Department of History
Site Contents
Directory
Michael Ryan
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Assistant Director, MARS
Office: UNIV 122
Office Phone: (765) 494-2681
Office Fax: (765) 496-1755
Email: ryan6@purdue.edu
Specialization: I am a specialist in the cultural and intellectual history of late medieval Europe, specifically the Iberian Peninsula. I teach the survey course of medieval history, as well as classes on medieval cultural history, apocalypticism, and late medieval crisis and change.
I was born out East, in the suburbs of New York City, and spent part of my childhood in New Jersey. My formative years, however, were in sunny Tampa Bay, which is essentially my home town. In high school, I loved my courses in the humanities, in foreign languages, in literature, in social studies, and, naturally, in history. I enrolled in the University of Florida as an undergraduate. My original major was chemistry, but I found that my true passion was awakened because of my history and language courses.
In my first semester, I decided to major in history. I decided to focus on medieval studies during my second year, after taking a class with a truly great medievalist, Dr. Patrick Geary. Dr. Geary inspired me with his love of his subject, his devotion to his students, and his passion for his work. Throughout the course of my undergraduate education, I enrolled in as many medieval-themed courses that I could, as well as embarked upon intensive foreign language study.
After graduating, I received an Academic Year Ambassadorial Fellowship from the Rotary Foundation and lived in Barcelona for ten months' time. It was there that I fell in love with the culture, the language, the history, and the people of Catalonia. I returned to the States and enrolled in a Master's program at Western Michigan University, located in Kalamazoo. This university is also home to the largest annual gathering of medievalists, the International Congress on Medieval Studies.
I wrote a thesis on fugitive slaves from the Kingdom of Valencia and then enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota, where I worked under the direction of Dr. William D. Phillips, Jr. and Dr. Carla Rahn Phillips. I adored my period of graduate study at Minnesota, during which I had the opportunity to study with medievalists of the highest caliber in the Department of History, as well as other departments, since Minnesota's graduate program in history encouraged interdisciplinary approaches to historical inquiry. I am currently revising my dissertation, which studied the notion of how prophecy and divination represented medieval people's attempt to access a body of privileged knowledge, into a book-length manuscript.