GENDER & SEXUALITY STUDIES PROGRAM

Dyan Elliott (PhD Toronto, 1989), Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History, is a historian of western Europe in the Middle Ages. Her interests center around gender, spirituality, and sexuality and the way these three variables interact. She is especially intrigued by how the margins help to define the center of a given society. Elliott's publications include Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (1993); Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (1999); Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (2004; winner of the 2006 Otto Gründler Award); and The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 (forthcoming 2012). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the ACLS, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco. Elliott is currently examining the concept of scandal and its practical and ideological consequences for church history.

Courses Taught

• "Medieval Sexuality"