Rebecca Church

Biography

Rebecca Church is a community faculty professor of history and currently vice president for Community Faculty for the Faculty Association at Metropolitan State University. She holds a Masters (2005) and a PhD (2013) in history from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation research involved recreating the trans-Pyrenean networks that connected medieval French monasteries, nobility, knights, and pilgrims, and the peoples of the Andalusi, Aragonese, and Castilian kingdoms. Her scholarly interests are varied: nuns and other aspects of religious practice, crossing cultural boundaries, gender constructions and hierarchies, violence and its social impacts, and, most of all, the multi-cultural Mediterranean. Professor Church has published articles in Church History and Religious Culture and the Coordinating Council for Women in History Newsletter. She was a 2019 Summer Fellow in the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer Seminar, Material Maps in the Digital Age at the Newberry Library.

Professor Church teaches courses on medieval and early modern Europe, the ancient and medieval Middle East and Mediterranean, medieval Iberia, world history, religious movements of the Middle Ages, holy war in East and West, and love in the multicultural Middle Ages. At Metropolitan State University, she has taught courses on Gender in Early Modern Europe (HIST 357), Creation and Conflict: Europe 1500-1789 (HIST 380), Crusades: Origins and Global Perspectives (HIST 391), and Maps in the Historical Imagination (HIST 353).

Professor Church’s teaching style emphasizes interpretation of the processes of history, using source analysis and critical thinking. History is our lab for learning about human society. Professor Church loves the dialogue with her Metro students as they bring so much inquisitiveness and rich and diverse lived experiences to their historical analysis.