DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Middle Eastern and North African History; Medieval and Early Modern European History

Thematic Field(s):  Political and Policy History; War and Empire in History; Religious History

Principal Research Interest(s):  The Mediterranean, Iberia, Intellectual History, Muslim-Christian-Jewish Relations, Premodern Race and Gender, Codicology

Biography 

Alexandra Montero Peters is a historian of the medieval Mediterranean, specifically the intellectual exchange between Iberia, North Africa, and the Near East. Working primarily with Arabic and Castilian manuscripts, she investigates the many ways textual, visual, and intellectual traditions traversed confessional, cultural, and racial boundaries. Her current book project, Representations of Power: Alfonso X, the Book of Games, and the Islamic Tradition, is a close study of these themes via the richly illuminated, titular manuscript produced in the court of Alfonso X the Learned of Castile (r. 1252-1284).

The esoteric knowledge enshrined in the Book of Games was heavily indebted to the Islamic tradition, a fact that prompts a myriad of questions, most notably about why a Christian king would invest untold resources into a work that lauds the intellectual and courtly achievements of the Islamic world. Answering this question, Representations of Power asserts that Muslim-Christian exchange was central to how Mediterranean rulers like Alfonso X articulated authority locally and across the sea, and that a language of power intelligible to nearby Muslim potentates was politically necessary for the Castilian court. Indeed, works like the Book of Games and their Mediterranean entanglements ultimately allow for a reimagination of how intellectual discourse travels across time and space, and how certain themes repeatedly transcend their origins and find traction in new political and cultural contexts.  

Alongside this research, she has forthcoming publications on race and race-craft in the Middle Ages. This interest has taken her from the folios of medieval Arabic geographies to the illuminations from vernacular histories of the world. Much of this work supports her second monograph project, which will investigate the racialized representation of India and its people in Castilian and Arabic manuscripts to show how India served as a staging ground for premodern notions of race in both Christian and Islamic traditions.  

Her research has been supported by the American Association of University Women, Erasmus+ (E.U.), SSRC-Mellon Mays, FLAS, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Prior to Northwestern, she taught at Texas State University and Bowdoin College.