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 healthcare practices of nuns and beguines who lived in Northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 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 presently conducting research for a book on nineteenth-century philological efforts to furnish a text of oral tradition, and the consequent production of knowledge about "the medieval" that resulted from collecting and translating French performance traditions, including healing rituals, convent drama, dit, and other forms of writing orality in France, the Caribbean, and south Louisiana. I am also co editor-in-chief (with Shazia Jagot and Julie Orlemanski) of ​postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.   

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, gender relations in medieval Europe, medieval drama and medievalism, research methods, and historiography.