Julian Weiss

Julian Weiss is a Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Spanish at King’s College London. After earning his DPhil at Oxford in 1984, he held academic positions at the Universities of Liverpool, Virginia, and Oregon (where he served as Head of Romance Languages) before joining King’s in 2001. He is an affiliated member of the Programme in Comparative Literature and co-leads the Travelling Concepts strand of the Language Acts and Worldmaking project.

• Research Interests:
  • Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Literatures
  • Manuscript Studies and Early Printed Book History
  • Interfaith Relations and Historical Legacy in Iberia
  • Gender Theories and Literary Form
  • Cultural Production in Medieval Spain
  • Transhistorical Literary Evolution
• Key Projects:
  • Current monograph on Flavius Josephus’s early modern Hispanic reception, analyzing Jewish-Christian identity negotiations across Europe and the Americas (1492–17th century)
  • The French Connection: Epic rivalries between Spain and France in reshaping Iberian historiography
  • Conference papers on Romantic visions of Al-Andalus (Chateaubriand, Irving) and Sephardic balladry
• Publications & Impact:
  • Co-edited Al Andalus in Motion: Travelling Concepts and Cross-Cultural Contexts (2021), addressing the modern reconfiguration of medieval Iberia as a global metaphor
  • Locating the Middle Ages: Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture (2012), an interdisciplinary exploration of medieval spatial identity
  • 1990 monograph The 'Mester de Clerecía': Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile, redefining clerical narrative’s role in societal change
• Teaching:
  • Developed modules like Writing Women in Premodern Spain, Muslim Spain: A European Fantasy, and Language Acts and Worldmaking in Medieval and Early Modern Spain
  • Co-created Global Iberias, a first-year core module exploring the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds