Dr James Kane

Born and raised in the Hunter Valley of NSW, James completed his bachelor's and Master's degrees at the University of Sydney before moving to the UK to complete a PhD at the University of Cambridge. James later returned to Australia and taught Latin, Old Norse-Icelandic, and Old and Middle English language and literature at the University of Sydney. He moved to Adelaide in January 2020 to take up a lectureship at Flinders, where he teaches widely across the history of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, with a particular focus on the history of the crusades and medieval religion.

James is currently working on a number of projects, including a monograph with the provisional title Writing the Crusader's Cross in the Long Twelfth Century. The book explores how the cloth crosses that crusaders stitched onto their clothing transformed the ideology and vocabulary of crusading in different regions and languages between the First Crusade and the early 1200s.