Alexander D’Alisera is an environmental historian of premodern Europe, focusing especially on lived religion in the North Sea milieu. His dissertation, “Early Medieval Cave People: Real and Imagined Undergrounds in Britain, c. 400-1000 CE,” deploys archaeological and literary sources, alongside eco-criticism and phenomenology, to explore cave ritual and underground perceptions in post-Roman and early medieval Britain.

D’Alisera centers his publications on premodern caves, stones, and religion. His newest article, forthcoming in postmedieval, is entitled “Speluncar Slumber and the Medieval Time Traveler: Unearthing the Imagined Cave of the Old English Seven Sleepers.” His chapter on the Book of Durrow’s iconographical resonances with Pictish stonescapes is also forthcoming, in Ì Chaluim Chille: Interdisciplinary Studies on Iona and Columba on the 1500th Anniversary of the Birth of the Saint. In 2023, he was first author on a new translation of and introduction to “The Dream of the Rood,” which appeared in the third volume of Tony Burke’s New Testament Apocrypha book series.

Beyond the dissertation, D’Alisera’s in-progress works include the production of an international volume, provisionally titled Perceptions of Stone in Global Premodernity, which he is co-editing with colleagues from Queen’s University Belfast and Durham University. He is also working on a shorter pedagogical piece, “Teaching the Climate Catastrophe with Early Medieval Poetry,” which will appear in Alexandra Hui and Emily Pawley’s forthcoming Historian’s Handbook to Saving the World. At Harvard University, he has advised and evaluated senior theses in the Department of the History of Science since 2023.

D’Alisera previously attended Yale University as a Marquand Scholar, where he received an M.A. in religion from the Divinity School. He also holds a B.A. in history and classics from Bard College, where he attended as an Excellence and Equal Cost Scholar. From Boston College, he holds graduate certificates in college teaching and in digital humanities. He has also held various editorial and publishing positions, including at Yale Law School and Wiley, and he formerly served as the editor in chief of Glossolalia, Yale Divinity School’s graduate journal of religion. His current CV may be downloaded from his Humanities Commons profile: https://hcommons.org/members/dalisera/.