yale-1I am a professor in the Department of Art & Art History at California State University, Chico, where I teach courses on ancient and medieval art, monsters, and film. I have written Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (Routledge, 2006; paperback 2008), co-written with Susan Kim Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (ACMRS, 2013, winner of a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association and an ISAS Best Book Prize), and a number of articles on the subject of monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages. I coedited with Peter Dendle a Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Ashgate/Routledge, 2012; paperback 2013), and am the president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application), accidentally founded at Kalamazoo in 2008 to create a home for walkers in the margins of academia. I was co-director of Virtual Mappa, with Martin Foys. With Sherry C. M. Lindquist, I curated Terrors, Aliens, and Wonders: Medieval Monsters at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. I am now at work on the Franks Casket and images of Jews on medieval world maps.  I am an active (and founding) member of the Material Collective, and a regular contributor to the MC group blog. I was born and raised in New York, the son and grandson of artists, and in a family of writers of one sort and another.

See here for my Art History Rules site, containing information and advice on how to write art history papers, how to find and cite sources, and how to apply for graduate school.

See here for my Academia.edu site, with much of the same content, plus a current CV, and here for my Humanities Commons site, which has PDFs to download.

Education

  • Stanford University, Ph.D., Art History, 2003, “Living at the Edge of the World: Marginality and Monstrosity in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and Beyond”
  • Stanford University, M.A., Art History, 2000
  • Cornell University (magna cum laude), B.A., History of Art, 1998

Contact
Department of Art & Art History
California State University, Chico
Chico, CA 95929-0820
asmittman@csuchico.edu