About
Karla Mallette studies communications between literary traditions in the medieval Mediterranean—especially Arabic and the Romance vernaculars—and the way that we remember that history today. Her first book, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), traced the transition between Arabic and Italian literary traditions in medieval Sicily; her second, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), focused on a southern European tradition of scholarship that identifies the origins of modernity in the contact between Islamic and Christian civilizations in the medieval Mediterranean. 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. By profiling two pre-modern cosmopolitan languages, Arabic and Latin, and acknowledging the emergent cosmopolitan languages of the twenty-first century, the book contextualizes and defamiliarizes the national language system of European modernity. Lives of the Great Languages was winner of the 2022 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione award for best book in Comparative Literary Studies in 2022. She has published essays on medieval translations of Aristotelian philosophy, framed narratives, European Orientalism, and Mediterranean Studies, in addition to Italian literature.
Recent and Selected Publications:
“Furtuna fallenti: Postcolonial studies and the Italian Middle Ages.” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, special issue, “New Directions in Medieval Postcolonialism,” 53 (3) 521-42.
“Sicilian Multilingualism and Cosmopolitan French.” Medieval French Interlocutions: Shifting Perspectives on a Language in Contact, ed. Thomas O’Donnell, Jane Gilbert, and Brian J. Reilly, 269-92. York: York Medieval Press, 2024.
“The 1001 Nights and Mediterranean Framed Narrative Traditions.” Approaches to Teaching the 1001 Nights, ed. Paulo Lemos Horta. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2023, 140-45.
“Narration as Raumschach: Kalila and Dimna in Time, Space and Languages.” Postmedieval 13 (2022): 313 – 329.
“Lingua Franca.” Companion to Mediterranean History, ed. Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita, 330-44. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014.
A Sea of Languages: Literature and Culture in the Pre-modern Mediterranean (co-edited, with Suzanne Akbari). University of Toronto Press, 2013.
European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. The book received the 13th Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, awarded by the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M University.
“Beyond Mimesis: Aristotle’s Poetics in the Medieval Mediterranean.” PMLA 124 (2009): 583-91
The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
Research Areas(s)
- Medieval Mediterranean literature in Italian, Arabic, Latin
- translation between Greek, Arabic and Latin during the Middle Ages
Field(s) of Study
- Medieval Mediterranean literature in Italian, Arabic, Latin
- Translation between Greek, Arabic and Latin during the Middle Ages
