Ruth Mazo Karras

Ruth Mazo Karras (born February 23, 1957) is an American historian and author of the Middle Ages whose interests are masculinity and sexuality in Christian and Jewish society during the Middle Ages. Her book, Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages, was named co-winner of the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History for 2012.

Professor Ruth Mazo Karras
Born	(1957-02-23) February 23, 1957 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Historian and academic
Title	Lecky Professor of History
Academic background
Alma mater	Yale University (BA, MPhil, PhD) University of Oxford (MPhil)
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	Middle Ages History of sexuality History of religions History of marriage
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania Temple University University of Minnesota Trinity College Dublin
Notable works	Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages

Since 2018, Ruth Mazo Karras has held an appointment as the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin. She was also the President of the Medieval Academy of America in 2019–20. In spring 2018, she was a visiting fellow at the St. Andrews Institute for Medieval Studies.

Prior to taking up her post in Dublin, she served as Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She earned a PhD and an MPhil in History from Yale University, an MPhil in European Archaeology from the University of Oxford, and a BA in History from Yale.

Education and Career

Ruth Mazo Karras was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 23, 1957. Karras attended Yale University, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts in 1979, Master of Philosophy in 1983 and Doctor of Philosophy in History in 1985. She also completed a Master of Philosophy in European Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 1981.

She was Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia from 1985 to 1993. While teaching at Temple University, she was Associate Professor from 1993 to 1996, Professor of History from 1996 to 2000, Director of the Intellectual Heritage Program from 1999 to 2000 and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts from 1999 to 2000. Karras would later spend eighteen years (2000-2018) at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis as Professor of History and being named Distinguished Teaching Professor for her work with postgraduates. Since 2018, she has been the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin, teaching courses on medieval sources, marriages, and Christianity and Judaism during the Middle Ages.

Awards and Fellowships

Ruth Mazo Karras has received numerous awards and honors throughout her career, including: the Rhodes Scholarship from 1979-1981; the National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1989; American Philosophical Society research grant in 1989; she was named Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2003; she was accepted as a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University in 2003-2004; she received the Distinguished Women Scholars Award in Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2008; she was honored with the Dean's Medal and Graduate-Professional Teaching Award at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2010; in 2012, she was honored as "Feminist Foremother" by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and the Joan Kelly Prize in Women's History from the American Historical Association for her work in Unmarriages; and she was an invited member to the Israel Institute for Advanced Study in 2016-2017.

Throughout her career as a scholar and professor, Karras has also received fellowships to advance her research such as the following: the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1993-1994; the American Philosophical Society sabbatical fellowship in 2004-2005; the Medieval Academy of America fellowship in 2009; the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in 2010; the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012; the European Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship in 2016-2017; and the Donald Bullough Fellowship from the St. Andrews Institute for Medieval Studies in 2018.

Memberships and Service

Karras holds memberships in the Medieval Academy of America, American Historical Association, Women's History Association of Ireland, and Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

She served as assistant editor of Common Knowledge (published through Duke University) from 1993 to 1998 and since 2001; for Medieval Feminist Newsletter, she was editor from 1994-1999 and general editor from 1997-1998; general editor of the "Middle Ages Series" for the University of Pennsylvania Press since 1994; associate editor of Journal of British Studies since 2004; and has contributed to academic journals including Journal of Women's History, Scandinavian Studies, Early Medieval Europe, American Historical Review, and Journal of the History of Sexuality. Karras was also member of the advisory board for the Journal of the History of Sexuality from 1990-1993, Medieval Feminist Newsletter from 1991 to 1994, and History Compass since 2005.

More recently, Karras was the North American Co-Editor for Gender and History from 2008 to 2013; President of the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women from 2005 to 2008; served on the Editorial Board for the American Historical Review; and the Medieval Academy of America was Chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Harassment in 2018, Second Vice-President from 2017 to 2018, First Vice-President from 2018-2019, and President from 2019-2020.

Selected publications

• [Edited volume with Elisheva Baumgarten and Katelyn Mesler], Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
• Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 2017).
• [Edited volume with Judith Bennett], Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
• “The Regulation of Sexuality in the Late Middle Ages: England and France,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 86 (2011) 1010–1039.
• [Tiffany Vann Sprecher and Ruth Mazo Karras,] “The Midwife and the Church: Ecclesiastical Regulation of Midwives in Brie, 1499-1504,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 85 (2011), 171–192.
• [Cameron Bradley and Ruth Mazo Karras,] “Masculine Sexuality and a Double Standard in Early Thirteenth-Century Flanders?” Leidschrift 25 (2010), 63–77.
• [Ruth Mazo Karras and Jacqueline Murray,] “The Sexual Body,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body, vol. 2, In the Medieval Age, ed. Linda Kalof (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 59–75.
• “Marriage, Concubinage, and the Law,” in Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Matter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 117–129.
• [Edited volume with Joel Kaye and E. Ann Matter,] Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
• From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
• Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
• Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
• [Ruth Mazo Karras and Tom Linkinen,] "John/Eleanor Rykener Revisited," in "Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies," part 2, ed. Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O'Sullivan (England: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 111-122