We are delighted to welcome Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, our new Visiting Assistant Professor, to St. Thomas. She offers courses in Byzantine, Islamic, Armenian, and medieval European comparative and world history. Her research focuses on pre-modern imperialism, border cultures and literatures, Byzantine-Armenian relations, and letter-writing. When she’s not teaching or researching, she writes science fiction (also about empires, but with some extra artificial intelligence and cybernetics in). She’s from New York City, though she’s lived in three countries in the last three years.
She will offer the following courses in the Fall semester:
HIST 1006: This section of World History will explore patterns of continuity and change in world civilizations using visual and written propaganda to think about state power and resistance to it, empires, and cosmopolitanism.
HIST 2553 — History of the Islamic World: In this course, we will discuss the first 800 years of Islam from a world-historical perspective. Islamic culture ranges from Arabia to China, Africa, Central Asia, and the Crusader states. We will focus on the cultural achievements and flexibility of Islamic civilization in these many contexts.
HIST 2206 — History of the Middle Ages: This year-long exploration of the medieval period covers not only the European middle ages but ranges east to Byzantium (and beyond to the Mongols and China) and south to the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa. We will consider major themes which characterize ‘medieval history’ throughout Eurasia: the fall of the empires of antiquity, the development of vernacular languages, relations between secular and religious authorities, and interactions between nomadic and sedentary peoples. This is a comparative course which centers itself in the familiar European middle ages before expanding out to see wider patterns of ‘medieval’ in the Eurasian world.