STS
Sarina Kuersteiner
Job Title
Assistant Professor of History
Research interests
My research centers on how economic and legal history intersects with the history of religion, art history, and literary history in the premodern Mediterranean. I currently focus on two principal areas of study. One area examines the relationship between religious practices and economic institutions of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traders between the 12th and 15th centuries. The other pertains to processes of state formation, urbanization, and commercialization. “Minds and Margins: Notarial Culture in Bologna, ca. 1250-1350” is a book project based on my dissertation examining the self-images of notaries from the perspective of marginalia such as drawings and poems they entered into their registers alongside official acts.
Teaching interests
HST 351 – Medieval Minds
HST 246 – From Oracles to Mathematics: The Prehistory of Risk
HST 244 – Medieval Science
HST 141 – Bright Ages: A Medieval World (Europe), 410 CE – 1528 CE
HST 239 – Modern Extremism and the Medieval World, WAC-R
HST 140 & CLS 193 – History Done Digitally: Modern Analysis of the Premodern World
HST 144 – Global Medieval World
FYI (First Year Inquiry) – Religious Violence
HST 190 – Islamic World in the Premodern Era, 600 CE – 1700 CE
Publications
Articles
2026 “Whatever God Gives: Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Rizq and Latin Resicum in Commercial Vocabulary, 1154-1164 CE.” Forthcoming, Speculum.
2021 “Ad instar quatuor elementorum: Medical and Literary Knowledge in Salatiele’s Ars notarie (1242 CE – 1243 CE).” In “Il Notaio nella società dell’Europa mediterranea (secc. XIV-XIX),” ed. Gemma T. Colesanti, Daniel Piñol, and Eleni Sakellariou, special issue, RiMe (Rivista dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea) 9 (2021): 71-108.
Book Chapters
2024 “Almost Sacred? How Bolognese Notaries Shaped the Meaning of Archives, 1289 CE – 1294 CE.” In New Approaches to the Archive in the Middle Ages: Collecting, Curating, Assempling, edited by Emily Savage, 110-129. London: Routledge, 2024.
Reviews
2021 Review of Magdalena Weileder, Spätmittelalterliche Notarsurkunden: Prokuratorien, beglaubigte Abschriften und Delegatenurkunden aus bayerischen und österreichischen Beständen. Köln: Böhlau, 2019. In Sehepunkte 21 (2021), http://www.sehepunkte.de/2021/11/35681.html
MANUSCRIPTS IN PROGRESS
2024 “Minds and Margins: Notarial Culture in Bologna, ca. 1250-1350” (book project)
Additional media
Exhibitions
Sarina is one of the co-founders of the award-winning public history project Medievalist Toolkit, building bridges between academic outreach, social work, and journalism in relation to contemporary misuses of the premodern past.
Academic credentials
B.A., M.A. University of Zurich (Switzerland), Ph.D., Columbia University (2021)
Lippman Hall 112
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