Our people

Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch

Program Director
Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Areas of expertise: medieval history; history of the crusades, history and memory, gender history; religious history

Email: megan.cassidy-welch@acu.edu.au

Location:  ACU Melbourne Campus

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5451-7724

I am a cultural and social historian of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, with particular interests in the history of the crusades, histories of religious encounter, and themes of memory, space and violence. My published work has looked at the relationship between material and abstract space in medieval monasticism, the idea of imprisonment in medieval religious contexts, the history of war memory, and most recently, the many strands of thought shaping practices of religious violence. I’m working on with colleagues at Monash University, the University of Siena and the University of Delhi on an Australian Research Council funded project on ‘Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800’, particularly focussing on crusaders and pilgrims to the holy land during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. I am also currently developing a new large-scale project on crusading and the global turn, which will explore both the medieval expansion of crusading locales (especially throughout the thirteenth century) together with postmedieval uses of the idea of crusading in various colonial settings. Prior to joining ACU in mid-2021 as Program Director of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, I was McCaughey Chair in History and Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland.

Select publications

Monographs

• The Crusades and Medieval Violence (under contract, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022)
• War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019)
• Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150-1400 (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011)
• Monastic Spaces and their Meanings: Thirteenth-Century English Cistercian Monasteries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001)

 Edited collections

• Landscapes of Conflict and Encounter in the Crusading World, special issue of the Journal of Medieval History 47:3 (2021), co-edited with Beth Spacey
• Entangled Histories of Gender and Emotion in the Medieval Mediterranean, special issue of Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4:2 (2020) 
• Remembering Crusades and Crusading (London and New York: Routledge, 2017)
• Memory and the Crusades: Rethinking Past and Present, co-edited with Anne E. Lester (London and New York: Routledge, 2015)
• Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe co-edited with Peter Sherlock (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008)
• Memory and the Crusades: Rethinking Past and Present, special issue of The Journal of Medieval History, issue 3, 2014, co-edited with Anne E. Lester
• Medieval Practices of Space and Place, special issue of Parergon, issue 27:2, 2010

