Dr. Michael A. Ryan is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies. He is a social, cultural, and intellectual historian of late medieval and early modern Spain, Italy, and the Mediterranean Basin. He offers undergraduate and graduate courses on his research interests include the history of magic and the occult sciences in the Middle Ages, apocalyptic hopes and fears expressed in the Middle Ages and in modernity, the development of cities over the course of premodern period, medieval material culture and objects, and premodern expressions of gender and sexuality. In addition to a number of book reviews, essays, and articles, Dr. Ryan is the author of A Kingdom of Stargazers: Astrology and Authority in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Cornell, 2011) and the editor of A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse (Brill, 2016), the co-editor of End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity (McFarland Press, 2009), and is completing revisions on a book-length manuscript in which he analyzes books of secrets and their intersection with privileged knowledge and charlatanry in late medieval Venice.