About the Editor
Geraldine Heng is the Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Chair of English and Comparative Literature, and jointly appointed/affiliated to: Middle Eastern studies, Women’s studies, Jewish studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Social Justice. She is the author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018) and Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia, 2003), and the editor of Teaching the Global Middle Ages (MLA, 2022). Heng has published three Cambridge Elements: England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (2019), The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction (2021), and Teaching Early Global Literatures and Cultures (2025). She is working on two books, The Shipwreck that Shaped the World, and Global Stories: Literature and the Making of the Early World. She also coedits the University of Pennsylvania Press series, RaceB4Race: Critical Studies of the Premodern. Originally from Singapore, Heng is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy in Rome, and the Medieval Academy of America, as well as founder and director of the Global Middle Ages Project: www.globalmiddleages.org
Lynn Ramey is Professor of French and Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University. Her research and teaching bring together medieval French literature and culture, race and identity in the Middle Ages, digital humanities, and game-based learning. She is the author of An Introduction to Jean Bodel and Black Legacies: “Race” and the European Middle Ages (2024), as well as the co-author or co-editor of numerous volumes on medieval studies, digital games, and pedagogy. Her recent books include Engagements in Literary Gaming (2026) and Teaching Medieval French Language and Cultures through Digital Game Play: Applications from Brendan’s Voyage (2026).
Ramey is the founder and co-director of Brendan’s Voyage, an immersive digital environment for teaching medieval French language and culture, and co-director of the Global Middle Ages Project. Her digital humanities initiatives have received substantial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and other institutions. She previously served as Faculty Director of Vanderbilt’s Center for Digital Humanities and as Chair of the Department of French and Italian. She holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from Harvard University and undergraduate degrees in French and computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.
