|
Professor of English and Medieval Studies
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is professor of English and Medieval Studies, and was educated at Johns Hopkins and Columbia.
Her research focuses on the intersection of English and Comparative Literature with intellectual history and philosophy, ranging from neo-platonism and science in the twelfth century to national identity and religious conflict in the fourteenth century. Akbari’s books are on optics and allegory
(Seeing Through the Veil), European views of Islam and the Orient
(Idols in the East), and travel literature (Marco Polo); she is currently at work on
Small Change: Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan.
She is the volume editor for the
Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume B: 100-1500 and co-editor of the
Norton Anthology of Western Literature, and is at work on
The Oxford Handbook to Chaucer. Akbari is cross-appointed to the following units: Centre for Medieval Studies; Centre for Comparative Literature; Centre for Jewish Studies; Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations; Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.
Publications include:
Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (University of Toronto Press, 2004).
Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient,
1100-1450 (Cornell University Press, 2009).
(Co-ed. with Amilcare Iannucci) Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and
West (University of Toronto Press, 2008).
Selected articles:
"Currents and Currency in
Marco Polo's Divisement dou monde and The Book of John Mandeville,
in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West"
(2008).
“Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Petrus Alfonsi’s
Disciplina Clericalis and Marie de France’s Fables,” in
Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England (2008).
“Shaping Knowledge: The Movement from Verse to Prose in the Allegories of Christine de Pizan,” in
Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France (2008).
“Metaphor and Metamorphosis in the Ovide moralisé and Christine de Pizan’s
Mutacion de Fortune,” in Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid (2007).
“Placing the Jews in Late Medieval English Literature,” in Orientalism and the Jews (2004).
“Incorporation in the Siege of Melayne,” in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England (2004).
“Orientation and Nation in the Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer’s Cultural Geography
(2002).
“From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000).
Forthcoming:
A Sea of Languages: Literature and Culture in the Medieval
Mediterranean, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette. Commissioned essays that reconsider Maria Menocal’s seminal book and propose new avenues for study of the literary, social, and economic history of the medieval Mediterranean (under contract, University of Toronto Press).
The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross. Selected essays on the medical, legal, religious, and philosophical discourses that frame discussions of embodiment in texts of the Middle Ages
(submitted, University of Toronto Press).
|