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About Me

I am Professor and Chair of History at Manhattan College in Riverdale, NY, where I teach courses on medieval and ancient history.  I am the author of Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority in Poitiers’ Abbey of Sainte-Croix (Oxford, 2019), which examines the authority of abbesses over 900 years in Poitiers, France, and was a runner-up for the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship book prize. My 2014 article “My Sister for Abbess: Fifteenth-Century Power Disputes over the Abbey of Sainte-Croix, Poitiers” in the Journal of Medieval History won the Society for French Historical Studies William Koren, Jr. Prize.

I am working on a new book project, “Holy Healing: Saints and Leprosy in the Middle Ages,” which examines the unexpected ways that saints treated leprosy during the Middle Ages. I earned my PhD and MA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I am an associate editor for the Medieval Feminist Forum and serves on the Advisory Board of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship.

Recent Publications

Book

Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority in Poitiers’ Abbey of Sainte-Croix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Co-edited Journal Special Issue

With Linda Mitchell, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Special Issue: Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse–Medieval and Modern, 53, no. 1 (2017).

Articles

“The SMFS Survey on Harassment,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Special Issue: Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse–Medieval and Modern, 53, no. 1 (2017).

“#Femfog and Fencing: The Risks for Academic Feminism in Public and Online,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Special Issue: Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse–Medieval and Modern, 53, no. 1 (2017).

“Wiki Women: Bringing Women Back Into Wikipedia Through Activism and Pedagogy,” The History Teacher 48, no. 3 (May 2015): 409-36.

“Casting, Plotting, and Enchanting: Arthurian Women in Starz’s Camelot and the BBC’s Merlin,” Arthuriana 25, no. 1 (2015): 57-81.

“My Sister for Abbess: Fifteenth-Century Power Disputes over the Abbey of Sainte-Croix, Poitiers,” Journal of Medieval History 40, no. 1 (2014): 85-107.

“Reading Telemachus through Orestes: Using the Oresteia to explain The Odyssey,” The Classical Outlook 90, no. 1 (2012): 1-3. (appeared 2013)

“‘Man Can be Subject to Woman’: Female Monastic Authority in Fifteenth-Century Poitiers” Gender & History 25, no. 1 (2013): 86-106.

“Their Cross to Bear: Controversy and the Relic of the True Cross in Poitiers,” in Essays in Medieval Studies 24 (2007): 65-77.

Media Coverage

Social Media

@ProfJenEdwards

Country Focus

Europe, England, France

Expertise by Geography

British Isles, England, France, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

Medieval, Pre-17th century

Expertise by Topic

Gender, Medicine, Religion, Women