About

I earned my Ph.D. in medieval European history from Northwestern University and have appointments in both Religion and History at Boston University. I teach courses on Christianity, Judaism, and medieval and early modern European religious history, with special interests in Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations and other cross-cultural religious encounters. My research focuses on approaches to the Bible and biblical interpretation in medieval Christian-Jewish encounter and on the relationship between religious thought and policy/action.  The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Texts in the Later Middle Ages in the Later Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press) explores the complicated and contradictory attitudes toward Jewish tradition held by various Christian scholars and shows how the Franciscan Bible commentator Nicholas of Lyra came to serve as an important mediator of Hebrew traditions for Christian Europe. Recent articles include “The Encounter Between Christian Authority and Jewish Authority over Scriptural Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263” (in Autorität und Wahrheit: Kirchliche Vorstellungen, Normen und Verfahren (13. – 15. Jahrhundert), Gian Luca Potestà, ed., Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, 2012, 1-19) and “The Jew As Hagar in Medieval Christian Text and Image” (in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, June, 2015, 308-344). I am currently working on a little known fourteenth-century pastoral manual from Bavaria by Albert von Diessen in terms of its concerns about Christian-Jewish relations and anti-Jewish violence, which is leading now into additional work on Christian pastoral manuals as a means by which to explore the interaction between canon law (legal theory) and practical realities concerning Christian-Jewish relations.