Alexandra Montero Peters
Assistant Professor
Office: TMH 220
Email: ampeters@txstate.edu
Phone: 512.245.2142
Academia.edu
Personal Website
Educational Background
Ph.D. in Medieval History, University of Chicago
M.A. in Medieval History, University of Chicago
B.A. in Medieval Studies and History, University of Chicago
Research Interests
Medieval Mediterranean, Spain, Premodern Race and Gender, Islamic History, Manuscripts, Intellectual History, Interfaith Relations
Dr. Alexandra Montero Peters is a historian of the medieval Mediterranean world, 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 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 a richly illuminated thirteenth-century manuscript produced in the royal court of Alfonso X el Sabio ('the Learned') of Castile (r. 1252-1284). Alongside this research, she is also developing studies of how the Islamic intellectual tradition informed medieval Western notions of India, race, and marvel, and how the tradition was subsequently manipulated in the Christian context. She is specifically motivated by how imagined concepts of Indian fauna and peoples figured within premodern notions of race in these two intellectual ecosystems. A preliminary foray into this question appeared in her dissertation (2022), and she is currently drafting an article on the relationship between India, race, and medieval definitions of translatio studii.
Building on themes of sameness and difference, premodern race-craft, and the intersection between art and intellectual history, Dr. Peters is also in the process of publishing shorter works on medieval manuscripts. The first of these articles, to be published in an edited Brill volume, reassesses an illumination of Mongols playing chess in the Book of Games, which is also one of the first depictions of Mongols in the Latin Christian world. With her coauthor on this project, she contextualizes the visual significance of this image, suggesting that it reveals far greater connectivity between the Crown of Castile and the Eurasian Steppe than previously appreciated. Dr. Peters' second work shifts its focus to the significance of represented skin color in Alfonsine art. She reframes how Alfonso and other Iberian rulers articulated cultural and political power in the western Mediterranean by reassessing their representations of Black peoples in visual and textual dialogues about courtly prestige. This work, which addresses modern misunderstandings of Blackness in the Middle Ages, enslavement, and race, is forthcoming in the journal Medieval Encounters.
Dr. Peters' research has been supported by the American Association of University Women, Erasmus+ (E.U.), SSRC-Mellon Mays, FLAS, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship. She received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 2022. Prior to coming to Texas State, she taught at Bowdoin College.
Forthcoming Publications
- Book manuscript entitled Representations of Power: Alfonso X, the Book of Games, and the Islamic Tradition.
- With Laura Fernández Fernández (UCM), "Esos curiosos jugadores de ajedrez en Sevilla. La escena del folio 20v del Libro del axedrez, dados e tablas (RBME T-1-6)," in Mongoles en el Oeste. Noticias de la integración euroasiática en los reinos ibéricos (Brill).
- "Race, Chess, and Thirteenth-century Court Culture in the Western Mediterranean." Forthcoming, Medieval Encounters.
Classes Offered
- HIST 2310: Western Civilization to 1715
- HIST 3335: Spain of the Three Religions
- HIST 3374D: Reframing Medieval Power
- HIST 4318B: Race in the Middle Ages
Recent and Upcoming Talks
- “Arabic Geographies and a Thirteenth-century Castilian History of the World: Reading al-Bakrī’s Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-Mamālik to Understand Alfonso X’s General estoria.” March 2025, 100th Annual Meeting, Medieval Academy of America, Harvard University.
- “A New Approach to Reading and Seeing Black Characters in the Text and Illuminations of Castilian Manuscripts.” December 2024, Emerging Scholars in Premodern Critical Race Studies Virtual Symposium, Newberry Library.
- Webinar discussion on “Race in the Medieval Mediterranean,” part of The Medieval Mediterranean: Local and Global Perspectives webinar series, sponsored by the Society of the Medieval Mediterranean, Woolf Institute (Cambridge), IMF-CSIC (Barcelona), Medieval Studies Research Group at the University of Lincoln, Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (Universities of Ghent), and the Universities of Liege, Exeter and Edinburgh. Novemeber 2024, online.
- “Qiyān, Courtly Prestige, and Muslim-Christian Exchange: Reexamining Women and Race in the Libro de los juegos (RBME Ms. T-I-6) of Alfonso X el Sabio.” June 2024, Eighth International Conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, University of Edinburgh.