[Shirin Azizeh Khanmohamadi]

Hi everyone, My name is Shirin Khanmohamadi and I’m honored to have been nominated for election to the executive committee of CLCS- Medieval and wanted to introduce myself a bit here.  I am an Associate Professor of premodern literature in the Comparative and World Literature department at San Francisco State University, where I’ve been teaching since 2005.  My location in a Comparative and World Literature department means, felicitously, that my teaching has always extended beyond my training as in European and Mediterranean studies to embrace the literatures of premodern Asia, Africa and the Americas and a globalized Middle Ages.  My research and writing have also been marked by comparative methods and interdisciplinarity: my first book, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages(UPenn, 2014), considered critical-anthropological critiques of colonial ethnographic description in the postcolonial era to place into sharp relief the difference of premodern European ethnographic representation, namely its dialogism, especially in spaces where European description predated colonial control.  In showing a Latin Europe incorporative and integrative of the voices and perspectives of its (internal and external) others, I was also interested in the open-ended nature of European identity in its formative period. My current book project continues this interest while returning me to the complex ‘matter of Saracens,’ which first drew me to the study of the Middle Ages. ‘Translating Saracens’ deploys translatio/n theory and material culture studies to read the movement of symbolic objects associated with Muslim imperial authority in epics and other late medieval genres as the material expression of the widespread medieval trope of ‘translatio imperii et studii’ (the transfer of past imperial authority and cultural prestige to Europe). I thereby call for renewed attention, through the work of these critically neglected objects, to ‘the Arabic role’ not only in medieval literary history (Menocal 1987) but also in European self-definition itself.

In addition to regular participation in the forum panels, I also hope to play a role in planning some of them and to continue the work of expanding the contours of what we recognize as the premodern canon. Thank you for your consideration and time and I’m looking forward to meeting more members of this forum in the future.

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