Nancy Bisaha
Associate Professor of History
Office: Swift Hall, room 38A
Phone: (845) 437-5678
Hours: T, 3-5 p.m., Th, 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Nancy Bisaha was born and raised in central New Jersey. She received her B.A. from Rutgers College in 1990 and her Ph. D. from Cornell University in 1997, where she worked under the direction of John Najemy. In 2004 Bisaha published /Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks/ (UPenn Press), which examines the ways in which humanists created an intellectual discourse depicting the Ottoman Turks as a cultural and religious other. She is currently working on a study of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II, d. 1464) and translating one of his works. She is also a participant in a series of workshops entitled "Before Copernicus" at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.
In addition to teaching survey courses on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Bisaha teaches courses such as "The Dark Ages c. 400-900," "The World of the Crusades" and "Constantinople/ Istanbul: 1453." She is an active member of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and served as coordinator of the program in 2007-2008.
Publications
Books
Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
Released in paperback in 2006. Turkish translation, forthcoming from Dost Kitabevi Press.
Articles
“Discourses of Power and Desire”: The Letters of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1453), in /Florence and Beyond/, eds. David Peterson and Daniel Bornstein (University of Toronto Press, 2008)
“Pope Pius II and the Crusade,” in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact, ed. Norman Housley (Palgrave, November 2004)
“Pius II’s Letter to Sultan Mehmed II: A Reexamination,” Crusades 1 (2002)
“Petrarch’s Vision of the Muslim and Byzantine East,” Speculum 76 no. 2 (April 2001)
“The Early Ottoman Empire,” in Medieval Trade, Travel, and Exploration: An Encyclopedia, ed. John B. Friedman (Garland Press, 2000)
“New Barbarian or Worthy Adversary? Humanist Constructs of the Ottoman Turks in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perceptions of the Other, eds. Michael Frassetto and David Blanks (St. Martin’s Press, 1999)