About

His scholarship routinely moves between focusing on medieval literature and history and focusing on how the Middle Ages have been used in the modern world. Dr. Whitaker’s scholarship has appeared in scholarly journals in medieval studies such as the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, the Yearbook of Langland Studies, and postmedieval as well as scholarly journals in English literature more broadly, such as PMLA. He has contributed to projects designed to make medieval studies scholarship more accessible such as the Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales and Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past. His work also appears in volumes on the cutting edge of medieval and modern literary scholarship such as Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking and in volumes on the roles of history in modern politics such as Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories. Whitaker routinely edits important work as well, such as the award-winning postmedieval special issue “Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages.” 

Whitaker’s books combine the erudition required to study the Middle Ages on their own terms—in multiple languages and with attention to theological and philosophical concepts now outmoded—with the up-to-the-moment attention to current events required to understand how the Middle Ages are deployed in the most pressing of modern political concerns. Whitaker’s 2019 Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking shows how the reception of classical rhetoric in the Middle Ages helps develop and direct the concepts of race and racism. The black-and-white matrix of modern race has everything to do with medieval ideas about religious identity, how to use words convincingly, and expressions of sin and purity. Whitaker is hard at work on a new book, for which he was honored in 2019-20 to serve as a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and as a fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. In The Harlem Middle Ages: Color, Time, and Harlem Renaissance Medievalism, Whitaker argues that Harlem Renaissance writers and intellectuals, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Claude McKay, from Jessie Redmon Fauset to Langston Hughes, actively and radically deployed nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of the Middle Ages to advance their movement’s clarion call for black Americans’ equal claim to America’s past—and its medieval English pre-history. 

Whitaker believes that scholarship matters most when it has an impact in the world outside the classroom. His commitment to public outreach means that he regularly writes for high-circulation publications such as Politico magazine and has given interviews for such publications as The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and podcasts such as Citations Needed and In Search of Black History with Bonnie Greer. He blogs at In the Middle, the most read academic blog in medieval studies, and co-founded The Spoke, the blog for U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s Institute for Global Affairs. For Whitaker, the world is a classroom, and the Middle Ages are an integral part of the curriculum.

Whitaker uses his expertise to advance the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion. He has served as a founding steering committee member of 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. Whitaker consults, together with a team of fellow specialists, on organizational antiracism for Sagely, LLC. Understanding the history of race in all its complexity, he contends, is a necessary component of building a more just and equitable future.

In his work, Dr. Cord J. Whitaker strives to model how public scholarship can be simultaneously intellectually rigorous, broadly accessible, and profoundly inclusive.