American Museum of the House Cat. Sylva, NC.

SARA  RITCHEY
​_______

​Associate Professor of History
Affiliated Faculty, Religious Studies
Steering Committee: Women, Gender, and Sexuality 

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

I write about religion, gender, medicine, and the body in public and academic venues such as The New York Times, Religion Dispatches Magazine, ​Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and elsewhere. 

My most recent book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health (Cornell UP, 2021) explores the caregiving practices and healthcare knowledge of nuns and beguines who lived in Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages. I am also the author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell UP, 2014), co-editor (with Sharon Strocchia) of the award-winning collection ​Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 and (with Kristen Burnett and Lynn M. Thomas) of the Special Issue "Health, Healing and Caring" (Gender & History 33.3, 2021). I am co editor-in-chief (with Shazia Jagot and Julie Orlemanski) of ​postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.   

I am presently conducting research for Chansons creoles: Archiving the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century Francophone Peripheries. This book offers a new genealogy of medieval studies by exposing nineteenth-century French efforts to furnish a text of oral tradition, and the consequent production of knowledge about "the medieval" that resulted from collecting and translating performance traditions-- ​poésies populaires, healing rituals, convent drama, dit, and other forms of orality-- in francophone peripheries in Brittany, the Caribbean, south Louisiana, and Nova Scotia. 

Born and raised on the Vermilion Bayou, I am now Associate Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty in Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, where I teach courses on the history of medicine and the body, history of Christianity, feminist theory, medieval drama and medievalism, historical research methods, and historiography.