Faculty

UCLA faculty who are currently members of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies are listed below by department with a summary of their academic interests and specialties. Faculty belonging to interdepartmental programs are cross-listed.

UCLA faculty specializing in any aspect of Medieval and/or Renaissance Studies may request to be added to the Center’s faculty roster. Such requests are directed to the Center Director and approved by the Center’s Faculty Advisory Committee.

ARCHITECTURE & URBAN DESIGN
	Diane Favro: Architecture and topography of late Roman and early medieval Rome; eleventh-century Armenian architecture; architecture and urbanism in fifteenth-century Italy; virtual reality modeling projects.
ART HISTORY
	Lamia Balafrej: Islamic art and aesthetic theory; Persian manuscript painting; the Mediterranean; art, labor, and ecology; iconoclasm.
	Charlene Villaseñor Black: Early modern Iberian world, 16th-18th centuries; early modern art, trade, and materiality; early modern art and science; Catholic art and gender politics.
	Meredith Cohen: Art, architecture, and urban development of high medieval Europe.
	Sharon E. J. Gerstel: Byzantine art and archaeology; late medieval peasantry; art and archaeology of the Crusades; ethnography of the early modern Balkans.
	Cecelia Klein (Emeritus): Aztec art before, during, and after the Spanish Conquest of 1521.
	David Kunzle (Emeritus): Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art in the Netherlands, England, and Germany; art and Reformation; now finishing a book called Chesuchristo, the fusion in word and image of Jesus Christ and Che Guevara.
	Stella Nair: Andean art, architecture, and urbanism; cross cultural exchange in the Americas, construction technology, material culture studies, spatial theory.
	Bronwen Wilson: the history of art, visual culture, and urbanism of Venice and the Mediterranean world (1400-1700), print culture, portraiture and physiognomy, cartography, travel imagery, and early modern globalization.
	Joanna Woods-Marsden (Emeritus): Portraiture in Renaissance Italy; gender studies; Titian; Renaissance courts.
ASIAN LANGUAGES & CULTURES
	William M. Bodiford: Japanese religious life and culture; East Asian Buddhism.
	Robert E. Buswell: Buddhism in medieval East Asia; Buddhist mysticism; monastic culture.
	John B. Duncan: Medieval Korean institutional and intellectual history through the eighteenth century.
	Torquil Duthie: Early Japanese poetry, mythology, and historical writing.
	Natasha Heller: Religion in China, 9th-16th century; monasticism; legal culture.
	Stephanie W. Jamison: Vedic Sanskrit; Indo-European linguistics.
	Peter H. Lee (Emeritus): Classical and medieval Korean literature; comparative East Asian literature.
	Gregory Schopen: Buddhist studies and Indology; social and religious history of south Asia.
	Richard E. Strassberg (Emeritus): Classical Chinese literature and culture.
CLASSICS
	David Blank: Ancient philosophy; ancient medicine and rhetoric; transmission of classical texts.
	Francesca Martelli: Latin literature, especially Ovid and Cicero; the reception of Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance worlds.
	Kathryn A. Morgan: Greek intellectual history and philosophy and its reception in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
	Jaan Puhvel (Emeritus): Comparative philology; comparative mythology.
	Giulia Sissa: Culture and thought in ancient societies; the classical tradition in medieval and Renaissance political theory; also Political Science.
	Brent Vine: Classical and Indo-European linguistics; Vulgar Latin; history of English.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
	Massimo Ciavolella (CMRS Director): Boccaccio; Renaissance literature; Renaissance theories of love; see also Italian.
	Katherine C. King (Emerita): Epic; tragedy; the Classical tradition; women's studies.
	Efraín Kristal: Spanish-American colonial literature; the Spanish historical epic; see also Spanish and Portuguese.
	Kirstie McClure: History and historiography of political thought; politics and literature; feminist theory; see also Political Science.
	Zrinka Stahuljak: Medieval romance, historiography, and poetry; history of sexuality; Middle Ages and the nineteenth century; medieval translation theory; translation studies; see also French & Francophone Studies.
ENGLISH
	Michael J. B. Allen (Distinguished Research Professor): Renaissance Platonism; Chaucer, Shakespeare; Spenser; see also Italian and Philosophy.
