Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Interview with Mike Ryan, University of New Mexico

Associate Professor of History Mike Ryan will join UNM’s Institute of Medieval Studies after leaving a tenured position at Purdue University in Indiana.

His new UNM office is filled to the brim with books on everything from medieval sorcery to the practices of ancient Christianity.

The largest piece of art in the room is called “The Triumph of Death,” and it depicts the myriad ways a person could die in the early modern age. Ryan said he celebrated the publishing of his book, A Kingdom of Stargazers: Astrology and Authority in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon, by getting a sleeve tattoo of a 14th-century French translation of an early medieval text called “On the Properties of Things.”

Click here to read the interview with Professor Ryan from The Daily Lobo