Biography

Sierra Lomuto earned 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 in Oakland, CA 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 before joining the Rowan faculty in Fall 2020.

Dr. Lomuto’s first book is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press for The Middle Ages Series. 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.

Her published work examines global influences in medieval English literature and its production of racial discourses, the politics of periodization within the global medieval framework, and contemporary appropriations of the Middle Ages. Her 2016 essay, “White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies,” and subsequent co-founding of the Medievalists of Color organization helped shape both academic and public discourse about the field’s changing landscape and the necessity for more inclusionary practices. She has been quoted in The Economist, The New Yorker, and Teen Vogue, and has also appeared as a guest lecturer on The Great Courses. She was an invited plenary speaker for the Morgan Library’s 2024 Centennial Celebration held in honor of founding librarian and director Belle da Costa Greene.

Dr. Lomuto was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study under a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors (2023-2024); a participant in the Immersive Global Middle Ages Institute (2021-2023), a two-year NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities; and a recipient of the RaceB4Race Short-Term Residency fellowship at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She currently serves on the Editorial Team of “The So What,” the Public Humanities publication of Arthuriana; the Advisory Board of the Middle English Texts Series; 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.

PUBLICATIONS

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Edited Collections

Co-editor, Speculations, the centennial issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies (2026). Link here. Listen here for a conversation with all five co-editors on the Multicultural Middle Ages podcast.

Editor, The “Medieval” Undone: Imagining a New Global Past, a special issue of boundary 2 (2023). Link here.

Articles

“Tensions of Geography: Orientalism in the Man of Law’s Tale and Floris and Blancheflour,” in New Directions in Medieval Postcolonialism, ed. Marcel Elias, a special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 55:3 (2025), 419-438. Link here.

“Making Race: From Travel Writing to Discourse,” in The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing, ed. Sebastian Sobecki (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 89-103. Link here.

“Afterword: Motions of Global Periodization,” response to Essay Cluster: grounds for a trans-regional medieval studies, beyond the global, in postmedieval 15 (2024), 285-291. Link here.

“Drifting into the Fog: The Opacity of the Past in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift,” in Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics, eds. Joshua Davies and Caroline Bergvall (Arc Humanities Press, 2024), 107-116. Link here.

“Belle da Costa Greene and the Undoing of “Medieval Studies,” in The “Medieval” Undone: Imagining a New Global Past, ed. Sierra Lomuto, a special issue of boundary 2 50:3 (2023), 1-30. Link here.

“Chaucer, Geoffrey: Teaching in Classroom,” in The Chaucer Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Newhauser (Wiley, 2023), 351-354.

“Race,” in The Chaucer Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Newhauser (Wiley, 2023), 1567-1569.

“Becoming postmedieval: The stakes of the Global Middle Ages,” in postmedieval 11 (2020), 503-512. Link here.

“Race and Vulnerability: Mongols in Thirteenth-Century Ethnographic Travel Writing,” in Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality, eds. Ann Zimo, et al. (Routledge, 2020), 48-65.

“The Mongol Princess of Tars: Global Relations and Racial Formation in The King of Tars (c. 1330),” in Exemplaria 31:3 (2019), 171-192. Link here.

“Public Medievalism and the Rigor of Anti-Racist Critique,” in In the Middle (April 4, 2019). Link here.

“Chaucer and Humanitarian Activism,” in Public Books (April 24, 2018). Link here.

“White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies,” in In the Middle (December 5, 2016). Link here.

Book Reviews

Monstrous Fantasies: England’s Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500 by Leila K. Norako. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 47 (2025), 402-406. Link here.