Participating Faculty & SDAs

Professor Morse came to the Carleton history department in 1999 as a specialist in medieval history. Professor of History, she is also co-Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies program and served as the co-director of the Carleton College VIZ initiative. Her interests include spirituality and religious life, geography, the medieval world view, urbanism, and how visuality applies to learning. She has a very keen interest in cartography and has worked on the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She brings Medieval and Renaissance history and geography to life with hands-on research and cartography projects in the wide variety of medieval history survey and seminar courses she offers. She has a special interest in the Italian Renaissance and is fluent in Italian and French.

Professor North came to Carleton in 1999 as a medieval historian. In addition to being Professor of History, he is Co-director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program (MARS), 2001-2013, 2013-present.  He offers a wide variety of seminar and survey courses on topics in Late Antiquity, Early Medieval History, and the History of the Byzantine World. He is fluent in Latin and Greek, and is fluent in Italian. He is also comfortable with French, German and Spanish. He is an avid translator of primary sources from all of the periods that he teaches as well as modern scholarship. He is working on several  book-length translation projects focused, respectively, on Abbot Peter the Venerable’s Two Books on Miracles (with Read Wilder ’20); on the Saxon War in the 11th century; a city description of Medieval Pavia in the 14th century (with Dr. Victoria Morse); and a source reader on the period from 880-1080s, together with Professor Jason Glenn of USC. Professor North’s other research includes a book-length monograph about the transformation of clerical culture in the Age of Reform (1050-1130), an edition of several biblical commentaries from the 11th and 12th centuries, and a project about Ricardi Pratellensis’ Opera Omnia Exegetica, a study of the commentaries of Richard of Preaux on the five books of the Pentateuch, the Book of Ruth, the Solomonic books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, among a number of others. He has served as editor of the Haskins Society Journal from 2008-2013 and 2023- and associate editor from 2013-2023.

Wesleyan, B.A.; Columbia, M.F.A. (Film); Oxford, M.Phil. and D.Phil.

Pierre Hecker’s areas of teaching interest include Shakespeare; the drama, poetry, and prose of the English Renaissance; drama in performance; visual culture; the history, theory, and criticism of drama and film; screenwriting; and genre fiction.

Carleton College B.A. (History); Brown University M.A., Ph.D. (History)

Harvard University A.B., Cambridge University M.Phil., Yale University, Ph.D.

George Shuffelton teaches courses in medieval and early modern English literature, particularly Chaucer and his contemporaries.  His edition of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61,  a compilation of Middle English romances, courtesy manuals and other popular verse, was published by TEAMS in 2008.  Other publications include articles on Langland’s Piers Plowman, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and representations of minstrels in late medieval literature.   His current research interests focus on book ownership and social identity in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. 

Oberlin College, B.A.; University of California, Berkeley M.A., Ph.D.

Professor Kettering specializes in the early modern period, with a special interest in seventeenth-century Dutch art. She has taught a wide range of courses on art throughout western Europe, focusing on gender issues in western art, Renaissance and Baroque art north and south of the Alps, and the art of the print.

Her books and articles have concentrated on 17th-century Dutch pastoral images, the art of Gerard ter Borch and his family, and Rembrandt’s portraiture and renderings of the male nude. Her books include: The Dutch Arcadia: Pastoral Art and Its Audience in the Golden Age and Drawings from the Ter Borch Studio Estate in the Rijksmuseum. In 2004, she produced an essay and entries for the catalogue of an exhibition of Gerard ter Borch’s paintings which opened at the National Gallery in Washington. Since then she has published and lectured on a variety of subjects, including depictions of the occupations, the windmill, and country life.  She is Editor-in-Chief of the peer reviewed, open access e-journal, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art.

Hamilton College, B.A.; Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D.

Professor Paas is interested generally in the history of book and print production from the fifteenth century to the present. His research projects, however, focus on Germany in the seventeenth century, with emphasis on German political graphics and on the production of literature in cities such as Nuremberg and Strasbourg. Within the context of MARS, he teaches courses on medieval German literature in translation and on the history of printing.

University of New Mexico, B.A.; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., Ph.D.

In a nutshell, Cathy Yandell loves all things Renaissance (literature, history, music, and dance). Author of Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France, she has also edited Pontus de Tyard’s Solitaire second, ou prose de la musique and most recently co-edited the collection Vieillir à la Renaissance. In 2011, she will become President of the Sixteenth Century Society, an interdisciplinary and international scholarly organization. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of three journals, French Review, Women in French Studies, and French Forum. In addition to over twenty-five articles published in journals and collections, Professor Yandell has articles forthcoming on Ronsard’s bawdy adaptations of Catullus as well as the poetry of the French Wars of Religion. Her current research focuses on the relationship between the body and knowledge (including pedagogical discourse and ways of knowing) in early modern France.