Taryn DeLeon Mendiola

Research Assistant

(she/they)

Photo of Taryn DeLeon Mendiola

Taryn DeLeon Mendiola

Contact

Stokes Hall South 315-B

Email: deleonmt@bc.edu

Education

  • B.F.A. Studio Art, New York University, 2019
  • B.A. History, New York University, 2019
  • M.A. Medieval History, Fordham University, 2024

Research Interests

Viking-age Norse settlements throughout the North Atlantic; migration and cultural exchange in the early medieval period; women's work and women's history; textiles and homegoods; material culture and archaeology

Advisor

Robin Fleming

Curriculum Vitae

Department

History

Biography

Taryn received her B.F.A. in 2019 from New York University where she received degrees in Studio Art and History with a specialty in historical textile techniques. She continued her research into these techniques at the Textile Museum of Iceland where she was in residence in 2020. There she investigated historical methods of wool processing from sheep to cloth.

When she began her M.A. at Fordham University, she expanded her research interests to include not only textile production techniques but also wider economic questions of production, standardization, labor, and resource extraction. She focused her questions on the medieval Icelandic woolen industry, recentering textiles and women's labor in the wider history of the Icelandic Commonwealth.

At Boston College, she is researching the Viking-age Norse settlements of the North Atlantic through a post-colonial lens, examining the colonial contact between Norse and insular cultures and especially the ways in which women at the household level contributed to acculturation, hybridization, and cultural preservation.

Conference Presentations

“Cloth Production in Medieval Iceland: Gendered Labor and Systems of Extraction and Regulation"
Women and Gender History Symposium, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, February 2025


“Weaving Wealth and the Politics of Measures: Woven Currency in Iceland, 12th to 14th centuries”
International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 2024

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