Katherine L. French

Katherine L. French is the J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is a social and women’s historian focusing on late medieval England. She received her B.A. from Carleton College, and her M.A. and Ph. D from the University of Minnesota. She was a research associate in Women’s Studies in Religion at the Harvard Divinity School and held an NEH at the Institute for Advanced Study. Before coming to the University of Michigan, she taught at SUNY-New Paltz, where she won a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research. She has been a short-term visiting faculty member at Calvin College, at the Hebrew University, and the American University in Cairo. She is the author of three monographs, People of the Parish (2001), Good Women of the Parish (2008) and Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London (2021) all published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and more than a dozen articles and essays. Along with Allyson Poska, she is also the author of the textbook Women and Gender in the Western Past 2 vols. (2007, Houghton Mifflin). She is currently writing the history of boardinghouse in late medieval London.