	A. R. Braunmuller (Distinguished Professor): Tudor and Stuart English drama; European drama and art; history of the book.
	King-Kok Cheung: Milton; Shakespeare; Marlowe.
	Christine Chism: Old and Middle English literature, drama, and culture; theories of history, society, and cultural encounter; medieval Islam and Arabic; gender and sexuality.
	Edward I. Condren (Professor Emeritus): Old and Middle English poetry; Chaucer; The Pearl poet; numerical design in medieval literature; intellectual property.
	Matthew Fisher: Historiography, hagiography, paleography, codicology; Old and Middle English literature; Anglo-Norman literature; digital humanities.
	Barbara Fuchs: Early modern English and Spanish literature, Mediterranean and transatlantic studies, literature and empire, transnationalism and literary history, race and religion in the early modern world; see also Spanish & Portuguese.
	Lowell Gallagher: Spenser; English Catholic studies; early modern prose fiction; hermeneutic theory; queer theory.
	Eric Jager: Old English, Middle English, Latin, French, Italian; Augustine and patristics; the history of the book; law and ritual; literary theory.
	Henry Ansgar Kelly (Distinguished Research Professor): England, Italy, France, Spain; literature, canon law, common law, liturgy, theology, history of ideas (biblical, classical, medieval, early modern).
	Gordon Kipling (Professor Emeritus): Medieval and Tudor drama; theatrical spectacle; Shakespeare; Chaucer; Netherlandic-British cultural relations.
	V. A. Kolve (Distinguished Professor Emeritus): Medieval drama; Chaucer; literature and visual arts; medieval anti-Semitism.
	Richard A. Lanham (Professor Emeritus): Medieval, Renaissance, and modern digital rhetoric.
	Arthur Little: Nationalism and imperialism in early modern English culture; Shakespeare; race, gender, and sexuality in early modern culture.
	Claire McEachern: Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature; historiography; national identity; history of gender; political theory; religion; editing of Shakespeare.
	Donka Minkova (Distinguished Research Professor): History of English; English historical phonology; metrics; syntax.
	Joseph Falaky Nagy (Professor Emeritus): Medieval Celtic literatures; Celtic folklore; comparative folklore and mythology.
	Jonathan F. S. Post (Distinguished Professor): Seventeenth-century poetry; Milton; Shakespeare.
	Florence H. Ridley (Professor Emerita): Chaucer; fourteenth-century English poetry; Middle English dialects; medieval Scots poetry.
	David S. Rodes (Director Emeritus, UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts): Renaissance and Restoration theater and graphic arts; Shakespeare; Dryden; Wycherly; Molière.
	Karen E. Rowe (Professor Emerita): Colonial American literature to 1800; Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature; women's literature.
	Debora Shuger (Distinguished Professor): Tudor-Stuart religion and literature, neo-Latin, early modern intellectual history (especially religion, law, political thought).
	Arvind Thomas: Middle English and early modern Literature, particularly texts that engage discourses in Latin such as canon law.
	Robert N. Watson (Distinguished Professor): Shakespeare; Renaissance drama; Metaphysical poetry.
FRENCH & FRANCOPHONE STUDIES
	Jean-Claude Carron: Humanism; French Renaissance; poetry, literature, and philosophy; history of food.
	Zrinka Stahuljak: Continental French, Anglo-French, and Outremer literature, historiography, and culture; Mediterranean studies; Manuscript studies; Medievalism; History of sexuality; Translation studies.
GEOGRAPHY
	Norman J.W. Thrower (Emeritus): Geographical discovery and exploration; history of cartography.
GERMANIC LANGUAGES
	Marianna D. Birnbaum (Professor Emerita): Hungarian literature; Renaissance culture of Central Europe; Jews in Renaissance Europe.
	James A. Schultz (Professor Emeritus): Middle High German literature; history of sexuality; history of childhood; gender.
	Christopher M. Stevens: Germanic linguistics and philology; historical linguistics; dialectology.
HISTORY
	Brian P. Copenhaver (Professor Emeritus): Late medieval and early modern philosophy and science; magic, Cabala, and hermetica; also Philosophy.
	Patrick Geary (Professor Emeritus): Early medieval social and cultural history; barbarian societies; history of memory; history of ethnicity.
