My research focuses on the interactions of individuals and groups across religious and cultural divisions in the medieval Mediterranean region. Gender and sexuality are fundamental and central components of all human interactions, but medieval Mediterranean historians have only recently begun investigating the roles of women, gender, and sexuality in the context of cross-cultural encounters. My work particularly focuses on how women, and male-authored texts written about women’s bodies and women’s sexual practices, function within Muslim-Christian relations. An essay in the volume Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean, ed. Megan Moore (University of Arizona Press, 2019), for instance, examines Sicilian Muslim women at the intersection of gender and religion within a majority Christian context. These Muslim women and their marital status were a pivotal aspect of the preservation or disintegration of the minority Muslim community in an increasingly-dominant Latin Christian Sicily of the twelfth century. Similarly, an article I published in the journal Gender and History investigates how male-authored texts from both Arabic-Muslim and Latin-Christian perspectives on the Crusades describe the enemy’s women as being both militarily and sexually deviant. For both sides, the portrayal of enemy women as combatants on the battlefield was linked to their lurid descriptions of those women’s sexual profligacy. In-progress publications focus on the gendered aspects of economic systems in a global medieval context and the roles of women in the medieval textile industry.

I regularly teach courses with a strong component of gender and sexuality history, such as the graduate seminars “Women in the Global Middle Ages,” “Medieval Minorities,” the “Medieval Mediterranean,” and “Medieval Muslim-Christian Encounters”—all of which feature significant sections of the syllabus on matters of gender and sexuality. At the undergraduate level, I regularly teach a topics course called “Medieval Women in Text and Film.”