George Vahamikos is a scholar of late medieval and early modern literature, with a particular interest in England’s long and tumultuous love affair with Spain. He is passionate about bringing the distant past into dialogue with the present. He believes one of the great joys of studying medieval and early modern texts is that they allow us to rethink how many of our own assumptions have been formed, including issues of identity, power, sexuality, and faith. He also thinks that as we read, we catch sidelong glimpses at both the origins of many of our modern beliefs and alternate routes, roads not traveled in cultural history; and we can return from our reading with a fresh awareness that the prevailing beliefs of the present are not necessarily inevitable.