	Carlo Ginzburg (Professor Emeritus): Popular culture; intellectual history; iconography.
	Jessica Goldberg: Medieval Mediterranean History, especially of Italy and Egypt; Economic and Legal History; Geography; Cairo Geniza Studies.
	Richard Hovannisian (Professor Emeritus): History of Armenia and the Caucasus.
	Barisa Krekic (Professor Emeritus): Medieval southeastern Europe; Medieval Russia; Byzantium; Dalmatian and Italian urban history in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
	Lauro Martines (Professor Emeritus): History and literature of Renaissance Italy and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
	Ronald Mellor (Distinguished Research Professor): Roman history; religion and law.
	Michael G. Morony: Early Islamic history.
	Anthony Pagden: The history of political and social theory with special reference to European overseas expansion and its aftermath; see also Political Science.
	Carla Gardina Pestana: English America, especially 17th century; religion and empire in the British Atlantic world; conquest of Jamaica.
	Richard H. Rouse (Distinguished Research Professor): History of texts and libraries; manuscript production; paleography.
	Teofilo F. Ruiz: Late medieval social and cultural history; the kingdom of Castile; Iberian peninsula, late medieval and early modern.
	Peter Stacey: Renaissance political theory and intellectual history.
	Geoffrey Symcox (Professor Emeritus): Urban history, architecture, and planning (Renaissance and Baroque); states and institutions in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, France and Italy; Columbus and the Columbian voyages.
	Kevin Terraciano: Colonial Latin American history, especially New Spain; Mesoamerican writing systems and languages; ethnohistory, philology, art history.
	Stefania Tutino: Early modern cultural and intellectual history, post-Reformation Catholicism; see also Italian.
	Scott L. Waugh: (Executive Vice-Chancellor and Provost): Social and political history of medieval England.
HISTORY OF MEDICINE
	Rinaldo F. Canalis (Professor of Surgery, Department of Head and Neck Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA): History of surgery and anatomy during the Renaissance; history of otology from antiquity to the present.
	Ynez Violé O'Neill (Professor Emerita): History of medicine, especially anatomy, surgery, and neurology; medical images.
INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES PROGRAM
	Stephanie W. Jamison: Vedic Sanskrit; Indo-European linguistics; see also Asian Languages and Cultures.
	Joseph Falaky Nagy (Professor Emeritus): Medieval Celtic literatures; Celtic folklore; comparative folklore and mythology; also English.
	Christopher M. Stevens: Germanic linguistics and philology; historical linguistics; dialectology; see also Germanic Languages.
	Brent Vine: Classical and Indo-European linguistics; Vulgar Latin; history of English; see also Classics.
ITALIAN
	Michael J. B. Allen (Distinguished Research Professor): Ficino, Pico, and the Quattrocento; Renaissance philosophy, especially Neo-Platonism; see also English and Philosophy.
	Luigi Ballerini (Professor Emeritus): Medieval Italian poetry; Renaissance gastronomy.
	Massimo Ciavolella (CMRS Director): Boccaccio; Renaissance literature; Renaissance theories of love.
	Andrea Moudarres: Dante, Renaissance Epic, Humanism, Islam and the West, and Political Theology.
	Stefania Tutino: Early modern cultural and intellectual history, post-Reformation Catholicism; see also History.
	Edward F. Tuttle (Professor Emeritus): Italian philology; comparative Romance historical linguistics; socio-pragmatic and structural motives of language change; medieval Italian literature.
LAW
	Khaled Abou El Fadl: Medieval Muslim law.
	Stephen C. Yeazell (Emeritus): Medieval and early modern adjudicative procedure in Britain.
DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT UCLA
	Rinaldo F. Canalis (Professor of Surgery, Department of Head and Neck Surgery): History of surgery and anatomy during the Renaissance; history of otology from antiquity to the present.
	Ynez Violé O'Neill (Professor Emerita): History of medicine, especially anatomy, surgery, and neurology; medical images.
MUSICOLOGY
	Marie Louise Göllner (Professor Emerita): Music of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries and the late Renaissance.
	Richard A. Hudson (Professor Emeritus): Renaissance instrumental music, especially dance-related forms; tempo rubato; falling-third cadences.
	Mitchell Morris: Fourteenth- to sixteenth-century music; relationship between music and liturgical development in the late medieval mass.
