Professor Mitchell held the Starr Professorship in Women’s and Gender Studies from 2008-2020. She served as senior editor of the journal Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques from 2005 to 2018 and also served as president of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and on the steering committee of the Gender and Medieval Studies group, based in the U.K. Dr. Mitchell’s work focuses on issues regarding the conquest and settlement of the Normans in medieval Europe, with particular reference to the British Isles and the ways in which Anglo-Norman elite families operated as interlocking networks of alliance and affinity, ones that engaged the women in the family as much as the men. She also explores issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval world, especially the ways in which legal, cultural and social definitions of gender operate with and contest against each other.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 1979) and Indiana University (M.A., Ph.D., 1991), Professor Mitchell’s work has been published in journals and essay collections in both the United States and the U.K. She has published numerous books, most recently Joan de Valence: The Life and Influence of a Thirteenth-Century Noblewoman (Palgrave, 2016) and Voices of Medieval England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life (ABC-Clio/Greenwood Press, 2016). She is currently working on a monograph, titled The Marshal Consanguinity: Kinship, Affinity, and the Creation of a Socio-Political Network, 1200–1400 (Brill, forthcoming).
B.A., Sarah Lawrence College
M.A., Indiana University, Bloomington
Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington
