Marcel Elias

Marcel Elias is an assistant professor in the Department of English. His research focuses on the literary and cultural history of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. In particular, he works in the areas of Middle English and Old French literature, epic and romance, crusade and travel writing (in various languages), Christian-Muslim relations, emotion studies, and postcolonial studies.

His book, English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291-1453 (Cambridge UP, 2024), is a study of the Middle English crusade romances that proliferated between the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) and the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453). It places these romances in dialogue with multifarious Euro-Mediterranean documents to offer a novel account of late medieval crusade culture: as ambivalent and self-critical, animated by tensions and debates, and fraught with anxiety. These romances uphold ideals of holy war while expressing anxieties about issues as diverse as God’s endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of crusaders to Islam, the inadequacy of Christian warriors vis-à-vis their Muslim counterparts, and the morality of violence.

He is currently working on a second book, How the Muslim Counter-Crusading Movement Shaped European Culture, which will be a new cultural history of premodern Europe. Whereas much scholarship has emphasized the role of Latin Christian expansion (into Islamic Spain, Sicily, the Levant, and elsewhere) in the “making” of Europe during the central Middle Ages, this book will instead situate Muslim resistance at the heart of cultural change. This resistance, carried out on both military and cultural fronts, resulted in new formulations of Muslim and Christian identity. Europe absorbed these formulations, reworking them first during the central and later Middle Ages, then during the early modern period, before Enlightenment thinkers repurposed them to define modernity.

Elias is also the editor of New Directions in Medieval Postcolonialism, a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies that introduces new postcolonial voices and analytical methods into medieval studies to advance urgent conversations about race, religious difference, and the global Middle Ages. His essays have appeared in Speculum, Review of English Studies, Studies in Philology, New Medieval Literatures, The Oxford History of Poetry in English, and elsewhere.