Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan

Curriculum Vitae

Education
B.A. University of California–Davis, 2015
M.A. California State University–Chico, 2019

Biography
Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation project titled “Sultans of Babylon: Racialization and ‘Crypto-Visuality’ in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Latin Christian Manuscripts” moves away from considering the expected markers of racialization (such as particular types of skin color, physiognomy, costume, and accoutrements) and towards new vistas where text-image interaction, semiotics, materiality, topography, imposterism, accusations of appropriation, and visualized expropriation can serve as equally substantive and powerful indices when dealing critically with premodern formulations of race. As a voracious consumer of twentieth-century pulp fiction, he also works on the deployment of racist medievalism in Americana.

Research Interests
Race in the Middle Ages, Latin Christian depictions of Muslim Princes, Arthuriana, Crusade & Memory, Americana & Medievalism.

Publications
“‘Why is He Indian?’: Missed Opportunities for Discussing Race in David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021),” Arthuriana 33(2023):36–59.

“Sir Palamedes, the Indelibly ‘Saracen’ Knight: Heraldry, Monstrosity, and Race in Fifteenth-Century Arthurian Romance Manuscripts,” in The Arthurian World, eds. Victoria Coldham-Fussell, Miriam Edlich-Muth, Renée Ward. London: Routledge, 2022.

“Medieval Dreams and Far-Right Nightmares,” co-authored with Benjamin Bertrand, Current Affairs 6 no. 4, (2021).

Guillaume de Nangis, “How Sir John of Acre, butler of France, who was on guard, was deceived by some Saracens who requested baptism,” Global Medieval Sourcebook: A Digital Repository of Medieval Texts, translated by Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan.

Awards
2023 Transforming the Discipline Award
Outstanding Thesis Award for 2019–2020 from California State University, Chico for “White Saracens, Black Muslims, and Brown Hafsids: Imaginations of the ‘Saracen Prince’ in Les Grandes Chroniques De France (Royal MS 16 G VI)”

Courses
AH 303: Race in the Middle Ages and Its Contemporary Afterlives
AFR 321: First Semester Arabic

Primary Advisor(s)
Thomas E. A. Dale