postmedieval journal

postmedieval media list

What are we reading, watching, and listening to?

As a long, strange academic year draws to a close, the editorial board of postmedieval looks forward to doing what we do best: voraciously consuming books and other media, much of it on medieval themes! We’ve polled the board to see what’s next on everyone’s list. Here are the results, with a few select endorsements. Whether you’re looking for insight, inspiration, or sheer entertainment, this list has you covered.

Academic Reading

Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace, Sophia Rose Arjana

To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, eds. Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis

To consider the ethics of representation of those who cannot give their consent, and then to apply those ethical considerations to pre-modern representation of enslaved people. — AG

History 4 degrees Celsius: Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene, Ian Baucom

Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages, Nancy M. Caciola

Trying to think through medieval hauntology. — JC

Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu, Jack Chen

Trying to fine-tune my vocabulary and methods for performance analysis, temporal schematics, and the space between orality and text. — SR

The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, Leah Devun

"Theorizing queer temporalities: A roundtable discussion." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2 (2007): 177-19, Carolyn Dinshaw et al.

One of those texts that so many people have discussed that you think you don’t have to

read because you feel you already have, but really, you should read. Thinking about allies

and intersectionality these days. — AM

The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North, Armann Jakobsson

"Against primitivism: Meyer Schapiro’s early writings on African and Romanesque art." Res:

Anthropology and Aesthetics 71.1 (2019): 295-311, Risham Majeed

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Mark Rifkin

What is 'Islamic' Art? Between Religion and Perception, Wendy Shaw

Shaw's book looks important for rethinking what is meant by 'Islamic' in relation to the material and visual culture of the Islamicate world . — SJ

The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us

about the Making of European Commercial Society, Francesca Trivellato

To explore some of the ways in which myths - particularly anti-Semitic, white

supremacist, and misogynist myths - about the past feed into ideas and perceptions about

the marginalized in the present. And, on a purely practical level, I'd potentially like to

read selections with students next semester in my Jews, Money, and Finance course. — SID

Non-/semi-/para-academic Reading

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, Daphne Brooks

Brooks’ lyric and incisive remapping of Black women in 20th-century music promises to completely overturn how we think about (and hear) sonic and social power and what it means to do intellectual history. — SR

The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, Abolqasem Ferdowsi (trans. Dick Davis)

I read somewhere that when asked (this was back in the Middle Ages) what one book a

medieval traveler would take with them if they were limited to just one, the response was

the Shahnameh. I can’t remember the source of that anecdote, but the Shahnameh is a

towering and hefty tome drawing from pre-Islamic Persian myth that’s been sitting on my

desk waiting for summer. — AM

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

Arkady Martine (aka AnnaLinden Weller) is a scholar of the medieval

Mediterranean/Near East border between Byzantium and Armenia, and she describes her

Hugo Award-winning novel as a speculative futurist vision of that medieval world. —AG

The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

I loved Miller's Circe and am always fascinated by retellings of classics, fairy tales, and

myths - especially those that offer women's perspectives. — SID

Moon Knight Omnibus, vol 1, Doug Moench et al.

Because I keep buying oversized deluxe editions of Marvel Comics and should really make a dent on this terrifyingly large collection I have amassed. — JC

Blanche on the Lam, Barbara Neely

Veba Geceleri (Nights of Plague), Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk's most recent book is a historical novel set in the early 20th on a fictitious Ottoman island - and it is about a plague pandemic. It is a timely read during the Covid lockdowns and there is too much talk around the book in both academic and non-academic venues, I don't want to miss out. — IHC

Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse

This had me at “critically acclaimed epic fantasy based on Indigenous American history

and mythology.” — SL

Aladdin, Yasmine Seale

This is the newest translation of Aladdin by Yasmine Seale, an extraordinary

poet/translator/magician with words who is currently working on a translation of the

1,001 Nights (the first woman translator of the Nights!). It may also feature on my

teaching syllabus next year. (SJ)

East: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing, Meera Sodha

Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner

We Are All Birds of Uganda, Hafsa Zayyan

Viewing