I am an historian of late medieval and early modern Iberia whose research interests include Muslim, Christian and Jewish relations; the history of slavery and race in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean world; gender history; and the history of medicine and women’s health. My current research projects explore, respectively, the role of slavery in the production of medical (particularly gynecological) knowledge and constructions of maternity in the late medieval Mediterranean world. My current book project, entitled “Comares. Mothering in Uncertain Times,” exposes the complex interactions between midwives, wet nurses and birth mothers (not to mention physicians, surgeons and fathers) in a period characterized by male anxiety over female control of reproduction.
“Services for which I expect to be compensated”: Mothering as Salaried Labor in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon”in Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic, edited by Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Diaz (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).
Sargent-Faull Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2003-2004)
National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend (2003)
NEH Summer Seminar: “Disease in the Middle Ages” at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, UK (2009)
Evelyn S. Nation and Elizabeth Crahan Fellow at the Huntington Library (2010-2011)
2011 Premio del Rey, American Historical Association
Award given biennially to the best book on Spain’s early history and culture, 500-1516 A.D., published in the last two years.
2014 Best Essay Prize, Society for Renaissance Studies
Award given annually for the best essay published in Renaissance Studies.