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 medieval specialist). I will teach you content (i.e. facts about the past), but also I will help you to figure out how to go about being a university student – especially these days when we're experimenting with what "being a university student" means.

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 never update) or my Hcommons profile to know more about the academic me. I also have a profile page in Carleton's edossier system (cuPortfolio), which we may be using in class this year.

These kinds of academic/ professional sites obscure something key about your professors. Usually, we got into this whole world because we intensely loved something about the past. For me, my love of the Middle Ages started with die-cast knights and Lego castles in a Winnipeg basement. It only got worse after spending several years of my childhood in Germany - surrounded by medieval villages, ruined castles 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.

You can get in contact with me:

• by email (marc.saurette @ carleton.ca) before class starts

• (after class starts) via Slack direct messages

• I'll have regular office hours either in person or via Slack