An Interview with Medieval Monster Studies Scholar Asa Mittman
I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Medieval Monster Studies scholar Asa Mittman about his research into medieval marginalia, maps and monstrosity, and the othering of bodies in the middle ages. I don’t often interview folks outside of Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy for speculating Canada, but I thought my conversation with Dr. Mittman might be of interest to many of you.
Asa Simon Mittman (Professor of Art & Art History, California State University, Chico), is author of Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England (2024) andMaps and Monsters in Medieval England (2006, under contract for a revised second edition), co-author of Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013), and author and co-author of many articles on monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages, including pieces on race in the Middle Ages, Satan, and anti-Semitism. He edited the Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012), and co-edited Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (2019) and Demonstrare, a two-volume Monster Studies reader (2018). He also co-curated Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders at The Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum (2018), and his collaborative From Local to Global: Maps and Mapmaking during the Middle Ages is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD.
