EAJS Trustee/Director
I am an historian of later medieval Europe with broad interests across history and the humanities. I was educated at the Hebrew University with a BA in History, and MA in Medieval History, before progressing to a PhD at the University of Cambridge, completed in 1984. My doctorate studied charitable activities in Cambridge and its region from c. 1150 to the Reformation, and it was published as Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (CUP, 1987). Following a postdoctoral research fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, a British Academy postdoctoral research fellowship at the Faculty of History in Cambridge, and an year as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in 1989 I secured a CUF Lectureship at the University of Oxford and Pembroke College. At Oxford I published two books, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (CUP, 1991), and Gentile Tales: the Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Yale UP 1999); there I founded with Daniel Frank and Martin Goodman a seminar in Premodern Jewish History. My own work on the religious cultures of medieval Europe increasingly concerned Jewish-Christian relations. In 2000 I took up a Chair at Queen Mary University of London and soon successfully applied for a Leverhulme Major Research Award which I held from 2003 to 2006. During that period I completed a study of the understandings of the Virgin Mary, published as Mother of God: a History of the Virgin Mary (Allan Lane, 2009), where I explored links between anti-Jewish sentiment and the Marian cult. In 2009 I received an AHRC Network grant in support of research on the first text to articulate a child murder accusation against Jews, a project published in 2014 as a translation of the Vita et passio Willelmi Norwicensis as a Penguin Classic. I served as Head of the School of History at QMUL 2012-2015, and have supervised over 30 PhDs, all successfully. In 2017 I delivered the Wiles Lectures, published in 2020 as Cities of Strangers by CUP. Since 2020 I have served as President of the Jewish Historical Society of England.