Our Speakers

Elly Truitt

Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania

Elly Truitt studies the circulation of scientific objects and natural knowledge throughout central and western Eurasia and north Africa, from antiquity into the early modern period. She has a particular interest in how scientific ideas, practices, and objects traveled and were adapted to new settings, and philosophical treatises, archival material, literary texts, lyric, material objects, and images all inform their work. Truitt’s first book, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Penn, 2015), explored the history of automata in medieval Latin culture, where they appeared as gifts from foreign rulers in Baghdad and Damascus and at the courts of Constantinople and Shengdu, and demonstrated that artificial people and animals were ubiquitous in medieval culture, and that they were used to pose questions about identity, liveliness, and the ethics of knowledge and creation. Her second book, Necessary Inventions: Roger Bacon, the Middle Ages, and the Making of Modern Science (Penn, forthcoming 2026), explores how “the Middle Ages” as a historical period and medieval Christian theology are both necessary to the narratives of scientific progress. Truitt’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Harvard University/Villa I Tatti, and other institutions. They have published articles on the history of automata, literary marvels, polar bears, balsam, timekeeping technology, and, most recently, on Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, Roger Bacon and courtly science, and on concepts of artificial intelligence in the Middle Ages.

Truitt is currently occupied with several projects: an article on monumental astronomical clocks and Christian temporality in late medieval Europe, a book on the history of magic, a collaborative project (with Pamela Long) on Leonardo’s Madrid Codex, and a study of courtly science in the medieval world.

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Peggy McCracken

President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of French, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan

Peggy McCracken is the Anna Julia Cooper Distinguished University Professor of French Medieval Literature at the University of Michigan. Her teaching and research interests are located in the intersections of medieval literature, history, and theory. She is the author or co-author of six books, including most recently In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (2017). McCracken is the co-editor of six essay collections and translator of Gui de Cambrai’s Barlaam et Josaphat (2014). Her current work investigates the precarity and persistence of human being in medieval French translations and adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco

Augustus R. Street Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature at Yale University

J R Velasco teaches in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale. He got a PhD in Philology from the University of Salamanca; he will defend his PhD in Law at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris) in April 2025. Velasco has published, more recently, Microliteratures: The Production of the Margin in Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Books (Cornell UP, 2025), and Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). He is interested in the production of legal codes and legal thinking in the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages.