's Fellowship (2012-2013)
-Networks and Knowledge in the Medieval Muslim-Christian-Jewish Mediterranean, NEH Summer Institute, Barcelona, 2012 (co-director)
-Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center (Spring 2011)
-Mediterranean Studies UC Multicampus Research Project, 2010-2015 (co-director)
-Cultural Hybridities in the Medieval Mediterranean, NEH Summer Institute, Barcelona, 2010 (co-director)
-The Medieval Mediterranean & the Emergence of the West, NEH Summer Institute, Barcelona, 2008 (co-director)
-The Medieval Mediterranean, UCHRI (Irvine) Residential Fellowship, Fall 2007 (co-director)
-Residential Fellowship, Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France (Fall 2006)

Selected Publications

BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS

Marco Polo and His World. London: Reaktion, 2024.

Co-editor, with Brian A. Catlos, and contributor. Can We Talk Mediterranean? Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Mediterranean Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 2017.

Translator. Marco Polo, The Description of the World. Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 2016.

Co-editor, with Peregrine Horden. A Companion to Mediterranean History. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.

Co-author, with Peggy McCracken. Marie de France: A Critical Companion. Gallica. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012.

Co-author, with Virginie Greene, Sarah Kay, Peggy McCracken, and Zrinka Stahuljak. Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes. Gallica. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011.

Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Honorable Mention, MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies.

ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS (selected)

• “Marco Polo Meets Postcolonial Theory: Challenges and Opportunities of the Global Middle Ages,” Special issue “New Directions in Medieval Postcolonialism.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 55.3. Forthcoming 2025.

• “Marco Polo and the Mongol World Before European Hegemony.” Special Issue, “After Abu-Lughod: Comparative Frames for a Global Middle Ages.” Exemplaria, forthcoming.

• “China and India.” In A Global History of Medieval Travel Writing: European Perspectives, ed. Sebastian Sobecki. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.

• “How to do things with things: Material Objects in the Multicultural Mediterranean.” In Strange Matter: Disrupting Time in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Ed. Andrew James Johnston, Jan-Peer Hartmann and Martin Bleisteiner.  Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming.

• “Marco Polo and the Multilingual Middle Ages.” In Medieval French Interlocutions: Shifting Perspectives on a Language in Contact. Ed. Thomas O’Donnell, Jane Gilbert, and Brian Reilly. York: York Medieval Press, 2024. Pp. 159-78.

• “Translating Marco Polo.” In Marco Polo Research: Past, Present, Future. Ed. Hans Ulrich Vogel, Ulrich Theobald, and Cao Jin. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2024. Pp. 215-49.

• “Avendo di servidori bisogno: Decameron 5.7 and the Medieval Mediterranean Slave Trade.” In Sea of Literatures: Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature. Ed. Angela Fabris, Albert Göschl, and Steffen Schneider. Alpe Adria e dintorni, itinerari mediterranei 3. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023. Pp. 175-91.

• “Romance and the Medieval Mediterranean.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance. Ed. Roberta L. Krueger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022. Pp. 88-100.

• “Let no bad song be sung of us”: Fame, Memory, and Transmission in/and the Chanson de Roland.” In Bestsellers and Masterpieces: The Changing Medieval Canon. Ed. Heather Blurton and Dwight Reynolds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. Pp. 140-65.

• “Travelers: Texts and Contexts.” In A Cultural History of the Sea, ed. Margaret Cohen, vol. II The Medieval Age, ed. Elizabeth Lambourn. Cultural History Series. London: Bloomsbury, 2121. Pp. 139-58

•  “Sheep, Elephants and Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde.” In The Futures of Medieval French. Ed. Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin. Gallica. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2021. Pp. 314-27.

•  “Marco Polo and the World Empire of Letters.” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie. Volume II, 601 CE to 1450, ed. Christine Chism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. Pp. 1039-50.

•  “Medieval Travel Writing (2): Beyond the Pilgrimage.” In The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. Pp. 48-61.  

• "Romance in/and the Medieval Mediterranean.” In Thinking Romance. Ed. Nicola McDonald and Katie Little. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. Pp. 187-202.

•  “Traveling Texts: De-orientalizing Marco Polo’s The Description of the World.” In Travel, Agency, and the Circulation of Knowledge, ed. Gesa Mackenthun, Andrea Nicolas, and Stephanie Wodianka. Münster: Waxmann, 2017. Pp. 223-46. 

•  “Silk in the Age of Marco Polo,” in Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns, ed. Laine Doggett and Dan O’Sullivan. Gallica. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016. Pp. 141-51.

•  “The Painter, the Warrior, and the Sultan: The World of Marco Polo in Three Portraits,” The Medieval Globe 2:1 (2016): 101-28.

•  “Mediterranean Literature.” In A Companion to Mediterranean History. Ed. Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Pp. 314-29.

• “Reorientations: The Worlding of Marco Polo.” In Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages. Ed. John Ganim and Shayne Legassie. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 39-57.
• “Beyond Philology: Cross-Cultural Engagement and the Literary History of Romance.” In A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieal Literary History. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
• “Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire.” In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012. Pp. 37-65.
• “Translatio/n, Empire, and the Worlding of Medieval Literature: The Travels of Kalila wa Dimna.” Postcolonial Studies 11:4 (2008): 371-85.
• “Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés in the Medieval Mediterranean.” Arthuriana 18.3 (2008): 48-61.
• “Ports of Call: Boccaccio’s Alatiel in the Medieval Mediterranean.”  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:1 (2007): 163-95. Co-authored with Jason Jacobs.
• “Crusades and Identity.” Cambridge History of French Literature. Ed. William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond, and Emma Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Pp. 93-101.
• “Re-Viewing the Eastern Mediterranean.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2:3 (2011): 369-85.
• “Worlding Medieval French Literature.” French Global: A New Approach to Literary History. Ed. Susan Suleiman and Christie McDonald. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Pp. 3-20.
• “Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou Monde and the Tributary East.” Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare A. Iannucci. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 60-86.
• “‘Noi siamo mercatanti cipriani’: How To Do Things in the Medieval Mediterranean.” In The Age of Philippe de Mézières: Fourteenth-Century Piety and Politics between France, Venice, and Cyprus. Ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kiril Petkov. The Medieval Mediterranean. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. 41-60.
• “What’s Up in French Medieval Studies?” Editor’s Introduction to the special issue, “New Directions in French Medieval Studies.” Australian Journal of French Studies 46:3 (2009): 169-77
• “Medieval Mediterranean Literature.” Forum on Theories and Methodologies in Medieval Literary Studies. PMLA 124:2 (2009): 600-08.
• “Deprovincializing the Middle Ages.” The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Ed. Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery. Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, 2007. Pp. 61-75.
• “Almería Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary: Towards a 'Material' History of the Medieval Mediterranean.” Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings. Ed. E. Jane Burns. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. 165-76.