People

Matt King

Associate Professor

Contact information and CV

Office: SOC 213
Email: matthewking1@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Education

Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2018

Teaching

I am thrilled to teach courses on permodern history (especially the Middle Ages) and historical methods at USF. My classes embrace the complexity of the past and the many ways that modern scholars have tried to understand it. When teaching about the premodern world, I emphasize how so many of our historical narratives are tied to a handful of fascinating texts produced by people (usually elite men) with certain ideas about how the past ought to be remembered. I also highlight connectivites across the premodern world and how our understanding of "Western" Europe is incomplete without the analysis of contemporary happenings in the Mediterranean, Baltics, Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa (among other locales). My methods classes, meanwhile, unpack the manifold ways that scholars have approached the study of the past from Thucydides to Wollstonecraft to Foucault to the synthetic nightmare that is ChatGPT. By considering these scholars alongside technical skills essential for conducting modern research, I aim to provide foundational knowledge about how historians "do" history.

My teaching extends to local K-12 outreach, too. I am the organizer of a workshop series for K-12 teachers in Florida and regularly provide lectures to Pinellas and Hillsborough County School teachers on topics related to Florida's Social Studies Standards.

RESEARCH

My research focuses on the medieval Mediterranean during the age of the Crusades. My first book, Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily (Cornell University Press, 2022) considers the relationship between the Norman kingdom of Sicily and the Zirid emirate of Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia) during the twelfth century. For this project, I used Latin and Arabic texts alongside digital resources like the Old World Drought Atlas to show the expansive networks that connected the Normans and Zirids to other polities across the Mediterranean, with a particular eye toward restoring the agency of the often-maligned Zirids.

I have also co-authored a partial translation of the geography of al-Idrisi (with Katherine Jacka, Ahmed Fatima Kzzo, and Sherif Abdelkarim for ArcHumanities Press, 2024). My current book project is an admitted departure from my Mediterranean-centric scholarship and considers the history of goblins from the Middle Ages to the present.

I am willing to supervise graduate students who specialize in medieval history, especially the Mediterranean during the central Middle Ages (1000-1300). I have advised students whose projects are outside of this scope, though I am most comfortable with graduate research that broadly gravitates toward this chronology and geography. MA students should ideally have experience with one research language (usually Latin, Arabic, or Greek) before entering the program. PhD students should ideally have knowledge of at least one research language and one modern language (typically French, German, Italian, or Spanish) based on their area of expertise.