UCLA

Sensing Empire assembles a new literary history of the Mongol empire (1206–1368) by exposing the epistemological intersections between disparate cultural productions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Stemming from an interest in medieval philosophies of mind and cultural phenomenology, the dissertation explores how Mongol imperialism formed and reformed notions of self and the world across Middle English, Latin, and Classical Chinese “contact” literatures. Through a methodology that centers the perceptive body as the locus for cross-cultural encounter, Sensing Empire demonstrates the intimacy of the Mongol empire as a medieval global network. This work challenges Eurocentric approaches to medieval studies as it contributes to the burgeoning fields of medieval affect studies, premodern critical race studies, and the Global Middle Ages.