Our Committee

President

Nichola E. Harris is a Professor of Medieval History at the State University of New York.  Her research focuses on premodern health and healing, particularly the use of minerals in the development of Western pharmacology. During her doctoral research at Rutgers, she coined the term 'lapidary medicine' to describe a comprehensive, orthodox system of healing based on the therapeutic application of natural objects classified as 'stones' in the ancient, medieval and early modern world. Currently, she is writing a book entitled The Virtue of Stones, a comprehensive study of the natural history of the therapeutic application of lapidary medicine and mineral pharmacology in pre-modern Europe.

Her recent publications include: 'The Protection of Innocents:  Red Coral as a Lapidary Cure for the ‘Children’s Disease’ and Conditions Related to Childbirth in Medieval and Early Modern England,' in Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World (2022) and 'Loadstones are a Girl’s Best Friend: Lapidary Cures, Midwives, and Manuals of Popular Healing in Medieval and Early Modern England,' in The Sacred and the Secular in Medieval Healing: Sites, Objects, and Texts (2016). 

Vice President

Anna M. Peterson is an independent researcher whose work focuses on corruption and accountability in hospitals and leprosaria, especially in southwestern Europe, and the healthscaping policies of religious and secular authorities. Additionally, she also studies the social and cultural perceptions of leprosy and its sufferers in the Middle Ages. She is currently a working member for the project Hermenéutica del Cuerpo Visible: Conceptualizaciones y Prácticas en la Medicina Medieval de Tradición Latina/Hermeneutics of the Visible Body: Conceptualisations and Practices in Medieval Medicine in the Latin Tradition (VisibleBodyMed) (PID2019-107671GB-I00), with Prof. Montserrat Cabré (Universidade de Cantabria). 

In 2017, she was awarded her PhD in medieval history from the University of St Andrews. Her thesis, ‘A Comparative Study of the Hospitals and Leprosaria in Narbonne, France and Siena, Italy (1080-1348),’ analyses the development of assistive institutions in these cities, focusing on their relationship with religious and secular bodies as well as responses to corruption. She was awarded a Mellon Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto) from 2018-2019. She is also the co-founder of Leprosy and the ‘Leper’ Reconsidered. Recently, she has written a study of language and the ‘construction’ of the leper in municipal and legal texts in Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages (2021) and co-authored a chapter on healthscaping in Siena in Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (2022). 

Senior Series Editor

Lori Jones is an Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University, a part-time Professor at the University of Ottawa, and an independent medical historian. Her research primarily focuses on plague texts and images, early modern medical manuscripts, and global medieval/early modern disease environments. Her monograph Patterns of Plague: Changing Ideas About Plague in England and France, 1348–1750 (2022) won the Canadian Society of Medievalists’ Margaret Wade Labarge Book Prize for 2023. 

She edited Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (2022) and co-edited with Nükhet Varlık Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Perspectives From Across the Mediterranean and Beyond (2022), as well as publishing several book chapters and journal articles on plague treatises and images. 

Dr. Jones is currently preparing her third edited volume, Images, Objects, and Remains: Materialities of Disease in the Global Medieval World (forthcoming), as well as continuing to work on a larger research project about the intersection of manuscript and print in early modern medical manuscripts.

Secretary

Ginger L. Smoak is Associate Professor Lecturer at the University of Utah Honors College. Her research centers around medieval women’s healthcare, particularly midwifery and childbirth. In addition, she is interested in the intersection of pregnancy and anatomy, and is working on a project called Mapping Pregnancy, examining medieval maps and pregnancy illustrations.

 

She is also Editor of the journal Quidditas: the Online Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, of which she is a former President. She is the author of 'Imagining Pregnancy: The Fünfbilderserie and Images of 'Pregnant Disease Woman' in Medieval Medical Manuscripts,' Quidditas 34 (2013), as well as 'Midwives as Agents of Social Control: Ecclesiastical and Municipal Regulation of Midwifery in the Late Middle Ages,' Quidditas 33 (2012). 

Senior Social Media Manager

Lauren Cole is a PhD student in the Department of History at Northwestern University, and a DAAD Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz 2024-25. Lauren's dissertation investigates networks of medical knowledge in high and late medieval Europe, using the manuscripts of Hildegard of Bingen's medical texts. 


Lauren's recent publications include “Monastic Influences in Hildegard of Bingen’s Lapidary Recipes,” in Decoding Recipes: Histories of Knowledge and

Practice Across Time and Space (2025), 'Teaching with Isis: From the Cultural Turn to TikTok,' with Lydia Barnett, in the Isis centennial issue (2024), and 'Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Changing Depiction of the Erotic Female Body,' with Hannah Victoria, in Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements (2023). 


Lauren is a public historian on the platforms TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Under her handle "@MedievalLauren" she publishes videos on medieval history to over 90,000 followers. Lauren is also the co-founder of the Medieval Social Media Society, the Northwestern Medieval Graduate Council, and a board member of the Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies

Social Media Manager

Courtney A. Krolikoski is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at Jacksonville University. Her research concentrates on the intersection of social, medical, and religious history of leprosy in Bologna, Italy in the High Middle Ages. Her research interests also include issues of gender, religion, science, and digital history as it applies to the humanistic and social scientific studies of the Middle Ages. 

Advisory Board

Erin Connelly is an Assistant Professor at the School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick supported by a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to explore questions of ethnopharmacology and the antimicrobial efficacy of ingredients from historical or traditional medical sources. The research involves an interdisciplinary approach to quantitative analyses of historical recipes in surviving medical books, and empirical tests of the antimicrobial activity of ingredients inspired by historical combinations. 

Emeritus Members

Emerita President

Linda Migl Keyser directed and taught courses on health care systems, human sexuality, and medical humanities at Georgetown University School of Medicine for over twenty years. She also taught medieval literature at University of Maryland, College Park and Catholic University of America. Her research focuses on the gendering of illness, representations of the body, and the relationship between illness, healing, and social order. Specifically, her various projects investigate how medieval literary discourse and cultural history intersect with the discourse of medieval medicine from a multidisciplinary perspective and are outgrowths of her dissertation, Examining the Body Poetic: Representations of Illness and Healing in Late Medieval English Literature.

 

A member of Medica since its founding in 1998, Dr. Keyser served the society as Vice President from 2005-6, President from 2006-15, and Vice President/Treasurer from 2016-23. Additionally, in conjunction with AVISTA’s series Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, she co-edited, The Sacred and the Secular in Medieval Healing: Sites, Objects, and Texts (2016).

Dr. Keyser remains a supporting member of Medica and continues her research in medieval medicine. Most recently, she has begun teaching medieval literature classes for Encore Learning, an adult continuing education program in Northern Virginia.