Please write to me if you are considering a Ph.D. application to our department; I would be delighted to hear about your interests and to discuss whether the program is right for you. In the interests of fairness, I normally refrain from meeting prospective students via videocall or telephone, but I am happy to use email to answer your questions about the program and to make suggestions about other faculty to contact.
I have worked with dozens of doctoral students over the years, both as a principal adviser or co-adviser and as a committee member. In addition to advising Harvard dissertations, I regularly serve on dissertation committees and advise doctoral students elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Most of the students who work with me have focused on the period 1000-1600, on themes typically related to legal, social, economic, material, digital, and cultural history. I would be happy to advise students in other fields such as intellectual history, history of gender and sexuality, and religious history, although these are not areas where I have any special expertise. I regularly invite visiting doctoral students and post-docs from Europe to join our community for anywhere between one month to two years, as long as the students are able to find funding. Students who are interested in material culture are invited to participate in the DALME project, where it is possible to learn about the workings of an advanced project in digital scholarship while developing skills with languages and paleography by contributing records of inventories to the project.
My advising philosophy is to be endlessly supportive of my students and deeply respectful of their intellectual autonomy. I am constantly available for meetings and make student emails and requests for letters of recommendation a high priority. In 2014, I was honored to receive the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
Principal Dissertation Adviser/Co-adviser
Laura K. Morreale, Ph.D. Fordham University 2004. Dissertation: "Chronicle and Community in Northern Italy, 1270-1360." Website.
Jennifer Speed, Ph.D. Fordham University 2009. Dissertation: "The Politics of Emotion in Thirteenth-Century Iberia." Website.
Elizabeth Hardman, Ph.D. Fordham University 2010. Dissertation: "Justice, Jurisdiction, and Choice: The Church Courts of Carpentras in the Fifteenth Century." Website.
Christopher Beck, Ph.D. Fordham University 2012. Dissertation: "Seizing Liberties: Private Right, Public Good, and Letter of Marque in Medieval Marseille." Website.
Rena Lauer, Ph.D. Harvard University 2014. Dissertation: "Venice’s Colonial Jews: Community, Identity, and Justice in Late Medieval Venetian Crete." Website.
Rowan Dorin, Ph.D. Harvard University, 2015. Dissertation: "Expulsions of Foreign Merchants & Moneylenders in Western Europe, 1200-1450." Website.
Patrick Meean, Ph.D. Harvard University, 2021. Dissertation: "A Promised Wilderness: Colonial Encounters and Landscape in the Late Medieval Baltic." Website.