About

Ryan Szpiech is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures, Judaic Studies, and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. He specializes in the cultures and literatures of medieval Iberia, with a focus on cultural interaction, exchange, and conflict. His research emphasizes the concept of translation—covering languages, alphabets, styles, beliefs, identities, and ideas—as a means of understanding the relations between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Szpiech is particularly interested in conversion as a vehicle for exchange between different groups and explores how modern scholarly debates frame the history and criticism of Medieval Iberia and its cultures, including themes of conquest, reconquest, tolerance, and persecution. His work often centers on polemics between religious groups, and he has published studies on figures such as King Alfonso X, Ramon Llull, Ramon Martí, Abner of Burgos, Anselm Turmeda, Solomon Halevi, and Juan Andrés. Szpiech has authored a book on narratives of religious conversion within polemical writing from the 12th to the 15th centuries, edited volumes on medieval exegesis, cross-cultural contact, polemics, and astrolabes, and completed a documentary film about Alfonso X's role in the history of Castilian. Currently, he is working on projects including polemics against Islam in sixteenth-century Spain, a biography of Muhammad XI ('Boabdil'), and a study of translation and genealogy discourses in medieval Castile, including Arabic epigraphy from Christian Seville.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Art
• Philosophy
• History
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Gender studies
• Demography
• Ethnology
• Linguistics
• Literature
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• Carnal Israel? The Medieval Conceit of Jews as Organs in the Social Body

  Cultural encounters in late antiquity and the Middle Ages · 2025-01-01

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• 16.10.02, D'Angelo and Ziolkowski, eds., Author and Authorship in Medieval Latin Literature

  Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) · 2025-06-19

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• Images in the Borderlands: The Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period. By Ivana Čapeta Rakić and Giuseppe Capriotti. Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World, vol. 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. 309 pp. $125 cloth. Open-access e-book: https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MEMEW-EB.5.123930

  Church History · 2024-03-01

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  Images in the Borderlands: The Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period. By Ivana Čapeta Rakić and Giuseppe Capriotti. Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World, vol. 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. 309 pp. $125 cloth. Open-access e-book: https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MEMEW-EB.5.123930 - Volume 93 Issue 1

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• Mostrador de justicia

  2023-06-29

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• Pugio fidei

  2023-06-29

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• Fortalitium fidei

  2023-06-29

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• : <i>Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2022-03-01

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• Sounding the Qur’an: The Rhetoric of Transliteration in the Antialcoranes

  2022-09-05 · 1 citations

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• Interruption: Conversion as an Event in Paul of Tarsus and Paul of Burgos

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2022-01-01

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• Turning and returning

  2021-04-16

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  Because Iberia in the Middle Ages was the only land in Europe or the western Mediterranean shared by sizeable populations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, it is also a uniquely fruitful location to consider the history of religious change, constituting what one historian has called “a laboratory of conversion”. This chapter provides a broad overview of conversion in social and political terms, offering a bird’s-eye view of some key changes that shaped religious encounters in medieval Iberian history. It then raises the question of methodology, suggesting that although “conversion” serves as a useful historiographical shorthand for larger and more complex social processes, it is most meaningfully studied from a critical perspective as a metaphor of cultural expression. It compares the representation of conversion in Iberian literary texts such as Milagros de Nuestra Señora of Gonzalo de Berceo and Cantigas de Santa María of King Alfonso X with theological treatises such as the Sefer Ha-Kuzari of Judah Halevi and the Dialogus contra Iudaeos of Petrus Alfonsi, and first-person conversion narratives such as those Anselm Turmeda, Abner de Burgos, and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī. These examples show that conversion in Iberian societies was as much a topos of discourse as it was a phenomenon of Iberian social and religious history, and merits critical treatment as an aspect of poetics and a metaphor of culture more than as a historical fact or event.

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Frequent coauthors

• Katarzyna Krystyna Starczewska

  3 shared

• Mercedes García‐Arenal

  2 shared

• Andries W. Coetzee

  2 shared

• Mercedes García-Arenal Rodríguez

  2 shared

• Panagiotis Agapitos

  Délégation Paris 6

  1 shared

• Yosi Yisraeli

  1 shared

• Svend Erik Larsen

  Aarhus University

  1 shared

• Joshua Shapero

  University of New Mexico

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Spanish and Portuguese

  Yale University

  2006

• M.Phil., Medieval Studies

  Yale University

  2003

• M.A., Comparative Literature

  University of Illinois-Urbana-̦Champaign

  1997

• B.A., Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1995