Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan

Position title: PhD Candidate, Art History

Email: tnarayanan@wisc.edu

Address:
Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His dissertation project titled “Sultans of Babylon: Racialization and ‘Crypto-Visuality’ in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Latin Christian manuscripts” moves away from considering the expected markers of racialization (such as particular types of skin color, physiognomy, costume and accoutrement) and towards new vistas where text-image interaction, semiotics, materiality, topography, imposterism, accusations of appropriation and visualized expropriation can serve as equally substantive and powerful indexes when dealing critically with premodern formulations of race. As a voracious consumer of twentieth-century pulp fiction, he also works on the deployment of racist medievalism in Americana. He has recently won an award for his peer-reviewed article titled ‘Sir Palamedes the Indelibly ‘Saracen’ Knight: Heraldry, Monstrosity, and Race in Fifteenth-Century Arthurian Romance Manuscripts’ published in The Arthurian World (2022).