I am an Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. I have written Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (Routledge, 2006; paperback 2008), co-written with Susan Kim Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (ACMRS, 2012), and a number of articles on the subject of monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages. I coedited with Peter Dendle a Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Ashgate, 2012), and am the president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application), accidentally founded at Kalamazoo in 2008 to create a home for walkers in the margins of academia. I am co-director of Digital Mappaemundi, with Martin Foys. I am now at work on articles on Satan in the Junius 11 manuscript, the Franks Casket, and images of Jews on medieval world maps.

I was born and raised in New York, the son and grandson of artists, and in a family of writers of one sort and another. My work with manuscripts, primarily those in the collections of Cambridge, Oxford and the British Library, has given me a sense of tangible connection to the distant past. The charge I feel as my fingers gently touch the edges of folios, where the vellum has been darkened by the touch of hundreds of readers over a thousand years, is incomparable.

See here for my Art History Rules site, containing information and advice on how to write art history papers, how to find and cite sources, and how to apply for graduate school.

Education

1. -Stanford University, Ph.D., Art History, 2003, “Living at the Edge of the World: Marginality and Monstrosity in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and Beyond”
   

2. -Stanford University, M.A., Art History, 2000
   

3. -Cornell University (magna cum laude), B.A., History of Art, 1998
   

THEME SONG:  Tom Waits, "Goin' Out West"