Medieval and Renaissance Studies

University of California, Berkeley B.A. (French), M.L.S., M.A., Ph.D. (History)

Princeton University A.B. (Religion), University of California, Berkeley M.A., Ph.D. (History)

Professor North teaches courses in early medieval history (late antiquity to the 12th century), the history of medieval France and Germany, intellectual history, medieval historiography, and the history of the Byzantine Empire. He has a particular interest in the religious controversies, interfaith dialogue, and reform movements of the 11th and 12th century, and has written several articles that address specific aspects of the institutional culture of the period. He is currently completing a collection of translated sources on the Saxon rebellion against King Henry IV (1073-1089) which is to be published by Catholic University Press, and collaborating with V. Morse on the translation of Opicino de Canistris' In Praise of Pavia (1329) which will be published by Italica Press. His long term research projects concentrate on the edition and analysis of the Opera Omnia of Abbot Richard of Préaux (†1131), a student of Anselm of Canterbury, the works of Bishop Bruno of Segni (†1123), and the role of biblical exegesis and asceticism in monastic and clerical reform in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

W. North's Webpage

Amherst, AB; Yale Univ., MA, M.Phil., PhD

Professor Bashir specializes in Islamic Studies with primary interests in messianism, Sufism, and intellectual history of the Islamic East (Iran, Turkey, and Central and Southern Asia). His current and forthcoming publications focus on the histories and religious worldviews of two late medieval Islamic movements named the Nurbakhshiyya and the Hurufiyya; he recently published his first book, Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions. The Nūrbakhshīya between Medieval and Modern Islam, appeared in 2003 (University of South Carolina Press). His teaching interests include medieval and modern Islamic thought, and comparative issues in the study of messianism, apocalypticism, mysticism, gender, and aesthetics.

Jackson Bryce received his A.B. from the Catholic University of America (in Washington, D.C. and his A.M. & Ph.D. in Classics from Harvard University. He is particularly interested in Roman literature and history, especially of the Christian era. Professor Bryce's bibliography of Lactantius is available here.

Oberlin College, B.A.; University of California, Berkeley M.A., Ph.D.

Professor Kettering specializes in the early modern period, with a special interest in seventeenth-century Dutch art. She has taught a wide range of courses on art throughout western Europe, focusing on gender issues in western art, Spanish art, Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, and the art of the print. Every few years she takes a group of Carleton students to the Netherlands and Belgium on a December break field trip.

Her books and articles have concentrated on 17th-century Dutch pastoral images, the art of Gerard ter Borch and his family, and Rembrandt's portraiture. Her books include: The Dutch Arcadia: Pastoral Art and Its Audience in the Golden Age and Drawings from the Ter Borch Studio Estate in the Rijksmuseum. Her current research centers on Dutch images of the occupations. Additionally, she has recently produced an essay and entries for the catalogue of an exhibition of Gerard ter Borch's paintings whichopened at the National Gallery in Washington in November, 2004. She presented a lecture on Ter Borch's Grinder's Family, one of his most idiosyncratic paintings, at the opening of the exhibition. She is president of Historians of Netherlandish Art, an international organization that fosters communication among historians of Northern European art.

Carleton College B.A. (History); Brown University M.A., Ph.D. (History)

Hamilton College, B.A.; Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D.

Professor Paas is interested generally in the history of book and print production from the fifteenth century to the present. My research projects, however, focus on Germany in the seventeenth century, with emphasis on German political graphics and on the production of literature in cities such as Nuremberg and Strasbourg. Within the context of MARS, I teach courses on medieval German literature in translation and on the history of printing.

University of New Mexico, B.A.; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., Ph.D.

Author of Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France, Professor Yandell has also edited Pontus de Tyard’s Solitaire second, ou prose de la musique and is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of Women in French Studies. She is currently president of the Executive Committee for the French Sixteenth-Century Literature Division of the MLA and a member of the Council of the Sixteenth Century Society.

Her most recent publications include “Les roses de Ronsard: humanisme et subjectivité,” in Eléments naturels et paysage: l’émergence du sujet, auteur et acteur, dans la littérature à la Renaissance, ed. Dominique de Courcelles (Paris: Ecole des Chartes, forthcoming); "Rhetoric and Virility in Ronsard’s Les Folastries,” in Masculinities in the French Renaissance, ed. Philip Ford (Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, forthcoming); “Seeking the Other in Early Modern Literature,” in Reflections on Learning as Teachers, ed. Carol Rutz and Susan Singer (Northfield: College City Press, 2004), 137-46; and “Les ames sans corps et les corps sans ames, la pédagogie dialectique de Catherine des Roches,” in Lectrices d’Ancien Régime, ed. Isabelle Brouard-Arends (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003), 557-66. In addition, she has published articles on Nicole Estienne, Pernette du Guillet, Montaigne, Catherine des Roches, Ronsard, Jacques Tahureau, Pontus de Tyard, and the blasons anatomiques du corps féminin. Her current research focuses on pedagogical discourse, authority and subversion in early modern French texts.