Katherine L. French ’84 is an internationally recognized expert on late medieval England. Her work focuses on the social and cultural consequences of the Black Death.
After graduating from Carleton as a history major, she went on to earn an MA and PhD from the University of Minnesota in medieval history. She began her career in academia at the State University of New York–New Paltz, where she received two chancellor’s awards for research. In 1995, she held a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Seminar Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and in 2002, she received a full-year NEH Fellowship. During this time, she also published two monographs to critical acclaim. Her first, The People of the Parish: Community Life in Late Medieval English Diocese (2001), challenged the notion that local religious life was shaped by the clergy, while her second, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (2008), demonstrated how women’s domestic lives influenced and structured their religious activities. Published in 2021, French’s third monograph, Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London, examines the domestic consequences of increased consumption following the Black Death, when a drop in population led to a higher standard of living.
French has also published dozens of articles and essays, co-authored the two-volume textbook Women and Gender in the Western Past, co-edited two volumes of scholarly essays, and edited a third on her own. She is currently working on a fourth monograph, with support from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Throughout her career, French has held visiting positions at Harvard Divinity School and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, along with appointments at Hebrew University and the American University in Cairo. In 2011, she was named the J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History at the University of Michigan, a position she still holds today. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.