Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

2019 – 2021

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
“The Book and the Silk Roads: Phase I” - co-PI with Alexandra Gillespie and Sian Meikle

Funding: $920,000 USD 

The Book and the Silk Roads project brings together an international network of humanities scholars and scientists from around the world who are looking at various linguistic, religious, and national histories. The project will include five separate research clusters that will examine the following: early Roman and South Asian contexts; Dunhuang bindings from the end of the first millennium CE; the influence of Islamic bindings on European decorative binding techniques; fifteenth-century Ethiopian binding; and early Hebrew printed books in Ottoman Istanbul. With these close investigations, the project’s research findings will help to tell a new story about the making and movement of books along the Silk Roads, the ancient network of trade routes connecting the East and West.

Faculty Award

2013

University of Toronto 

This prestigious award recognizes accomplishments in research and scholarship across all academic divisions in the University of Toronto.

Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowship in the Humanities

Spring 2007

Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto
“Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Late Medieval Literature”

Funding: $45,000 CAD

This research grant supported research for a monograph in progress, Small Change: Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, as well as the following articles:

• “Ekphrasis and Stasis in the Allegories of Christine de Pizan.” The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture, edited by Andrew James Johnson, Ethan Knapp, and Magritta Rouse, Ohio State University Pres, 2015, pp. 184-205.

• “Death as Metamorphosis in the Devotional and Political Allegory of Christine de Pizan.” The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, edited by Suzanne Akbari and Jill Ross, University of Toronto Press, 2012, pp. 283-313.

• “Shaping Knowledge: The Movement from Verse to Prose in the Allegories of Christine de Pizan.” Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France, edited by Rebecca Dixon and Finn E. Sinclair, Boydell and Brewer, 2008, pp. 136-48.

• “Metaphor and Metamorphosis in the Ovide moralisé and Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune.” Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007, pp. 77-90.

Aid to Research Workshops & Conferences

2006 – 2008

Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada

Funding: $20,000 CAD

This grant was awarded in support of “The Body in Medieval Culture,” a conference held at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 10 – 11 March 2006.

Research presented at this event was published in The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Standard Research Grant

2003 – 2007

Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada
“Medieval Conceptions of the Orient and Their Role in the Development of Climate-Based Theories of Race”

Funding: $50,000 CAD

This research grant supported research for a monograph, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009; paperback edition 2012), as well as the following articles:

• “The Hunger for National Identity in Richard Coer de Lion.” Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, edited by Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, University of Notre Dame Press, 2005, pp. 198-227.

• “Alexander in the Orient: Bodies and Boundaries in the Roman de toute chevalerie.” Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, edited by Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 105-26.

• “The Diversity of Mankind in The Book of John Mandeville.” Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050-1500, edited by Rosamund Allen, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp.156-7.

• “Placing the Jews in Late Medieval English Literature.” Orientalism and the Jews, edited by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, University Press of New England, 2004, pp. 32-50.

• “Incorporation in the Siege of Melayne.” Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, edited by. Nicola F. McDonald, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 22-44.

Outstanding Teaching Award

2001

Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto 

This award recognizes exceptional performance in the classroom within the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto.