Hello and welcome to Queer as Facts, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice. I'm Irene. And today we are joined by Professor Roland Bettencourt, who's here to talk with us about his book Byzantine intersectionality, sexuality, gender and race in the Middle Ages.

We have some content warning to pornography in this episode.

This episode will include mentions of historic misogyny and queer phobia,

one-day queer phobia in scholarship, and there'll be a mention of abortion.

It will also include one instance of swearing. If any of that

sounds like something you don't want to listen to, feel free to skip this episode and check out any of our

other content. Thank you very much, Roland, for being here today. Welcome to Career is Fact.

Thank you. It's my pleasure. It's very good to have you here. First off, I thought I'd just start by asking you to tell us a little bit about your book and what it's about.

Yes, so my book is really a wide-ranging history about sexuality, gender, and race in the Middle Ages.

And so each chapter of the book focuses on a sort of small history that takes us across several centuries to better understand issues,

for example, about sexual consent, about sexual shaming, trans and gender variant identities

in the Middle Ages, and also constructions of race.

Okay. We also, I'm sure, a lot of our listeners are very interested in how you got,

what your sort of career trajectory to this point has looked like. I know we have a lot of

listeners who are interested in queer scholarship and sort of getting into the academic fields.

Are you interested in talking a little bit about that? Of course. So I always knew that I wanted

to go on to higher education in some capacity. And so from very early on, I was sort of PhD-minded in many ways.

Yeah. I mean, at one point I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, but I'm horrible at math.

I also always say that I love that I picked out of all the science side, the most abstract and

sort of like, quote unquote, useless one.

I also love the implications that at some point you were like, I want to do a PhD.

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