Shirin Khanmohamadi 2023

Shirin Khanmohamadi

Professor, Chair
Comparative and World Literature, Graduate Coordinator
Phone: (415) 338-7035
Email: shirin1@sfsu.edu
Location: Humanities Building, Room 326

Education

B.A. Literature and Society, Brown University
Ph.D. Columbia University 2005

Research/Interests

  • Comparative Medieval European Literature
  • Medieval Europe and the Islamic world
  • Premodern Travel and Ethnographic literature
  • Medieval Translation and Adaptation
  • Contemporary Literary Theory
  • Orientalism

Biography

I am a professor of premodern literature in the Humanities and Comparative World Literature department at San Francisco State University, where I’ve been teaching since receiving my PhD from Columbia University in 2005. I have a BA with Honors from Brown (Literature and Society) and an MA from UT-Austin (English, with a focus on Postcolonial Studies). My teaching and research is in comparative medieval European literature (epic, romance, tale collections), premodern travel, geographical and ethnographic writings, and literary and cultural contacts between the medieval European and Islamic worlds. I also teach classes in Contemporary Adaptation and Orientalism and Society, including in our new Video Game Studies B.A.

My research and writing is also marked by comparative methods and interdisciplinarity: my first book, In Light of Another´s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (UPenn, The Middle Ages Series, 2014), considered postcolonial critical anthropology's critiques of colonial ethnographic description and the ethnographic gaze in order to place into sharp relief the differences of premodern ethnographic representation, namely its dialogism and intersubjectivity, particularly where European description predated colonial control. In showing a Latin Europe incorporative and integrative of the voices and perspectives of its others, I was also interested in the open-ended nature of European identity in its formative period. My current book project continues this interest while returning me to the complex 'matter of Saracens,' which first drew me to the study of the Middle Ages. Splendorous Saracens: Appropriating Islamicate Prestige in Medieval European Literature deploys translatio/n theory and material culture studies to read the movement of symbolic objects associated with Muslim imperial authority in chansons de geste and chronicles as evidence of European desire for ‘prestigious association’ with various Islamicate empires in the Middle Ages. I thereby call for renewed attention to ‘the Arabic role' (Menocal 1987) in Europe's cultural and imperial self-fashioning. My project is being supported by an NEH Awards for Faculty grant in AY 2022-2023.

I have published work in a variety of journals, including postmedieval, Digital Philology, New Medieval Literatures, Exemplaria, and Arthuriana.

I served as Editor of Exemplaria: Medieval / Early Modern / Theory from 2020-2025.

Teaching and Research Interests

Pre- and Early Modern Travel and Ethnography; Europe and the Islamic world; The Global Middle Ages; Medievalism and Adaptations; Orientalism and Society

Selected Teaching at SF State (Graduate and Undergraduate)

  • CWL 230, World Literature
  • CWL 400, Approaches to Comparative and World Literature (major/minor)
  • CWL 423, Going Medieval: Contemporary Adaptations
  • CWL 424, Multicultural Middle Ages: Texts and Objects
  • CWL 426, Orientalism in Literature and Society
  • CWL 427, Travel and the Literary Imagination
  • CWL 800, Intro to Graduate Study in Comparative Literature (Theory)
  • CWL 815, Topics in Critical Theory: Anthropology and Lit Criticism
  • CWL 815, Topics in Critical Theory: Theory and the Premodern Text
  • CWL 820, Medieval & Early Modern Encounters: Travel and Ethnography
  • CWL 825, Advanced Study in Comparative Literature
  • CWL 896, Directed Reading: Orals
  • CWL 898, Masters Thesis

Publications

Books

Articles

  • "England and the World, 1100-1300.” In Oxford 21st Century Approaches to Medieval Literature: The High Middle Ages, eds. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Elizabeth Tyler.  Forthcoming 2023.
  • "Islamic Pathways and Imaginary Borders: Translating Islamic cultural capital and prestige in the Medieval Mediterranean and Beyond," Routledge Companion to Medieval Literature, eds. Sif Rickardsdottir and Raluca Radulescu (Routledge UP 2023): 199-211.
  • With Vera-Simone Schulz (co-author), “Editors’ Introduction,” Essay Cluster on “Ecologies of Things and Texts: Nature, Matter, and Material Culture in the Middle Ages,” postmedieval 13 (2022): 163-166.
  • "’Home’ and ‘Abroad’ in Medieval Travel and Trade Narratives,” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, vol. B (601 CE to 1450 CE), ed. Christine Chism, General editor, Ken Seigneurie, Wiley 2020.
  • “Charles in al-Andalus,” Digital Philology volume 8.1 (Spring, 2019): 14-28, Special Issue on “Global Medievalism,” eds. Candace Barrington and Louise d’Arcens.
  • "Durendal, translated: Islamic object genealogies in the chansons de geste," postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural criticism 8.3 (2017): 321-333.
  • "Worldly Unease in Late Medieval Travel Reports," in Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages, eds. John Ganim and Shayne Legassie, New York: Palgrave New Middle Ages Series, 2013, pp. 105-120.
  • “Salvage Anthropology and Displaced Mourning in the Lais of Marie de France,” Arthuriana 21.3 (Fall, 2011): 49-69.
  • "Casting a 'Sideways Glance' at the Crusades: the Voice of the Other in Joinville´s Vie de Saint Louis," Exemplaria: a Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22.3 (2010): 177-99.
  • "The Look of Medieval Ethnography: William of Rubruck´s Mission to Mongolia," New Medieval Literatures 10 (2008): 87-114.