Biography

Sierra Lomuto received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. She also earned her B.A. and M.A. from Mills College after previously studying at the Peralta Community Colleges, City College of San Francisco, and UC Santa Cruz. As an undergraduate, she was a dual major in Creative Writing and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She spent two years (2018-2020) at Macalester College as a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow, where she developed courses on the Global Middle Ages, Race and Medieval Literature, Chaucer and Adaptation, and Travel Literature. Her book-in-progress, Exotic Allies: Mongols and Racial Fantasy in the Literature of Medieval England, places medieval literature within a global framework in order to examine how the geopolitics of European-Mongol relations engendered a discourse of racial ideologies long before they were institutionally codified in the modern era. It argues that Europe’s ambivalent perception of Mongols coheres within a racial logic shaped by anti-Muslim crusader sentiment and a desire for more global significance. Exotic Allies ultimately claims that medieval formations of race matter to understanding the relational and complex ways in which Asians are still racialized today.

Dr. Lomuto is the editor of The “Medieval” Undone: Imagining a New Global Past, a special issue of boundary 2 (Duke); and co-editor of Speculations, the centennial issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Her essays have also been published in the peer-reviewed journals Exemplaria, postmedieval, and Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies; the edited collections Global Medieval Travel Writing: A Literary History (Cambridge), Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics (Arc Humanities Press), and Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality (Routledge); and she is a contributor to The Chaucer Encyclopedia (Wiley). She has published public essays in venues such as In the Middle, Public Books, and Medievalists of Color; she has been quoted in The Economist, The New Yorker, and Teen Vogue; and she has appeared as a guest lecturer on The Great Courses. She has forthcoming work in Approaches to Teaching the Arthurian Tradition (MLA).

Dr. Lomuto was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study under a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors (2023-2024); and was a participant in the Immersive Global Middle Ages Institute (2021-2023), a two-year NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. She currently serves on the Editorial Team of “The So What,” the Public Humanities publication of Arthuriana; and the Chaucer Forum Executive Committee of the MLA. She has previously served on the Editorial Board of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, from 2021-2024.