Caroline Walker Bynum

Professor Caroline Walker Bynum is the Professor emerita of Medieval European History at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and University Professor emerita at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the religious and intellectual history of late medieval Europe. She has written on twelfth-century monastic movements, on women's piety, on theological concepts of bodily resurrection, on gendered symbols in late medieval spiritual writing, and on death and apocalypse. Her work on religious conceptions of the female body and on the medieval understanding of person as a psychosomatic unity helped create the new interest in the history of the body. Recent work includes a study of the cult of Christ's blood in northern Europe and research into the continuity of medieval pious practices in Reformation Germany. . She is currently working on Christian devotional objects in cross-cultural perspective.  Some of her notable books include, "Holy Feast and Holy Fast" (Philip Schaff Prize), "Fragmentation and Redemption" (Trilling Prize & Award for Excellence from AAR), "The Resurrection of the Body" (Jacques Barzun Prize of the American Philosophical Society & Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of Phi Beta Kappa),  "Wonderful Blood" (Gründler Prize, Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America, & Award for Excellence from AAR), and "Christian Materiality." She is a member and past president of the Medieval Academy of America and served as the AHA President for 1996.