DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Professor Newman is known for her work on medieval religious culture, saints' lives, and women's writing. Her courses include Christian mysticism, the Bible as Literature, and feminist theology.

Her most recent book, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred, was published by Notre Dame in 2013. She is also the editor/translator of Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints' Lives (2008), and the author of Frauenlob's Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece (2006), God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2003), and From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (1995), as well as three works on Hildegard of Bingen: an edited volume, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (1998); an edition and translation of Hildegard's collected songs, Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum (1988, rev. 1998); and Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (1987).

Professor Newman has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern. She holds the John Evans Chair of Latin Language and Literature and previously held a Charles Deering McCormick Chair of Teaching Excellence (2003-06). Professor Newman is president of the Medieval Academy of America (2015-16) and director of the graduate cluster in Medieval Studies.