Thomas Burman is a medieval knight fighting for a noble cause, though he doesn’t wear a suit of armor or carry a broadsword.
His sword is his pen, and the banner he flies is that of the humanities.
“We live in a very anti-humanities age,” said Burman, who is a professor in the Department of History and the outgoing Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute after more than eight years in the role. “In most of the U.S., even at elite institutions, humanities are being diminished through neglect and through lack of investment.”
While the University of Notre Dame has steadfastly supported the humanities, including cultivating the largest group of medieval studies scholars in North America, the discipline has faced challenges elsewhere. So when Burman was asked to lead The Medieval Academy of America, he knew he had to take on the challenge.
“It feels like leaving the frying pan and getting into the fire,” he said. “But when I was nominated, I thought, ‘Well, these academic societies are both more important and under more threats than they have been.’”
The MAA serves as a scholarly community in which medievalists can share and expand knowledge in an inclusive and equitable way. Its operations include the publication of Speculum — a prestigious journal of medieval studies — and programs for bringing younger scholars into the field, such as bursaries and awards for rising medievalists.
Margot Fassler, the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy emeritus at Notre Dame, served as president of the academy from 2017–18. Now, after serving as second vice president and first vice president for a year each, Burman will be president for the 2027–28 academic year. This year, he was also elected as a permanent fellow of the academy, a meaningful accolade given by medievalist peers.
These were just two honors among many in a banner year for Burman. He was recently awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship and membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Aided by the funding and scholarly community offered by these organizations, Burman will spend the coming academic year on leave to focus on his own research, as well as his new role.
As a leader in the Medieval Academy, Burman’s job is to set the overall direction of the organization while addressing the many challenges facing the field of medieval studies.
One of the most pressing issues, Burman said, is the decline of students majoring in the humanities. Since the Great Recession, students who would make brilliant humanities scholars are instead choosing to major in the STEM fields or business because they think those are the only financially viable options, Burman said.
“We need people to recognize what is evidently true: Majoring in the humanities, and encouraging one’s children to do that, is a smart move,” said Burman, a two-time recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
While non-humanities fields are important, Burman said, a liberal arts education trains students in writing and speaking skills that are incredibly essential in any career, including science and business.
“They need to be very adaptable, creative thinkers,” he said. “And that’s what the humanities are for.”
Making a medievalist
Burman didn’t pull a magical history book from a stone, but he was destined to be a scholar.
He grew up in an academic family — his father an engineering professor, his mother an English teacher — and two of his siblings also became professors. For his undergraduate degree, he studied history and Spanish language and literature at Whitman College, a small liberal arts school in Washington. He loved his experience and didn’t want to stop studying history, so he went on to earn a master’s degree, a licentiate, and a doctorate in medieval studies from the University of Toronto.
“I didn’t really want to go anywhere else but to college,” Burman said.
Burman’s main academic interest is interreligious engagement, and the Middle Ages were full of it. Later periods in Europe saw nations casting out religious minorities, but in the medieval Mediterranean world, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side in the same neighborhoods.
Burman said there’s a modern misconception that often assumes religious people cannot connect with others of differing faiths without hostility in the foreground, but his research shows that was not the case in the past. People of different beliefs usually interacted peacefully, sometimes even studying the same books together.
“Exploring what happens in that pluralistic society of a thousand years ago or 800 years ago provides us with wisdom that we might apply to living in a highly pluralistic world in the present,” Burman said.
His study of interreligious interaction inevitably led Burman to Ramon Martí, a 13th-century Dominican friar who wrote enormous works exploring and refuting Judaism. Martí also wrote shorter works directed at Islam, which was unusual for a medieval Latin European scholar.
Burman is currently working on his book about the Dominican, tentatively titled “Beyond the Mediterranean: The Intellectual Venture of Ramon Martí.” Ten years in the making, the book will capture the full arc of Martí’s career while placing it in the broader intellectual context of the Middle Ages.
“There’s a lot of interesting research about what ordinary people in medieval Europe thought about Judaism and Islam,” Burman said. “But I’ve always been most interested in what the people who know the other religions best think about these religions. How do they engage this religious other?”
That question is a focal point of Burman’s career, and why he’s grateful to work at Notre Dame, the home of the world’s best theology department. The Department of Philosophy is another benefit, with its five medieval philosophers, and the Medieval Institute itself has more than 40 active fellows.
The opportunities available to students within the Medieval Institute are also unmatched, with a growing library and manuscript collection, lectures from leading scholars, and exceptional courses. Notably, Notre Dame is the only university in the country that offers classes on both Latin and Greek paleography, the study of ancient writing systems.
“Notre Dame is really the best place to be a medievalist in North America,” Burman said.
The future of the field
As Burman envisions the future of his own work and medieval studies as a whole, he considers where there’s room to grow.
One such spot is medieval archaeology — a field well studied in Europe, but not as developed in North America. Increasingly, being a medievalist often means working with physical artifacts, as new information can be gathered from archaeological pieces such as art and manuscripts. But Burman said he could probably count the medieval archaeologists based in the U.S. on one hand.
“The better we know our past and the better we know people who aren't like us, the better we know ourselves.”
- Thomas Burman, Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute
He also notices geographical gaps in his field. When most people picture the Middle Ages, they think of The Lord of the Rings or Monty Python and the Holy Grail — depictions based on life in Latin Europe. Burman is interested in expanding the public image of medieval studies to include the Greek and Islamic worlds, and to go farther east into India and eastern Asia.
“The future of medieval studies needs that kind of vision to survive,” he said.
Keeping that in mind, Burman hopes to devote his post-Martí efforts to writing for an audience broader than that of a monograph study like “Beyond the Mediterranean.” Instead of covering just one historical figure, he aims to look at several instances of scholarly interaction between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle Ages.
While many assume medieval people were primitive and isolated, Burman’s career has revealed that they were capable of the full range of intellectual, spiritual, and cultural experiences that modern people are.
And in Burman's eyes, learning about and from the past will also help us better understand what it is to be human.
“The better we know our past and the better we know people who aren't like us,” he said, “the better we know ourselves.”
