Cord Whitaker

Associate Professor of English

Researches and teaches late medieval English literature, the history of race, religious and cultural conflict in the Middle Ages, and the modern literary and political uses of medievalism.  

Dr. Cord J. Whitaker teaches courses on a wide variety of medieval subjects such as Chaucer, medieval romance, and the medieval development of race as well as the modern afterlives of these authors, texts, and developments.

His scholarship likewise routinely moves between focusing on medieval literature and history and focusing on medievalism, or how the Middle Ages were evoked or recreated by post-medieval authors. Dr. Whitaker’s scholarship has appeared in journals such as the Journal of English and Germanic Philology and the Yearbook of Langland Studies, and in collections such as Veer Ecology and the Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. He routinely edits important work as well, and he is the 2019-2020 Friends member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a 2019 Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. In October 2019, he published a new book Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), and he is hard at work on another, to be titled The Harlem Middle Ages: Color, Time, and Harlem Renaissance Medievalism.

Whitaker believes that scholarship matters most when it has an impact in the world outside the classroom. Whitaker’s commitment to public outreach means that he regularly writes for online, open access publications, such as the Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. He blogs at In the Middle, the most read academic blog in medieval studies, and The Spoke, which he co-founded as the blog for U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s Institute for Global Affairs at Wellesley College. In addition to serving on major committees for the Modern Language Association and the Medieval Academy of America, he is also on the Steering Committee for the Medievalists of Color, a professional organization dedicated to supporting the work of scholars of color working globally in the different disciplines of medieval studies. In his work, he strives to model how public scholarship can be simultaneously intellectually rigorous, broadly accessible, and inclusive.

Whitaker’s courses include:

  • English 210: “The perfection, the beauty, the grandeur & sublimity”: The History of the English Language
  • English 213: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Community, Dissent, and Difference in the Late Middle Ages
  • English 291: What Is Racial Difference? on the literary, social, and scientific histories of race
  • English 315: Medieval special topics including
    • The Black, the Lady, and the Priest: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Race
    • Reason and the Medieval Wild Man on medieval literature’s philosophical and conceptual engagements with the idea of the human.

Education

  • B.A., Yale University
  • M.A., Duke University
  • Ph.D., Duke University

Current and upcoming courses

  • This course considers racism a hegemonic discourse that permeates many unto all elements of life within our current age. The course considers racism as a discourse that may penetrate to the very spirit of the individual, whether victim or perpetrator, racist or antiracist. Literature that aims to depict elements of real life, capture their spirit, and leave readers feeling fundamentally changed often aims to produce transformation at the level of the reader’s soul. In order to understand the dynamic interactions between literature, racism, and the spirit, this course examines scriptural texts from major religious traditions, philosophical and scholarly traditions germane to racism’s influence on the soul, explicitly white supremacist thought, and critical race theory. Students will focus on meditative practices for reading and analysis. We will use these practices to ask: what happens when literature, racism, and the spirit come together? And how can such knowledge help to fashion a collective life worth living?
  • This course takes its title from Duby’s magisterial history The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, which studies medieval marriage and its implications for marriage and gender relations in modernity. We will build on Duby’s work by considering how medieval romance literature has constructed not only marriage but also race. We will read medieval romances that depict religious differences as physical differences, especially skin color, and we will consider texts in the theological, philosophical, and historical contexts that informed their creation and reception. We will also consider the afterlives of medieval romance in modern love stories that are concerned with race. We will inquire, what do blackness and whiteness mean in chivalric literature and the history of love? And is modern race actually medieval? Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.