I’m a senior undergraduate at Harvard, concentrating in History with a secondary in Linguistics. I currently work as a Research Assistant for MOL, investigating objects and writing their biographies. In my freshman year, I studied medieval material culture under Professor Daniel Smail, which gave me my first exposure to the wonderful medieval objects in Harvard’s collections. I studied a 15th-century Russian icon as well as medieval world maps.
Since then, I have continued to study medieval history, with a focus on geography and cartography. I am very interested in the borders of medieval Europe, particularly in the far north and the Near East. What did medieval people think of their outsiders and frontiers? What was the relationship between texts, oral traditions, maps, and practice? And perhaps most importantly, what can medieval frontier legends tell us about modern notions of difference? I’m currently writing my senior thesis on the often forgotten Renaissance debate on the Riphean Mountains, an ancient frontier legend about the far north that came under scrutiny in the fifteenth century. This is a journey that I have been on since my first semester at Harvard, and it’s been extremely rewarding to dig into this subject so deeply.
I first realized my interests in this subject through the physical objects of medieval world maps. Many of the medieval objects in Harvard’s collection attest to the vibrant cultural exchanges that occurred at the edges of Europe. Physical objects often have fascinating stories, having traveled across borders and moved through different contexts throughout their long life. I am excited to help bring these objects to life and get students up close and personal with medieval material culture.