Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Amy G. Remensnyder is Giancarlo Family Provost’s Professor of History at Brown University and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. A medieval historian, she focused on southern French monastic culture and collective memory in her first book. She then retrained herself as an Iberianist and published a book that spanned the Atlantic, placing medieval Iberia in dialogue with colonial Mexico by exploring the Virgin Mary as a symbol of conquest and conversion. A practitioner of engaged scholarship and teaching, she is a co-editor of the volume Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice (Routledge, 2021) and founder and director of the Brown History Education Prison Project. She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Series in the New Medieval History. At the Cogut Institute, she will be working on her current book project: a maritime microhistory that explores the tiny, remote, central Mediterranean island of Lampedusa between 1550 and 1750 to map a new blue, deserted island-centric history from below of early modern Mediterranean piracy, slavery, shared religious sites, and the sea of danger that produced them all. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and her B.A. from Harvard University.