Teaching

I teach two main survey courses—Medieval Europe (700-1350) and Renaissance & Reformation Europe (1300-1650); together these form a year-long introduction to the basic events and ideas of post-classical, premodern European history. The surveys are supplemented with more focused introductory courses, such as Norman Conquests, An Introduction to Medieval Manuscripts, The History and Legacy of Rome, or Medieval Cities. Introductory courses are generally taught on a three-year rotation.

Every six years I also teach the History discipline's required course in Historical Methods, a course which I developed in 2008 and taught again in 2012 and 2016; barring unforeseen schedule changes, I will next be teaching it in 2021.

I also teach a range of advanced seminar courses on subjects like The Black Death, The World of St Francis, Renaissance Italy, Death, Hell, and Capitalism: Medieval Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, and The Global Middle Ages: Travel and Cultural Exchange before the 'Age of Exploration'. These recur based on student demand and my own interests. If you're interested in a particular course, and you'd like to know when it will next be offered, please contact me. (If I'm not planning on teaching it any time soon, it might be possible to arrange an individual or group tutorial.)

I tend to offer an annual (in spring) mod-credit group tutorial in Medieval Latin, open to all students with at least a semester of classical Latin. I have also begun a tradition of offering a group ISP every other year that focuses on "gamified" or LARPing history via Reacting to the Past: in January 2019 we ran Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament. (The next of these LARP ISPs will be offered in 2021.) I have also offered tutorials on subjects as diverse as medieval Judeism, medieval art, Latin paleography, the history of Western costume & fashion, Italian Renaissance epic, medieval women's mysticism, propaganda in Fascist Italy, and medieval technology.