Disciplinary boundaries and conventional periodization often isolate the early medieval English world from the contemporary world that our students navigate daily. This separation can make the field feel remote, irrelevant, or inaccessible. The readings collected here aim to close that distance by inviting students to see medieval studies not as a retreat into the past, but as a critical lens for understanding the present and imagining different futures.

The list begins by introducing students to history and literature not as static disciplines, but areas of study shaped by political commitments and effects. From there, it offers examples of scholarship that reapproach these disciplines in critical and imaginative ways. These readings challenge linear conceptions of time and equip students with methodological frameworks for connecting their lived experiences to the premodern material in discussion.  

Each thematic cluster pairs key summaries and critiques from both Anglo-European and Indigenous thinkers. This pairing allows for comparative thinking and reveals tensions, parallels, and productive frictions between epistemological traditions. As an instructor, I work to ensure that classroom conversations resist hierarchical logics that position texts or peoples as either advanced or backward, good or bad. Instead, these readings create space for inquiry grounded in respect, curiosity, and a shared commitment to critical thinking.

On history and power

• Deloria Jr., Vine. “Anthropologists and Other Friends,” Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).

• Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3^rd edition (Zed Books, 2021).

• Trouillot, Michel-Rolf. “Introduction” to Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Penguin Random House, 2015).

Literature and periodization

• Davis, Kathleen. “Introduction” to Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

• Justice, Daniel Heath. “Preface” and “Introduction” to Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2018).

• Maracle, Lee. “On Oratory,” Memory Serves (NeWest Press, 2015).

• Rifkin, Mark. “Introduction” to Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self Determination (Duke University Press, 2017).

Medieval influence in the modern world

• D’Arcens, Louise. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016).  Selections.

• LaVoy-Brunette, Sarah and Dusti Bridges, “Anglo-Saxonism and Indigenous Dispossession: Land Grab Universities and the Emergence of Medieval Studies,” Speculum 100, no. 1 (2025): 46-78.

• Miyashiro, Adam. “Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9-10 (2019).

Selected models of transtemporal scholarship

• Andrews, Tarren. “Gendered Exile in the Past and Present: An Indigenous Feminist Medievalist in Search of Serial Collectivity,” Yearbook of English Studies 52 (2022): 69-85.

• Cleaves, Wallace. “From Monmouth to Madoc to Māori: The Myth of Medieval Colonization and an Indigenous Alternative,” English Language Notes 58, no. 2 (2020): 21-34.

• Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9-10 (2019).

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