Early Global Insularities (Torres, Otaño Gracia, Andrews, Ahmed, Correa Reyes)

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In this episode, editors Sara Torres and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia discuss the themed issue of Viator they co-edited entitled "Early Global Insularities." They are joined by three of the contributors to the cluster (Tarren Andrews, Tanvir Ahmed, and Jonathan F. Correa Reyes) for a conversation about both pre-modern discourses of insularity, the lasting legacies of discourses that approach insularity as a form of isolation, and some of the ways in which insularity can be theorized as a form of connection. Islands occupy a sometimes ambiguous place in center-periphery models. As the conversation explores a wide range of conceptualizing islands in medieval, early modern, and modern texts, it "centers" insularity as a topography, a literary conceit, and a disciplinary trope. In a time of climate crisis, the precarity of islands and archipelagoes (so often the sites of colonial violence) brings a sense of urgency to this reappraisal of the historical ideation of insularity and the relationship of the local to the global. 

Tarren Andrews is Assistant Professor in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and a faculty member in Medieval Studies at Yale University. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2022. Her scholarship draws on critical Indigenous studies to rethink the legacies of early medieval England. Her book, The Formations of Settler Colonialism (forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press), takes a transtemporal approach to legal and literary history, reading texts from the early medieval North Atlantic, including the Domesday Book, the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, and the Old English poem “The Wife’s Lament,” to trace the emergence of Anglophone settler colonial logics that continue to structure Indigenous–settler legal relations in North America.

Tanvir Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University. He works on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Islam, with expertise in the connected worlds of Central & South Asia. His current book project, Dissenting Souls: A Cultural History of Medieval Muslim Rebellion, explores the matter of popular uprisings against the Mongol Empire, drawing on records of haunted tyrants and rebellious saints to narrate the lives, deaths, and dreams of the dispossessed. Beyond the monograph, his work takes on the alternate histories haunting the graveyards of Herat, diluvian history in the mountains of Laghman, Churchill's cosmic horrors in Malakand, and more. You can find such work at forums such as History & Theory, Afghanistan, and Viator. Alongside his scholarship, Ahmed has also authored works of speculative fiction, cultural criticism, and translation. He earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in 2021.

Jonathan F. Correa Reyes is an Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from The Pennsylvania State University in 2023. His research explores formulations of identity in medieval romances through the lenses of Caribbean epistemologies. His current monograph,Bad Romance: Ontologies of the Human in Middle English Literatures reframes late medieval English romances as experimental sites for defining who counted as human in a period of profound social, religious, and political change. Bringing together canonical and understudied Middle English texts, this book shows how narratives of conversion, crusade, demonic lineage, and comedy negotiate shifting ontologies of the human through racialized, gendered, and embodied hierarchies. His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation. He has publications out or forthcoming in Speculum, Arthuriana, Postmedieval, Sargasso, and Viator. Jonathan is also a co-founder and co-producer of The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast. 

References/Further Reading:

• Table of Contents of "Early Global Insularities"

• "Early Global Insularities: Archipelagos and Islands in Medieval and Early Modern Texts" by Sara V. Torres and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia (Editors' Introduction) 

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