Your Professor, Marc

Hi! I'm (Dr.) Marc Saurette! Or at least an digital facsimile of me....

My purpose (as the professor) is to act as your contact person, academic guide and tutor (as well as a historical game studies specialist). As a professor, you tend to accrue more and more online identities as time goes by. If you want, you can check out my Departmental Profile (which I rarely update) or my Hcommons profile to know more about the academic me.

These kinds of academic/ professional sites obscure something key about your professors. Usually, we got into this whole world because we intensely loved something. For me, my love of the Middle Ages started by playing with die-cast knights and Lego castles in a Winnipeg basement. It deepened after spending years of my childhood in Germany - surrounded by medieval villages, castle ruins and awe-inspiring cathedrals. Then I really fell in love with the period by reading novels about the Middle Ages - especially Arthuriana like T.H. White's Once and Future King or Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex. So I studied history because I fell in love with the subject and then, during university, became passionate about how exciting the world of the past showed people to be.

As an undergraduate, I found myself in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba, soaking up mediævalia from ex-missionaries, Byzantinists and the new historicists in the English department. But choice encounters with a charismatic Victorianist and a committed researcher of Latin American history drew me into the worlds of nineteenth-century égouts, class identity and cultural power dynamics. They made me rethink what I thought history was, by teaching me new methodologies and THIS made me change how I wanted to think and write about the Middle Ages.

I did my graduate work at the University of Toronto – Canada's (and arguably North America's) most important centre for Medieval Studies. I ended up entranced by the monks of an obscure French monastery (Cluny) and their powerful, charismatic (if also somewhat problematic) abbot Peter the Venerable. He liked to write, I liked to read. So I sat down to read. A few years later I stopped reading and started to write. And I haven’t stopped finding things about him to write about.

A few years ago, I started noticing that more and more of my students were coming from outside of the humanities. And they stopped citing historical fiction, movies or tv shows as their reason for taking my course, and began –almost exclusively– to cite video games, such as Assassin’s Creed, Crusader Kings or Dark Souls. They considered these games not a distraction or just entertainment, but a form of history. While hesitant to talk about their class readings, they waxed at length about how authentic and immersive their games were. Games, such as Crusader Kings III, taught them the prosopography of medieval political dynasties. While students saw value in games, few had the tools to address them critically. They didn’t see that games were only a partial representation of history. Or that games tended to represent a Middle Ages that was a hundred years out-of-date with scholarship. Or that this dependence on nineteenth-century history meant that these games were falsely representing the Middle Ages as a golden age of religious and racial purity.

My students taught me that I needed to start thinking seriously about games. And I want our students to think more seriously about games, too.

You can get in contact with me:

I'll schedule office hours for Thursday in fall and winter semesters. Often these will take place via Teams.

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Last updated 10 months ago