Genre: Premodern

The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators

Published: 09/06/2024

In The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators, Zamler-Carhart impersonates the 12th-century Byzantine princess and historian Anna Comnena as she comes out as trans and tries to write her father’s imperial biography, The Alexiad, while in exile in contemporary West Africa. Outside the Empire,[…]

The Gentrified City of God: Queer & Medieval New York from 9/11 to COVID-19

FORTHCOMING Summer 2025

The United States is a spiritual wasteland—a two-party dictatorship that worships money and that eats human beings alive, where racial and gender oppression attack the body, and where partisan polarization stifles the mind. In this dreary context, A.W. Strouse pursues a life of sin and salvation. As a queer scholar of the Middle Ages and[…]

Masks

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Published: 04/26/2024

The mask is the classic disguise. But as alter ego, it reveals as much as it conceals. Why are masks so often creepy, even outside of horror movies? Can a mask change expression while you’re wearing it? How much of someone’s self can inhabit a mask? Why would anyone make a plaster cast of a[…]

The Getty Fiend

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Published: 01/29/2024

The Getty Fiend, a contemporary medieval melodrama set in Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, takes the reader on a tour filled with rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints, all seen through the keenly dramatic flair of a collector’s eye. A cinematic and labyrinthine take on pulp horror, Ken White’s screenplay-in-verse[…]

Dancing with Philoctetes: Reflections on Pain and Remembrance

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Published: 12/15/2023

Abandoned by his community, doomed to a solitary existence with his voice as sole companion: can Sophocles’ Philoctetes still speak to us? What do his screams have to say? Dancing with Philoctetes: Reflections on Pain and Remembrance juxtaposes a new adaptation of Sophocles’ play with an essay describing the process of bringing it to life[…]

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 8

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Published: 06/27/2023

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and the critical and theoretical approaches of postcolonial and African studies. Dotawo gives[…]

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis

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Published: 07/27/2023

Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic[…]

Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages

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Published: 05/04/2023

Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages seeks to expand our understanding of early medieval connectivity by interrogating social and intellectual collaborations, competitions, and communications among persons, places, things, and ideas in the European and Mediterranean West during the second half of the first millennium CE. In so doing, its contributors explore the[…]