Menocal, María Rosa

María Rosa Menocal

Bio

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María Rosa Menocal is the Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University.  She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979 and is the Sterling Professor of the Humanities.

Menocal’s areas of interest include: Comparative medieval lyric; the intellectual history of the study of the Arabic and Hebrew aspects of medieval Spanish identity; the formation of Castilian culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Her books include The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987) Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio (1991) and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (1994).  The Literature of Al-Andalus in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series was co-edited with Raymond Scheindlin and Michael Sells, and in 2002 Little, Brown published The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Christians, and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which has since been translated into eleven languages.

In the spring of 2007 an international conference commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Arabic Role in Medieval History, and its impact on the field of medieval and philological studies, was held in Toronto; the volume from that conference, The Persistence of Philology: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, will appear with Toronto University Press in 2008.  Also to appear in 2008, with Yale University Press, is a broad-ranging and richly illustrated collaborative project, written with art historian Jerrilynn Dodds and Arabist and historian Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture.