People

Matt King

Assistant Professor

Contact information and CV

Office: SOC 213
Email: matthewking1@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Education

Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2018

Teaching

I am thrilled to teach courses on medieval history and the Digital Humanities at USF. In my survey-level classes, I use active-learning pedagogy alongside traditional lectures to show the diversity and the complexity of the medieval world. My seminars on the Digital Humanities, meanwhile, consider the possibilities and problems of conducting historical research during the age of Wikipedia and ArcGIS.

I am also actively involved in National History Day, an outreach program that allows middle school and high school students to conduct original historical research about topics of their choice. If you have questions about this program or would like to volunteer for it, please do not hesitate to send me an email.

RESEARCH

My research focuses on the medieval Mediterranean during the age of the Crusades. My first book, Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily (Cornell University Press, 2022) considers the relationship between the Norman kingdom of Sicily and the Zirid emirate of Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia) during the twelfth century. For this project, I used Latin and Arabic texts alongside digital resources like the Old World Drought Atlas to show the expansive networks that connected the Normans and Zirids to other polities across the Mediterranean, with a particular eye toward restoring the agency of the often-maligned Zirids.

My current research projects include a co-authored partial translation of the geography of al-Idrisi, a book chapter on labor in the medieval Maghreb, and an article on the cultivation of coral in the coastal city of Marsa al-Kharaz in modern Algeria. I am also learning Python3 and hope to leverage this coding language into future projects related to quantitative text analysis of Arabic texts.