Keynote Talk: We Take What We Fancy: How Disneyland Pirates the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance

I am absolutely thrilled to have been invited to be the keynote speaker for the conference Afterlives: Reinvention, Reproduction, and Reception, hosted by Forest Lawn Museum and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at CSULB on November 15, 2025.

Here is the blurb for the talk:

We Take What We Fancy: How Disneyland Pirates the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance

What do Theodor de Bry’s map of the Caribbean, the Lindau Gospels, a Moche ear ornament, and Titian’s Venus of Urbino have in common? All find new life in the dimly lit, glittering caverns of the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, where global medieval and early modern objects have been reimagined and recontextualized for 20th- and 21st-century edutainment. This talk explores how the attraction’s visual culture pirates the past to create an immersive fantasy of the Golden Age of Piracy.