	Elizabeth Randell Upton: Medieval and Renaissance music and musical culture; musical paleography and codicology; performance and listening; Early Music revivals; medievalism and music.
NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES & CULTURES
	Carol Bakhos: Ancient and medieval rabbinic texts; comparative scriptural interpretation.
	Michael Cooperson: Classical Arabic literature, especially biography; the cultural history of Abbasid Baghdad.
	S. Peter Cowe: Medieval East Christian theology and spirituality; Armenian language and literature.
	Herbert A. Davidson (Professor Emeritus): Medieval Hebrew literature; Rabbinic literature; medieval Jewish and Arabic philosophy.
	Ismail K. Poonawala (Professor Emeritus): Early intellectual and cultural history of Islam; Shi'ism, Isma'ilis/Fatimids; classical Arabic literature; contemporary Islamic thought.
	Yona Sabar (Professor Emeritus): Hebrew and Aramaic; Syriac; Modern Aramaic dialects; Jewish languages; folk and religious literature of Kurdistani Jews.
	Luke Yarbrough: Islamic history and historiography; medieval Egypt and Syria; communal boundaries and conversion; polemic; Islamic law; premodern Arabic literature; administrative history.
PHILOSOPHY
	Michael J.B. Allen (Distinguished Research Professor): Renaissance philosophy, especially Neo-Platonism; see also English and Italian.
	John Carriero: Medieval Aristotelian philosophy; seventeenth-century philosophy.
	Brian Copenhaver:Late medieval and early modern philosophy; magic, Cabala, and hermetica; modern Italian philosophy; see also History.
	Calvin Normore: Medieval philosophy; 16th-and-17th-century philosophy.
	Terence Parsons (Distinguished Research Professor): Philosophy of language; metaphysics; history of logic.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
	Kirstie McClure: History and historiography of political thought; politics and literature; feminist theory; see also Comparative Literature.
	Anthony Pagden: The history of political and social theory with special reference to European overseas expansion and its aftermath; see also History.
	Giulia Sissa: Culture and thought in ancient societies; the classical tradition in medieval and Renaissance political theory; see also Classics.
SCANDINAVIAN
	Jesse L. Byock (Research Professor): Viking archaeology; Old Icelandic and Old Norse history, society, and sagas; feud and violence in the Viking world.
	James R. Massengale (Professor Emeritus): Scandinavian medieval ballads; Scandinavian folk tales.
	Timothy R. Tangherlini: Folklore, oral traditions, ritual; Old Norse.
SLAVIC LANGUAGES & LITERATURES
	Henning Andersen (Research Professor): Cultural contacts in the Baltic and Slavic lands; historical linguistics.
	Emily Klenin (Professor Emerita): Slavic linguistics, languages, and literature.
	Gail Lenhoff: Old Russian hagiography, history writing, textual production.
SOCIOLOGY
	Rebecca Jean Emigh: Fifteenth-century Tuscan agriculture; historical demography; sociological theory.
SPANISH & PORTUGUESE
	Verónica Cortínez: Colonial and contemporary Latin American literature; literary theory; Chilean film.
	John Dagenais: Medieval Castilian and Catalan literature; Hispano-Latin; manuscript culture; Digital humanities; Romanesque architecture and pilgrimage.
	Barbara Fuchs: Early modern English and Spanish literature, Mediterranean and transatlantic studies, literature and empire, transnationalism and literary history, race and religion in the early modern world; see also English.
	Efraín Kristal : Spanish-American colonial literature; the Spanish historical epic; also Comparative Literature.
	C. Brian Morris (Professor Emeritus): Golden-Age Spanish poetry; the Picaresque novel.
	Javier Patiño Loira: Early modern Iberian literature; early modern Spanish and Italian poetics and rhetoric; early modern libraries.
	Enrique Rodríguez-Cepeda (Professor Emeritus) : Cervantes/Spanish Golden Age; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theater; popular culture and Spanish ballads.
THEATER
	Michael Hackett: Early Baroque theater; Shakespeare; the English masque.
WORLD ARTS & CULTURES
	Emma Lewis Thomas (Professor Emerita): Renaissance and Baroque dance history; translation of Italian, French, German, English texts and notation; re-creation of dances; performance practice.