Brigitte Bedos-Rezak

French-born Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak is a Professor of History at New York University, specializing in the history of medieval northern France.  Educated at the Ecole nationale des chartes and the Sorbonne Paris IV,  she received her Ph.D. in 1977.  For the next three years, she was the curator and head of the Seal Department at the Archives Nationales in Paris. On coming to the United States, she was a visiting scholar (1982-85) and Mellon Fellow (1985-87) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, an adjunct associate professor of history at SUNY Stony Brook (1985-87), and a visiting associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park (1987-89) before joining the latter university’s faculty as an associate professor in 1989; she served as its director of graduate studies from 1990 to 1993, and was promoted to professor in 1994.  Ms. Bedos-Rezak accepted an appointment as professor in the history department at NYU in 2002.

One of Ms. Bedos-Rezak’s prime interests is medieval seals, what they can tell the historian about the culture that produced them and the individuals who used them, and how changes in the meaning and significance of seals over the centuries was indicative of societal and cultural reformulations.  Among her publications on this subject are Form and Order in Medieval France. Studies in Social and Quantitative Sigillography  (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993); "Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept," which received the Distinguished Essay Award from the Society for French Historial Studies on its publication in American Historical Review in 2000; and "Replica: Images of Identity and the Identity of Images," which was published in The Mind’s Eye. Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West (Princeton UP, 2006), edited by Jeffrey Hamberger and Anne-Marie Bouché.

In addition to the appointments already mentioned, Ms. Bedos-Rezak has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1995), the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA (2000), the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University (2000), and the Ecole nationale des chartes (2001).  She was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1996-97.