Faculty

Nancy Bisaha

Professor of History and Chair of History

  • Office: Old Laundry Building 315
  • Office hours: Tue 12:30-2:30 Wed 10:30-12:30 Thurs 1:00-4:00 Fri 12:30-2:00 And By Appt.
  • Phone: 437-5678
  • Box: 81
  • Email: nabisaha@vassar.edu

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 has recently completed a translation of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini's De Europa in collaboration with Robert Brown and is currently working on an intellectual biography of Piccolomini (Pope Pius II, d. 1464).

In addition to teaching survey courses on the Middle Ages and the  Renaissance, Bisaha teaches such courses 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. She is currently chair of the History Department.


Publications

Books

Europe, c. 1400-1458, a translation of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s De Europa (1458) -- with Robert Brown (Catholic University of America Press, Forthcoming)

Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
Released in paperback in 2006. Turkish translation: Doğu ile Batı’nın Taratılışı, tr. Melek Dosay Gökdoğan (Ankara: Dost Kitabevi, 2012)

Articles

“”Inventing Europe” with Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini,” in Images of Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Times: Exclusion, Inclusion, and Assimilation, edited by Anja Eisenbeiss and Lieselotte Saurma-Jeltsch (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2012)

“Discourses of Power and Desire”: The Letters of Aeneas Silvius  Piccolomini (1453), in Florence and Beyond, a festschrift honoring John Najemy, 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)

Reviews

Bisaha has published reviews with CHOICE, the American Historical Review, Speculum, and the Crusades. She has served as an internal reviewer for several journals and presses.