Karla Mallette

I work on communications between languages and literary traditions in the medieval Mediterranean—especially Arabic, Latin and the Romance vernaculars—and the way that we remember that history today. I was trained as a literary historian in an interdisciplinary program (the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies), so the historical context in which people wrote literature is very important to me. I am interested especially in things that travel from one shore of the Mediterranean to another – people, books, ideas, and material objects – how they are transformed in the process, and the transformative cultural impact they have in a new land.

My first book, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), described the emergence of the very first poetry in Italian in a kingdom where poets wrote in Arabic only a generation earlier. European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), my second book, looked at 19th and 20th century intellectuals from southern Europe who traced the origins of their nations to the contact between Islamic and Christian civilizations in the medieval Mediterranean. My most recent book, Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean (University of Chicago Press, 2021), studies the strategies that language uses to transcend the boundaries that language creates. I profile two pre-modern cosmopolitan languages, Arabic and Latin, in order to think about men and women of letters who take on a new language – and with it a new literary identity – in order to participate in trans-regional and trans-historical cultural debate. I am now working on a project on regimes of risk assessment and management in the pre-modern Mediterranean. I publish essays on medieval translations of Aristotelian philosophy, framed narratives, European Orientalism, and Mediterranean Studies, in addition to Italian literature.

I teach courses on medieval Italian literature, modern Italian culture, Mediterranean Studies, Islamic world literature, and the Qur’an. I directed the Global Islamic Studies Center from 2014-2020, and now am Chair of the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan.

Affiliations

• Romance Languages and Literatures
• Middle East Studies
• Global Islamic Studies Center

Publications

“Dante and the Mediterranean.” The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, 368-82. Oxford University Press, 2021.

“The Hazards of Narration: Frame-Tale Technologies and the ‘Oriental Tale.’” The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and James Simpson, 184-96. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020.

“The Secular Wisdom of Kalila and Dimna.” Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, ed. Christine Chism. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118635193.ctwl0098

"Palermo." Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418, ed. David Wallace, 2:12-24. Oxford University Press, 2016