Sahar Amer
(Ph.D., Yale University) is former Professor of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and then at the University of Sydney (Australia). Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in Arab and Muslim societies, on comparative, cross-cultural relations between Arab Muslim societies and the West, and on postcolonial identities. She is especially interested in the notion of borders (cultural, linguistic, historical and geographic), not as elements of separation and division, but rather as fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration. She is the author of What Is Veiling? (2014); Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (2008), winner of the 2009 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies by the Modern Languages Association of America, and A Feminine Esope: Marie de France and the Politics of Interculturality (1999, written in French).
Israel Burshatin
is Emeritus Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Haveford College. His essay was first presented at the 2015 meeting of the Mediterranean Studies Association, held in Athens, Greece.
Robert L.A. Clark
is Professor of French at Kansas State University. He has published broadly on medieval theater, devotional practices, and gender, as well as on opera. He is editor of two special volumes for ROMARD: The Ritual Life of Medieval Europe: Papers by and for C. Clifford Flanigan (2014); and Early English Drama: New Research in Archives, Authorship, and Performance (2020). He is co-editor with Kathleen Ashley of Medieval Conduct (2001), and, with Pamela Sheingorn, has published seven articles on the performative reading of illuminated manuscripts. He is currently working on a monograph on Jacques Copeau and the Middle Ages.
Denise K. Filios
is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric (2005). Her teaching and research interests include medieval Iberian literature, women in literature, performance, cultures of fitness, and medievalism in Spanish tourism. Her current
Ellen Lorraine Friedrich
is Professor Emeritus of Modern and Classical Languages (Valdosta State University, Georgia, USA). As a Romance philologist, she has published on homoeroticism, same-sex relations, and castration in the Romans de la rose, and on erotic metaphor in the Chevalier de la Charret. She has published book chapters on the Old French fabliaux, and on the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de escarnho e mal dizer. Present projects include research on transformed bodies in classical and medieval literature.
Edmund Hayes
earned his doctorate in Islamic Thought with honors from the University of Chicago in June 2015. He works on early Islamic history, in particular Shiʿism, focusing on the intersection of intellectual developments and social and political dynamics. His dissertation, “The Envoys of the Hidden Imam: Religious Institutions and the Politics of the Occultation Doctrine,” analyzed the doctrinal and institutional framework underlying the authority of the fiscal agents of the Shiʿi Imams and their role in formulating doctrine. He also has interests in articulations of ethnic, religious, and sexual identity in the premodern Middle East.
Gregory S. Hutcheson
is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and affiliated faculty in the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at the University of Louisville. He has published on gender, sexuality, and queer desire in the Spanish Middle Ages, contributing to edited volumes such as Same-Sex Desire Between Women in the Middle Ages (2001), Queering the Middle Ages (2001), and Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Iberia (2005). With Josiah Blackmore he coedited Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (1999). His current research explores the sites of negotiation between Islam and Christianity in medieval Spanish and aljamiado texts.
Vicente Lledó-Guillem
is Professor of Spanish at Hofstra University in New York where he teaches Hispanic Linguistics and medieval and early modern Iberian literature. His main area of research is the history of the Spanish and Catalan languages from a social, ideological and cultural point of view. He is the author of two book
Felipe E. Rojas
is Associate Professor in Spanish at West Liberty University. His academic interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature, queer and gay studies, mythology and literature, Spanish Golden Age politics and religion, and medieval Spanish literature. Specifically, he is interested in veiled sexual references in theater and how they may allude to the political, religious, and historical formation of Spain. He has published articles on the figure of Ganymede in Spanish Golden Age theater in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies and Ceræ: An Australian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
Leyla Rouhi
is Preston S. Parish iiird Century Professor of Romance Languages at Williams College, where she is also actively involved with Comparative Literature and Arabic Studies. Her research is mostly on early modern Iberia with a special focus on Cervantes and Islam, with other areas of interest such as Iranian culture and translation studies. She is in addition the cotranslator of the nineteenth-century work of fiction El anacronópete by Enrique Gaspar, the first modern time-travel novel.
Robert S. Sturges
is Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he teaches medieval literature and queer studies. He is the author or editor of six books and the author of numerous essays on medieval literature and literary theory. His most recent books are a facing-page edition and translation of Aucassin and Nicolette and a monograph entitled The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama: Theaters of Authority.
Peter E. Thompson
is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (Spanish), at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and is cross-appointed to the Departments of Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. His area of specialization is Spanish Golden Age short theatre. He has written