Contact Zones

This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Contact zones: Fur, minerals, milk, and other things. It offers strategies for writing the companions of our humanity. Just as the book entails contact zones between scholars working across languages, periods, regions, and disciplines, we each envision contact zones between materials, bodies, and identities as multidirectional agentic exchanges that define and enact material-semiotic entanglements. Together, the chapters offer disanthropocentric readings of materiality that center the more-than-human agencies that impact human identities and embodiments across the medieval world. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 11, issue 1, March 2020. 

Elizabeth S. Leet Assistant Professor of French Department of Modern Languages, Washington & Jeffferson College, Washington, PA, USA