Education
B.A., Washington and Lee University
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
My work focuses on the eleventh and twelfth centuries in medieval Europe. I’m interested in how religious beliefs and medieval ideas of gender influenced the way people thought about power and rulership in a Christian society. I’m working on my first book, which studies how religious reform challenged and changed the roles of elite laywomen in medieval society. I’m also starting a new project exploring how the early crusading movement grew out of and affected concepts about gender and race in the medieval European worldview.
I teach introductory and upper level courses in ancient and medieval history, including Origins of European Civilization (HI 101) and the Early Middle Ages (HI 313), offering in Fall 2021, and The Crusades (HI 113) and Ancient Greece (HI 311) in Spring 2022.
“The Story of the Veil: Matilda of Scotland, Controversy, and Imagination in Anglo-Norman Historiography,” The Haskins Society Journal: Studies in Medieval History 31 (2021), pgs. 133-62.
“‘And they shall be two in one flesh’: The Battle over the Virgin’s Body in The Life of Christina of Markyate,” in The Medieval Feminist Forum vol. 50.2, pgs. 64-81; awarded 2014 Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Graduate Student Essay Prize