Articles and book chapters

• ‘Wild lands and the southern sun: claims to North Africa during the thirteenth-century crusades’ in Landscapes of Conflict and Encounter in the Crusading World, Journal of Medieval History 47:3 (2021), 381-93.
• ‘Landscapes of conflict and encounter in the crusading world’ (with Beth Spacey), Journal of Medieval History 47:3 (2021), 293-301.
• ‘Lay brothers and lay sisters in medieval monastic life’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism, edited by Alison Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1027-38.
• ‘Entangling Medieval Emotions and Gender in Mediterranean History’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4:2 (2020), 317-27.
• ‘Emotion, place and memory at the royal abbey of St Denis’ in Performing Emotions in Early Europe, edited by Joanne McEwan, Anne Scott and Philippa Maddern (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 185-99.
• ‘The Stones of Damietta: Remembering the Fifth Crusade’ in The Papacy, Peace and the Crusade: Essays in Memory of James M. Powell, edited by Jessalynn Bird (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 195-210.
• ‘Before Trauma: The Crusades, Medieval Memory and Violence’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (2017), 619-27.
• ‘Remembering in the time of the crusades: concepts and practices’ in Remembering Crusades and Crusading, edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 3-10.
• ‘1270: Le mort de Saint Louis à Tunis’ in L’Histoire de France vue d’ailleurs, edited by Jean-Noël Jeanneney and Jeanne Guerout (Paris: Editions de Arènes, 2016).
• ‘Dixit quod nunquam vidit haereticos: dissimulation and self-censorship in thirteenth-century inquisitorial testimonies’ in The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes, edited by Han Baltussen and Peter Davis (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 251-68.
• ‘Order, Emotions and Gender in the Crusade Letters of Jacques de Vitry’, in Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder, edited by Susan Broomhall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 35-49.
• ‘La filiation de Clairvaux: les îles britanniques’, in L’aventure cistercienne, edited by Arnaud Baudin (Paris: Somogy editions, 2015), 107-9.
• ‘O Damietta: memory and crusade in thirteenth-century Egypt’, Journal of Medieval History 40:3 (2014), 346-60.
• ‘Memory and interpretation: new approaches to the study of the crusades’ (with Anne E. Lester), Journal of Medieval History 40: 3 (2014), 225-36.
• ‘The Monastery of Sao Vicente de Fora in Lisbon as a site of crusading memory’ Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 3 (2014), 1-20.
• ‘The Stedinger Crusade: war, remembrance and absence in thirteenth-century Germany’, Viator: UCLA Journal for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 44:2 (2013), 1-16.
• ‘Refugees: views from thirteenth-century France’ in Why the Middle Ages Matter, edited by Celia Chazelle, Amy Remensnyder and Felice Lifshitz (London: Routledge, 2011), chapter 11.
• ‘Incarcération du corps et libération de l’esprit: un motif hagiographique’, in Enfermements: Le Cloître et la prison au moyen âge, edited by Isabelle Heullant-Donat, Elisabeth Lusset et Julie Claustre (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011), 57-70.
• ‘Images of Blood in the Historia Albigensis of Pierre of les Vaux-de-Cernay’, Journal of Religious History (2011), 478-91.
• ‘Memories of space in thirteenth-century France: displaced people after the Albigensian crusade’, Parergon 27: 2 (2010), 111-31.
• ‘Space and place in medieval contexts’, Parergon 27-2 (2010), 1-12.
• ‘Images of incarceration in late-medieval art’ in Imagination, Books and Community in Medieval Europe, edited by G. Kratzmann (MacMillan Art Publishing/State Library of Victoria, 2009), 190-95.
• ‘Prison, power and sacrament: images of St Barbara in late medieval art’, Journal of Medieval History 35: 4 (2009), 1-14.
• ‘Reflecting and creating gender in late-medieval and early modern Europe’, in Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 317-26.
• ‘Grief and Memory after the Battle of Agincourt’ in The Hundred Years War II: Different Vistas, edited by Andrew Villalon and Donald Kagay (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 133-50.
• ‘A place of horror and vast solitude: medieval monasticism and the Australian landscape’ in Medievalism and the Gothic in Australia edited by Stephanie Trigg (Turnhout: Brepols; Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), pp. 189-204.
• ‘Prisoners of war after Agincourt: gender, mourning and cultures of captivity in fifteenth-century France’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 12 (2003), 9-22.
• ‘Pilgrimage and embodiment: captives and the cult of saints in late-medieval Bavaria’ Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 20: 2 (2003), 47-70.
• ‘Testimonies from a fourteenth-century prison: rumour, evidence and truth in the Midi’, French History 16:1 (2002), 3-27.
• ‘Incarceration and Liberation: Prisons in the Cistercian Monastery’, Viator: UCLA Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 32 (2001), 1-25.

Projects

• ARC Discovery Project, 2022-26, Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800, ($950,000), co-CI (project lead, Professor Guy Geltner, Monash University.)
• ARC Discovery Project, 2016-20, Atrocity in warfare: a social and cultural history ($278,173), chief sole CI
• ARC Discovery Project, 2014-18, Battlefields of memory: places of war and remembrance in medieval and early modern England and Scotland ($300,000), co-CI
• ARC Future Fellowship, 2011-15 War and memory in European culture: a long perspective
• ARC Discovery Project, 2008-11, Crusade, displacement and the aftermath of war in medieval France ($115,344), chief sole CI
• ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2001-4, A cultural history of the medieval prison

Accolades and awards

• McCaughey Chair in History, University of Queensland
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UK
• Associate investigator ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions

Appointments and affiliations

Academic appointments

• Professor of History, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland (2017-2021)
• Associate Professor of History, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University (2015-2017)
• ARC Future Fellow, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University (2011-2015)
• Lecturer in Medieval History, School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne (2004-2010)
• ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, History Department, University of Melbourne (2001-2004)
• Lecturer in Medieval History, Level A, School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania (1998-2001)

 Leadership

• Head of School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland (2017-21)
• Head of School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University (2016-17)
• Head of History, Monash University (2015-16)
• President, Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2003-5)

Editorial roles

• Editorial Board member, Journal of Medieval History.
• Editorial Board member, Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies
• Editorial Board member, Europa Sacra book series (Brepols)
• Editorial Board member, Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Brepols)
• Editorial Board member, Medieval Animals (University of Wales Press)

International journal review panel

• Reader and reviewer for Speculum; The American Historical Review; Palgrave MacMillan; Viator: UCLA Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Cambridge University Press; Brepols; Parergon; The Journal of Medieval History, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History

Grant agency review panel

• Peer reviewer for the Australian Research Council, the AHRC (UK), the Icelandic Research Fund