Elements in the Global Middle Ages is a series of concise studies that introduce researchers and instructors to an uncentered, interconnected world, c. 500-1500 CE.   Individual Elements focus on the globe’s geographic zones, its natural and built environments, its cultures, societies, arts, technologies, peoples, ecosystems, and lifeworlds.

Born digital, with print-on-demand, and updatable annually by authors, this multidisciplinary Cambridge series of studies takes advantage of the latest digital technology, and is able to embed audio, video, and visual materials.

Series Coeditors:

Geraldine Heng is Perceval Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018) and England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (2018), both published by Cambridge, as well as Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2003, Columbia). She is the editor of Teaching the Global Middle Ages (2022, MLA), coedits the University of Pennsylvania Press series, RaceB4Race: Critical Studies of the Premodern, and is working on a new book, Early Globalisms: The Interconnected World, 500-I500 CE. Originally from Singapore, Heng is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, a member of the Medievalists of Color, and Founder and Co-director, with Susan Noakes, of the Global Middle Ages Project: www.globalmiddleages.org

Susan J. Noakes is Professor of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, where she also serves as Chair of the Department of French and Italian.  For her many publications in French, Italian, and Comparative Literature, the University In 2009 named her Inaugural Chair in Arts, Design, and Humanities.  Her most recent publication is an analysis of Salim Bachi’s L’Exil d’Ovide, exploring a contemporary writer’s reflection on his exile to Europe by comparing it to Ovid’s exile to the Black Sea; it appears in Salim Bachi, edited by Agnes Schaffhauser, published in Paris by Harmattan in 2020. 

Lynn Ramey is Professor of French and Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University and Chair of the Department of French and Italian. Ramey is the author of Jean Bodel: An Introduction (2024), Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (2014), and Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature (2001). She is currently working on recreations of medieval language, literature, and culture in video games for which she was awarded an NEH digital humanities advancement grant in 2022.