Nancy Caciola

Vita

Publications

Current Research

Courses

Vita

Nancy Caciola is the department's specialist in medieval history. She was educated at Wesleyan University (BA) and at the University of Michigan (MA; PhD). She is broadly interested in the religious and social construction of identities in the later Middle Ages. For 2004-2005, Professor Caciola is Director of UCSD's Program for the Study of Religion.

Publications

• Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
• "Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe." Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, 2 (April 2000): 268-306. Winner, 2000 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Article Prize.
• "Spirits Seeking Bodies: Death, Possession, and Communal Memory in the Middle Ages." In Peter Marshall and Bruce Gordon, eds., The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66-86.
• "Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual in Medieval Culture." Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies #152 (August, 1996): 3-45. Winner, 1998 Van Courtlandt Elliot Prize, Medieval Academy of America.

Current Research

History, geography, and apocalypticism in the Middle Ages. The boundary between life and death in medieval thought.

Courses

• HIEU 110. The Rise of Europe.
• HIEU 111. Europe in the Middle Ages.
• HIEU 113. Rule, Conflict, and Dissent in the Middle Ages.
• HIEU 114. Preindustrial Light and Magic.
• HIEU 147A. Women in the Middle Ages.
• HIEU 163/263. Seminar: Special Topics in Medieval history (topics vary by year).
• HUM II. Rome, Christianity, and the Middle Ages.