Speculum Spotlight: A Conversation with the Editors of Speculations

Listen now!

In this episode we sit down with the five editors of Speculations, the centennial issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Comprised of 60 short essays that speculate about the possible futures of medieval studies, this issue represents an attempt to disrupt disciplinarity by foregrounding perspectives, methodologies, and geographies from a variety of fields from medieval studies. Born from the understanding that the future of medieval studies depends on imagination and experimentation, this issue is a collaborative attempt to mark the passing of time and open the field to a broader appeal. The short essays in this issue are an invitation to think together and reinvigorate conversations about our discipline. Join us as we reflect on the past and present of medieval studies, and as we speculate about the possible futures for our field. 

Mohamad Ballan is an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intellectual, cultural and political history of late medieval Iberia and North Africa. He received his PhD from the Department of History at the University of Chicago in 2019, and has previously held appointments as a Junior Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows (2018–2019) and as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame (2021–2022). In both his writing and his teaching, Ballan highlights the interconnected histories of Europe, Africa and Asia through a close examination of social, intellectual and political networks. In his first book, The Politics of Sovereignty in the Medieval Islamic West: The World of Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2026), Ballan explores the phenomenon of the “scholar-statesman”—figures who ascended to the highest offices of state—through the life and works of Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (1313–1374), the most prominent Spanish Muslim historian, chancellor and philosopher of the fourteenth century. His book situates this figure within a broader “community of letters,” a network of Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars that extended from Seville to Damascus, in order to illustrate how these scholar-officials played a major role in reshaping the political culture, social hierarchies and conceptions of sovereignty in Nasrid Granada and beyond.

Cecily J. Hilsdale teaches Medieval Art and Architecture at McGill University in Montreal. Her research focuses on Byzantine diplomacy and cultural exchange, particularly the circulation of luxury objects as diplomatic gifts and the related dissemination of eastern styles, techniques, iconographies, and ideologies of imperium. Her research has received support from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Medieval Academy of America, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, and the Fulbright Foundation. In addition to her book,Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline (Cambridge University Press, 2014), her work has appeared in Art Bulletin, Art History, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Gesta, and The Medieval Globe, among others.

Sierra Lomuto is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Rowan University. She has published on Mongol-European relations, race, and Orientalism in medieval English literature, the politics of global periodization, and contemporary appropriations of the Middle Ages in several edited collections, journals, and online venues, including Exemplaria, postmedieval, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Public Books. She is the editor of a special issue of boundary 2, The “Medieval” Undone: Imagining a New Global Past (2023). Her first book, Exotic Allies: Mongols and Racial Fantasy in the Literature of Medieval England, is under contract with Penn Press for The Middle Ages series. She was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), where she held a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors (2023–2024).

Katherine L. Jansen is a historian of the later Middle Ages. She is the author the award-winning book, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Peace and Penance in late Medieval Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). She has also published three co-edited volumes:Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); and Center and Periphery: Essays on Power in the Middle Ages in Honor of William Chester Jordan (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Professor Jansen has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Villa I Tatti (The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and The American Academy in Rome, where she was also a Resident in 2014. She has been Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University and taught for 30 years at The Catholic University of America, from where she has just retired as Professor Emerita. She has been Editor of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies since 2019 and in 2020 was elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Her current book project is entitled The Relics of Rome, for which she has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship (2025–2026).

Peggy McCracken is the Anna Julia Cooper Distinguished University of Medieval French Literature and Professor of French, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on medieval France and is situated at the intersection of literature, history, and theory. Her most recent book is In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (2017) and her current research investigates ways in which medieval French writers imagined the persistence and precarity of human being in adaptations and rewritings of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Will Beattie is an independent researcher of apocalypticism and early medieval England. He received his PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame, and his dissertation explored the embedding of eschatological imagery in local landscape and history. He is an affiliated scholar of the university's Medieval Institute. In addition to The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast, Will is co-creator and editor of Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast.

Loren Cantrell is a Doctoral Candidate of French at the University of Virginia, specializing in Old French translation, manuscript studies, and the digital humanities. For the 2024–2025 academic year, she was named the Digital Humanities Fellow of the UVA Scholars’ Lab (a department within the UVA Library community for experimental scholarship informed by digital technologies). Loren has previously served as the Chair of the Graduate Student Committee of the Medieval Academy of America, and her research has been supported by several major fellowships including the Chateaubriand and the SPFFA Jeanne Marandon Doctoral Research Fellowship.

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. 

Listen now!