Lecturer in Medieval & Renaissance Studies

Biography

Sam Lasman studies the relationship between identity, the supernatural, and the past in premodern narrative literature, focusing particularly on the medieval Iranian world and northwestern Europe. He works on texts in languages including Persian, Welsh, French, Arabic, Middle English, Old Norse, and Irish. His teaching experience has included thematic courses on medieval comparative literature, ecocriticism, and classical reception, in addition to reading courses in medieval languages.

Since earning his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, he has held postdoctoral positions at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and at the University of Chicago. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including postmedieval, Viator, Arthuriana, The Journal of English & Germanic Philology, The Global Medieval Sourcebook, and edited collections from Brill, Brepols, and Bloomsbury Academic. His current book project, Parahuman Pasts, is a comparative study of how supernatural beings—including ancient giants, devouring monsters, and otherworldly seducers—construct communal identities and histories in medieval Persian, Welsh, and Old French narratives. He has also begun work on a second monograph, Colonizing the Otherworld. This focuses on the racialization of supernatural beings by 19th and 20th century authors, and has received support from institutions including the American Council of Learned Societies and the Medieval Academy of America.

He is also a fiction writer and graduate of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop.