People

Matt King

Associate Professor and Graduate Director

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 medieval history, digital humanities, and historical methods at USF. In my survey-level classes, I use active-learning pedagogy alongside lectures to show the the complexity of the medieval world. My seminars on the digital humanities consider the possibilities and problems of conducting historical research in an age of Wikipedia, ArcGIS, and ChatGPT. When I teach HIS 3002: Historical Methods & Materials (required for all history majors), 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 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 recently co-authored a partial translation of the geography of al-Idrisi (with Katherine Jacka, Ahmed Fatima Kzzo, and Sherif Abdelkarim). 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.