History Graduate Students

Profile

I am a second-year PhD student focusing on the High Middle Ages, particularly twelfth- and thirteenth-century France, England, and Spain.  I am also interested in late medieval and early-modern Spain.  My research interests include heresy, persecution, and redemptive violence, as well as rural social history, and provincial and local administrative history.  Past projects have focused on medieval inquisitions into heretical depravity, the monastic economy of a small monastery in the Vermandois, and the intellectual creation of the 'grand narrative' of medieval heresy in the thirteenth century.  My current research is on the incorruptible royal bailli of the Vermandois from 1256-1260, Mathieu de Beaune, whose sterling career is preserved in the testimonies of over 250 individuals in a 1261 enquête.  This source not only offers a unique glimpse in the daily trials and tribulations of a provincial governor, but also gives us an interesting look at how the post-crusade reform movement of Louis IX played out at the level of local administration and everyday men and women in the bailliage.

I received my A.B. in History from Washington University in St. Louis in 2011, where I graduated summa cum laude with a Distinction in History.  I was awarded the J. Walter Goldstein Prize for the best senior honors thesis, which examined the Franciscan bishop Juan de Zumárraga's inquisition of native Mexica leaders from 1536-1540.