Profile:
Elspeth Carruthers teaches courses in medieval European history as well as an introductory survey of “western civilization.” The course that best reflects her research interests is her upper-level seminar in Germany during the later Middle Ages (“Germans Before Germany”), designed to provide advanced students with lectures and readings that guide them through the complicated political history of the medieval German Empire, while at the same time challenging basic presumptions about the inevitability of the nation-state, the emergence of ethnic and national identity, and the relationship between material and political culture.Carruthers is currently completing her manuscript (Transforming the Medieval Baltic Frontier: the Christianization and Colonization of Pomerania and Western Prussia), and she has a chapter on that topic in the forthcoming Davis Center volume on migration (Rochester , 2007). Her work engages issues surrounding migration, identity, and human impact on the environment, with specific focus on the relationship between land use and medieval habits of mind. She has begun new research into how medieval people delineated physical space and represented it in law (written and oral), maps, and chronicles, and has written about the links between medieval memorial practices and contemporary installation art (“Circuitio, Memory, and the Medieval Mapping of Space,” in Jessica Stockholder. Kissing the Wall , 2004).