Dr Alfred Hiatt
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8556
email: a.hiatt@qmul.ac.uk
Research interests:
Alfred Hiatt works on medieval literature and culture, with a particular interest in spatial representation. He is the author of Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (British Library and University of Chicago Press, 2008), a history of the representation and cultural significance of the antipodes in European thought from Plato to the discovery of the New World. His doctoral work and first book – The Making of Medieval Forgeries (British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2004) – was on the reception and use of forged documents. He continues to be interested in forgeries and document culture, and has recently written on the reception of medieval forgeries within the ‘Republic of Letters’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
His current major research project (Dislocations: Reading Medieval Maps) combines his interest in spatial representation with literary themes. Related interests are the spatial history of medieval London, Old English literature, geography and humanism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the medieval reception of Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan. Since 2008 he has been Book Reviews Editor for the annual journal Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
Publications:
Books
Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (British Library and University of Chicago Press, 2008)
The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2004)
Journal articles
‘Beowulf off the map’, Anglo-Saxon England 38 (2009), 11-40
‘Diplomatic arts: Hickes against Mabillon in the Republic of Letters’, Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009), 351-73
‘The Map of Macrobius before 1100’, Imago Mundi 59 (2007), 149-76
‘Petrarch’s Antipodes’, Parergon 22 (2005), 1-30
‘Blank Spaces on the Earth’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (2002), 223-50
‘The Cartographic Imagination of Thomas Elmham’, Speculum 75 (2000), 859-86
Book chapters
‘Maps and Margins: Other lands, Other peoples’, in The Oxford Handbook to Medieval Literature, ed. Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford University Press, 2010), 649-76
‘Genre without System’, in Twenty-first Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 277-94
‘Mapping the ends of empire’, in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 48-76
‘Historical Writing’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Boydell and Brewer, 2004), pp. 175-93
‘Stow, Grafton, and 15th-century historiography’, in John Stow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past, ed. I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (British Library, 2004), pp. 45-55
‘Beyond a border: the maps of Scotland in John Hardyng’s Chronicle’, in The Lancastrian Court: Proceedings of the 18th Harlaxton Symposium (Shaun Tyas, 2003), pp. 78-94