On this episode, Stephanie is joined by Heather Blatt, Associate Professor in Florida International University’s Department of English. Dr. Blatt’s first book, Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England, was published by Manchester University Press in 2018, when she also won the FIU Faculty Senate award for Excellence in Teaching. That award was granted in recognition of her work on learner-centered, global, and anti-racist course design. In this interview, Blatt discusses how she developed her global learning course, "Medieval Monstrosity," which is all about how peoples and cultures view themselves and define who is “other.” She talks about how even a course in medieval literature, through global learning, can impact a student’s civic mindset and how global learning influenced even her own research.
Resources Mentioned
- “Monster Culture Seven Theses,” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
- T-O Map
- Great Ming World Map
- Orientalism, by Edward Said
- The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
- “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People”
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Freire
- Margery Kempe
- “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy,” by Dorothy Kim
- Racism Without Racists, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
- Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
- Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence, by Derald Wing Sue
- bell hooks
Great Quotes
“If all of that I teach is a view of the Middle Ages that is homogenously white, even if that's part of my specialization, I'm leaving my students open to how the Middle Ages has been weaponized by white supremacists.”
“One of the points of the global learning program that I really think is an important point is that not only should we be diversifying what we're reading in terms of a literature class, but also whose criticism we're attending to.”