I received a M.A. (2001) and Ph.D. (2008) in History at the University of Iowa. Prior to arriving at UTEP, I spent two years as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at Emory University, and two years as a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA.  

As a historian of the Middle Ages, my main research and teaching interests center on gender and sexuality, the use of violence in medieval society, the social, cultural, and religious history of Spain and the Mediterranean, Jewish-Christian relations, and Medieval Islam.  I have published articles on clerical concubinage in the Spanish Church, clerics’ concubines, and the conflict-ridden, often violent, relations between priests and the laity in the parishes of late medieval Catalunya.  Currently, I am working on a book manuscript that focuses on the sexuality and gender identity of non-elite clerics two hundred years after canon law prohibited clerical marriage.  Based on unpublished fourteenth-century visitation and court documents written in Latin gothic cursive and medieval Catalan, my study investigates clerical de facto marriages and families shaped clerical masculinity and their identity as priests.  My work challenges the view that the Gregorian reform eradicated the practice of clerical marriage, or that these reforms changed clerical culture by demanding that clerics relinquish their notions of lay masculinity.