Michelle Armstrong-Partida is an Associate Professor of History at Emory University whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, and women’s history in Iberia and the Mediterranean. She is the author of Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya (Cornell, 2017), co-editor of Women & Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2020), and has published articles on masculinity and sexual violence in Gender & History, Speculum, and MFF’s Journal of Gender & Sexuality. Her interest in race and gender stems from two concurrent projects. The first, a single-authored monograph on concubinage that studies the Christian practice of informal unions in the context of a multi-cultural Mediterranean and addresses the custom of enslaved concubinage and race. The second, a collaborative project with fellow medievalist Susan McDonough on Singlewomen: Enslaved and Free in the Late Medieval Mediterranean, funded by Emory University’s Halle Institute & the Global Inequalities Research Grant and supported by Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship. This project focuses on the migration, labor, economic activities, and community building of enslaved, formerly enslaved, and freeborn women in the late medieval Mediterranean and weaves race and intersectionality into its framework.
Race & Gender in the Global Middle Ages
A Monthly Working Group