Kimberly Lifton

Kimberly Lifton’s research focuses how shifting geopolitics, specifically the rise of the Ottomans, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries influenced portrayals of the religious and racial “other.” Her dissertation Prisoner, Diplomat, Soldier, Spy: Crafting Geopolitical Knowledge about the Islamic World in the Fifteenth Century considers moments of engagement between Christians and Muslims to examine how such moments calibrated or recalibrated types of otherness—bodily, dietary, linguistic, religious, etc. In drawing together chronicles, diplomatic documents, paintings, epistles, romances, and other types of objects her work bridges disciplinary divides. She also works across linguistic boundaries by bringing together sources in Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Middle French, Middle English, and Latin. While novel positive, neutral, or negative portrayals of Muslims did not entirely replace older constructions, they structured early modern ones that later manifested in Shakespeare’s Othello and Marlow’s Tamburlaine the Great.

Beyond her research, Kimberly is also a consultant at the Digital Humanities Lab. She has worked as a digital curatorial assistant at the Yale Center for British Art and as a Caribbean Digital Studies Research and Publications Assistant. Previously, she has contributed to The English Equity Court Transcription Project facilitated by Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Before coming to Yale, Kimberly received a BA in History and Literature from Hamilton College and an MPhil in Medieval English Literature from Cambridge University.