As a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, Sierra is interested in how ideologies of race and orientalism developed within pre-colonial global histories. She is completing her dissertation on the racial construction of Mongols in the European Middle Ages and its influence on early English colonialism in the sixteenth century. Exotic Allies: Mongol Alterity in the Global Middle Ages traces the relation between two competing discourses of Mongol representation—the Christian savior and the ferocious monster—in various medieval texts, from thirteenth-century Latin crusade documents, chronicles, and travel narratives to fourteenth-century Middle English romances.