My research on Arthuriana from the Global North Atlantic tends to focus on two interrelated axes. First, I pay careful attention to the dissemination of Arthurian texts throughout Europe, depicting the nonlinear circulation of the materials, and how they shape and are shaped by the political, historical, and commercial interconnections between Africa, Europe, and the Islamicate worlds. Second, I focus on the ideologies that circulated within these texts, finding that they tend to support Christian chivalric ideologies because ethically speaking, these texts are part of a system constructing a medieval European self by erasing European diversity, dehumanizing Muslims and other racial and religious groups, and normalizing these violent ideologies. In other words, these Arthurian texts function within an ethical framework of whiteness because the texts normalize certain forms of dehumanization; the texts normalize exclusionary violence based on race.

Nevertheless, the inclusion of this chapter in a volume on Arthurian ethics has less to do with the ethics inherent in the texts and more to do with my own ethics. Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh's work has helped me articulate my own ethical stance vis-à-vis my research. She writes:

Rajabzadeh points out that what we have learned to value as academics – what she calls a “depoliticized observational and analytical objectivity” that is supposedly “reliable, authoritative, and accurate scholarship” – is ultimately tied to whiteness because it is tied to exclusion.