Alexandra Montero Peters

Assistant Professor      
Office: TMH 220      
Email: ampeters@txstate.edu      
Phone: 512.245.2142     
Academia.edu 
Personal Website 

Curriculum Vitae

Educational Background      
Ph.D. in Medieval History, University of Chicago      
M.A. in Medieval History, University of Chicago      
B.A. in Medieval Studies and History, University of Chicago

Research Interests       
Medieval Mediterranean, Spain, Premodern Race and Gender, Islamic History, Manuscripts, Intellectual History, Interfaith Relations

Dr. Alexandra Montero Peters is a historian of the medieval Mediterranean world, specifically the intellectual exchange between Iberia, North Africa, and the Near East. Working primarily with Arabic and Castilian manuscripts, she investigates the many ways textual and intellectual traditions traversed confessional, cultural, and racial boundaries. Her current book project, Representations of Power: Alfonso X, the Book of Games, and the Islamic Tradition, is a close study of these themes via a richly illuminated thirteenth-century manuscript produced in the royal court of Alfonso X el Sabio ('the Learned') of Castile (r. 1252-1284). Alongside this research, she is also developing studies of how the Islamic intellectual tradition informed medieval Western notions of India, race, and marvel, and how the tradition was subsequently manipulated in the Christian context. She is specifically motivated by how imagined concepts of Indian fauna and peoples figured within premodern notions of race in these two intellectual ecosystems. A preliminary foray into this question appeared in her dissertation (2022), and she is currently drafting an article on the relationship between India, race, and medieval definitions of translatio studii. 

Building on themes of sameness and difference, premodern race-craft, and the intersection between art and intellectual history, Dr. Peters is also in the process of publishing shorter works on medieval manuscripts. The first of these articles, to be published in an edited Brill volume, reassesses an illumination of Mongols playing chess in the Book of Games, which is also one of the first depictions of Mongols in the Latin Christian world. With her coauthor on this project, she contextualizes the visual significance of this image, suggesting that it reveals far greater connectivity between the Crown of Castile and the Eurasian Steppe than previously appreciated. Dr. Peters' second work shifts its focus to the significance of represented skin color in Alfonsine art. She reframes how Alfonso and other Iberian rulers articulated cultural and political power in the western Mediterranean by reassessing their representations of Black peoples in visual and textual dialogues about courtly prestige. This work, which addresses modern misunderstandings of Blackness in the Middle Ages, enslavement, and race, is forthcoming in the journal Medieval Encounters. 

Dr. Peters' research has been supported by the American Association of University Women, Erasmus+ (E.U.),  SSRC-Mellon Mays, FLAS, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship. She received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 2022. Prior to coming to Texas State, she taught at Bowdoin College. 

• “Qiyān, Courtly Prestige, and Muslim-Christian Exchange: Reexamining Women and Race in the Libro de los juegos (RBME Ms. T-I-6) of Alfonso X el Sabio.” June 2024, Eighth International Conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, University of Edinburgh. 
• “Chess, Power, Race, and Thirteenth-Century Court Culture in the Western Mediterranean.” May 2024, 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University.
• “Imagining India, Imagining Race: Arabic Geographies and Castilian Histories as Sources for Medieval Muslim-Christian Intellectual Exchange.” March 2024, Medieval Academy of America, University of Notre Dame.  
• Co-presenter, “Esos curiosos jugadores de ajedrez en Sevilla. La escena del folio 20v del Libro del axedrez, dados e tablas (RBME T-1-6).”  May 2023, “Mongoles en el Oeste. Noticias de la integración euroasiática en los reinos ibéricos,” May 2023, CSIC, Madrid.