I am a PhD candidate in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, though I took a circuitous route to get here.  After a brief stint as a substitute Latin teacher, I interned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and the Department of the Interior’s Museum Program.  A year later, medieval studies had lured me back, and I graduated from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto with a MA.  My PhD research centers on networks of material and cultural exchange, with a particular focus on the luxury textiles which traversed the Mediterranean and beyond in the 14th century.  The fact that “Tartar” cloth (named for Tarsus in modern Turkey) traveled to English treasuries and damask (named for Damascus in modern Syria) to Rome speaks to an interconnected medieval world.  In the face of popular media—and older scholarship—it can be easy to forget that the medieval world stretched beyond Europe, included Muslims and Jews as well as Christians, spoke Greek and Arabic as well as Latin, and was connected by commerce and diplomacy as much as crusade.  Medieval studies allows me to learn about the connected histories (and art histories) of this vibrant and variegated world.  The field also allows me to take an interdisciplinary approach to research: I can look at both surviving objects and records of objects preserved in 14th-century ecclesiastical inventories, melding art history and history, with a smidgen of digital humanities for good measure.  I stumbled into the Medieval Studies major almost by accident (“hey, this class looks fun and this is a great prof!” x 10 –> major), and I consider myself immensely lucky—I haven’t looked back.