Suzanne Conklin Akbari

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is a medievalist at the University of Toronto specializing in the intersection of medieval literature and the history of ideas.

[edit] Background and Education

Akbari was born to a modest family in small-town Butler, New Jersey in 1965. She left high school at the age of fifteen to attend Johns Hopkins University, where she earned her B.A. in 1984. Although she had as a child dreamed of one day becoming a geneticist, she was inspired by her humanities professors at Johns Hopkins. After spending a few years in New York City working in video production, Akbari earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1995 and then left for the University of Toronto, where she had accepted an employment offer after considering several others. She has three daughters and one son.

[edit] Publications

• Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (University of Toronto Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8020-3605-8)
• "Metaphor and Metamorphosis in the Ovide moralisé and Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune," in Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2006).
• "Woman as Mediator in Medieval Depictions of Muslims: The Case of Floripas," in Medieval Constructions in Gender and Identity (2006).
• "Alexander in the Orient: Bodies and Boundaries in the Roman de toute chevalerie," in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages (2005, ISBN 0-521-82731-0).
• "The Hunger for National Identity in Richard Coeur de Lion," in Reading Medieval Culture (2005).
• "The Diversity of Mankind in The Book of John Mandeville," in Eastward Bound: Medieval Travel and Travellers (2004).
• "Placing the Jews in Late Medieval English Literature," in Orientalism and the Jews (2004).
• "Incorporation in the Siege of Melayne," in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England (2004).
• "Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto: The Faculty Perspective," in Florilegium (2003).
• "Orientation and Nation in the Canterbury Tales," in Chaucer's Cultural Geography (2002).
• "From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation," in The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000, ISBN 0-312-23981-5).
• "Islam and Islamic Culture," in The Dante Encyclopedia (2000).
• "Imagining Islam: The Role of Images in Medieval Depictions of Muslims," Scripta Mediterranea 19-20 (1998-99).
• "The Rhetoric of Antichrist in Western Lives of Muhammad," Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 8 (1997).
• "Medieval Optics in Guillaume de Lorris' Roman de la Rose," Mediaevalia et Humanistica, n.s. 21 (1994).
• "Nature's Forge Recast in the Roman de Silence," in Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture (1994).