Self -Designed Courses
As an instructor of record at Binghamton University, I have designed and taught several courses that are currently taught in the History and Medieval Studies departments.
Mediterranean Encounters
Upper division (300-level) / Summer 2022, Summer 2023, and Summer 2024
In the ancient and medieval periods, the Mediterranean served as the primary meeting place for the different cultures, ideas, religions, and commodities that shaped the histories of Eurasia and Africa from the height of the Roman Empire to the sixteenth century. Drawing upon readings of primary and secondary sources, this course will explore premodern Mediterranean cultural interactions and exchange through five interrelated themes: race and slavery, trade, science and medicine, crusading, and political expansion.
Dungeons and Outlaws: The Prison in Medieval History
Upper division (300-level) / Winter 2024
In modern films, games, and television shows that depict the Middle Ages, the dungeon sits at the heart of the “darkness” of medieval life. For prisoners inside dungeons, castles, monasteries, and towers, the experience of imprisonment differed based on one’s status, social class, and gender. Drawing upon readings of primary and secondary sources by prisoners and their jailers, this course will explore prisons in the cultural, social, religious, and political fabric of the medieval world in three interrelated themes: gender and sexuality, religion and inquisition, and crime and punishment. To look beyond the ways that modern culture views medieval dungeons and prisons, this course will explore how medieval people used, viewed, and experienced imprisonment between the Carolingian period and the Protestant Reformation.
Premodern Italy, 500-1650
Upper division (300-level) / Winter 2025
The Italian Peninsula has long been viewed as a center point for cultural diversity, religious coexistence, and artistic flourishment in the history of the premodern Mediterranean. The polities that came to dominate Italian life – notably the Kingdom of Sicily, Republic of Venice, and Republic of Genoa – between 500 and 1650 offer a complex history filled with religious coexistence, trade, warfare, social change, and cultural development. Drawing upon readings of primary and secondary sources, this course aims to study premodern Italian history through themes of religious interaction (Christian, Islamic, and Jewish), conquest and political expansion, race and race making, and gender and sexuality. This course will ask students to think critically about the role of Italy in the Mediterranean world and its interactions with the peoples, polities, and cultures that occupied the same sea.
Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain
Upper division (300-level) / Summer 2025
Popular films, books, and culture present the Spanish and Portuguese Middle Ages as a period dominated by religious warfare (Reconquest/Reconquista), social violence, and changing borders. The kingdoms that came to dominate Iberian life – Castile-Leon, the Crown of Aragon, Navarre, and Nasrid Granada – between 711 and 1492 offer a complex history filled with religious coexistence, political expansion and contraction, and social change. Drawing upon readings of primary and secondary sources, this course aims to study the Spanish and Portuguese Middle Ages through themes of crusading, religious interaction (Islamic, Christian, and Jewish), colonization, and conflict between the Umayyad expansion into Iberia in 711 to the expulsion of Iberian Jews and Muslims after 1492. This course will ask students to think critically about the broader role of Iberia in European, North African, and Near Eastern history between medieval and early modern worlds that looks beyond notions of reconquest and convivencia.
Western Civilization (500 BCE to 1500 CE)
Lower division, survey course (100-level) / Summer 2025
This course examines the foundations of Western Civilization by focusing on major developments in the history of the ancient and medieval worlds before 1500 CE. The course will cover the history of the Mediterranean world—from Iberia to Persia—very broadly defined in considering the complex, diverse roots of the Western tradition. Among the topics considered will be the evolution of political systems; the development and spread of empires—Greek, Roman, Persian, Islamic, Byzantine, Carolingian, and Ottoman; the emergence of Christianity and Islam and their interactions with Judaism; shifting conceptions of sex, gender, ethnicity, and freedom; and major trends in the evolution of science, medicine, philosophy, literature, art & architecture, and historiography.
