Asa S. Mittman
Title
Professor
Department
Office
AYRS 204
Office Hours
Mon 12-1; Wed 12-2; Fri 10-11; or by appt
Campus Zip
0820
Phone
Email
Asa Simon Mittman is a Professor of Art and Art History at California State University, Chico, where he teaches Ancient and Medieval Art, as well as thematic courses on monsters and film. He is author of Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England (2024) and Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (2006, revised 20th anniversary edition forthcoming 2026), co-author with Susan Kim of Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013, awarded a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association and an ISAS Best Book Prize), and with Sonja Brentjes and Cordell Yee Mapmaking in the Global Middle Ages: Chinese, Islamicate, Latin Christian, and Jewish Traditions (forthcoming 2026). He is also author and co-author of a number of articles on monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages, including pieces on Satan in the Junius 11 manuscript (Gesta, with Kim) and race in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period (A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age and postmedieval).
He co-edited with Peter Dendle the Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012), with Marcus Hensel Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume 1 and Primary Sources on Monsters: Demonstrare, Volume 2 (2018), and with Richard H. Godden Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (2019). Mittman and Sherry C.M. Lindquist co-curated Terrors, Aliens and Wonders (The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, 2018; The Cleveland Art Museum; and The Blanton Museum of Art, 2019).
He is the founding president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application). Mittman is a founding member of the Material Collective, an organization of medieval art historians. His research has been supported by College Art Association, International Center of Medieval Art, Kress, Mellon, American Philosophical Society, Newberry Library, Renaissance Society of America, and NEH grants. He edits book series with Boydell and Brill. Long-range research interests include the Franks Casket and the horned Moses.