David Cantor-Echols

We make history every day, but it rarely feels that way. While the present seems immediate and self-explanatory, the past often appears distant and opaque. In my classes, we interrogate both of these ways of thinking about "then" and "now." We ask what it would mean to see people in the past as navigating uncertainty, making choices, and arguing about what was true, just as we do. We also ask how the “facts” we encounter now—in textbooks, archives, and the news—gain acceptance. Who decides what counts as a fact? What counts as evidence? What gets preserved, and what is discarded? Working with documents, images, objects, and places, we take up these questions to test historical claims and offer novel interpretations, all with the understanding that our present will soon be past.

My approach in the classroom reflects how I think about the past as a scholar. I study medieval Iberia, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived in proximity, sometimes peaceably and sometimes not. I am interested in how faith communities and political institutions formed themselves through historical thinking—and how those efforts shape what we think we know about the Middle Ages and modernity alike.