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 training and work are guided by interdisciplinary methods, and, as such, she collaborates extensively with colleagues in other fields.

Her current book project, provisionally entitled Representations of Power: Alfonso X, the Book of Games, and the Islamic Tradition, is a close study of cosmopolitan connections 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. Crucially, 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 written about race and race-craft in the Middle Ages. This inquiry has taken her from the folios of medieval Arabic geographies to the illuminations in vernacular histories of the world. Much of this work supports her second monograph. This project will investigate the racialized representation of India and its people in Castilian and Arabic materials to show how India served as a staging ground for premodern notions of race in both Christian and Islamic traditions. Finally, she is also interested in the materiality and long lives of medieval manuscripts and their fragments, developing projects on, as examples, pieces from Northwestern’s Special Collections and serving as a researcher on the E.U.-funded project Libros y mapas medievales en la esfera cultural contemporánea: recortes, exposiciones y facsimiles/Medieval Books and Maps in the Contemporary Cultural Sphere: Cuttings, Exhibitions and Facsimiles (2026-2030).

Her work 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.

Selected Publications

“Race, Chess, and Thirteenth-Century Court Culture in the Western Mediterranean,” Medieval Encounters 32, no. 3 (2026): 240-292.

“Esos curiosos jugadores de ajedrez en Sevilla. Mongoles en la corte del rey sabio.” Co-written with Laura Fernández Fernández in Mongoles en el Oeste. Noticias de la integración euroasiática en los reinos ibéricos, edited by Antonio Garcia Espada and Bruno de Nicola. Brill, 2025.

Teaching Interests

Professor Montero Peters offers introductory courses on the premodern Mediterranean, as well as seminars dedicated to thematic understandings of the medieval millennium (500-1500). Her current rotation includes:

• HIST 101-8-26 ‘Here Be Dragons’: Medieval Travel
• HIST 200-0-20/MENA 290-4-2 From Marrakesh to Madrid: Spain and North Africa, 700-1600
• HIST 200-0-24 Rulers of the Medieval World: Queens, Emperors, and Caliphs
• HIST 201-1-20 Europe in the Medieval and Early Modern World
• HIST 292-0-20 Thieves and Collectors: Medieval Objects in Modern Hands
• HIST 395-0-20 Spain of the Three Religions: Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Medieval Iberia

Affiliated Programs

• Middle East North African Program
• Graduate Cluster in Medieval Studies