Geraldine Heng

Biography

Geraldine Heng is Perceval Fellow and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with a joint appointment in Middle Eastern studies and Women’s studies.  She holds the Perceval endowment for Medieval Romance, Historiography, and Culture, an endowment created to support her research and teaching.

Heng is Founder and Co-director of the Global Middle Ages Projects (G-MAP), the Mappamundi cybernetic initiatives, and the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages (SCGMA): http://www.laits.utexas.edu/gma/portal/

Her teaching has included courses on the literatures and political cultures of the crusades, the genealogies and texts of medieval romance, the literatures of medieval England, Chaucer/s, medieval biography, premodern race and race theory, transcultural medieval travel narratives, and feminist theory and third world feminisms.  A documentary created by her student, Murray Sanders, for her undergraduate Bridging Cultures course, Envisioning Muslims: The Middle Ages and Today, can be viewed here:

Envisioning Muslims: A Modern Day Perspective from Murray Sanders on Vimeo.

In 2004, Heng designed, coordinated, and taught in “Global Interconnections: Imagining the World 500-1500 CE,” an experimental interdisciplinary graduate seminar collaboratively taught by seven faculty to introduce an interconnected premodern world spanning Europe, Islamic civilizations, Mahgrebi  and SubSaharan Africa, India, China, and the Eurasian continent.

For a description, see the article, “The Global Middle Ages” and also:

Medieval Academy
Medieval Studies

Heng’s research focuses on literary, cultural, and social encounters between worlds, and webs of exchange and negotiation between communities and cultures, particularly when transacted through issues of gender, race, sexuality, and religion.   She is especially interested in medieval Europe’s discoveries and rediscoveries of Asia and Africa.  Her book, Empire of Magic, traces the development of a medieval  literary genre—European romance, and, in particular, the King Arthur legend—in response to the traumas of the crusades and crusading history, and Europe’s myriad encounters with the East.  She is currently completing monographs on premodern race and racial-religious difference, and medieval England as a global site, traced through its literature.  She conceptualized a Theories and Methods cluster on Religion for PMLA (May 2011), and is currently editing a special issue, "The Global Middle Ages," for the digital journal Literature Compass.

Heng's work has been honored by six research fellowships, including fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, Brown University's Pembroke Center, the University of California's Humanities Research Institute, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute for Research in the Humanities.  She was a collaborator in a 2008 NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities award ($250,000), and currently serves on the Steering Committee of HASTAC.   The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities has conferred on her the Winton Chair (of flexible duration) for "paradigm-changing scholarship."

Articles forthcoming in 2010-11 include:

"The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages."  Literature Compass, the Global Circulation Project.

"The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race." Literature Compass, the Global Circulation Project.

"Holy War Redux: The Crusades, Futures of the Past, and Strategic Logic in the 'Clash' of Religions."  PMLA May 2011.