Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 8, 2002Volume 30, Number 17


Paul Freedman




Paul Freedman is named the
Chester D. Tripp Professor

Paul Freedman, the newly appointed Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, is a specialist in the history of medieval Catalonia who has focused much of his research on how peasants were viewed by others in the Middle Ages.

His books include "Images of the Medieval Peasant," "The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia" and "The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia." He has also published two collections of essays, "Church, Law and Society in Catalonia, 900-1500" and "Assaigs d'historia de la pagesia catalana" (writings on the history of the Catalan peasantry translated into Catalan). More recently, he edited (with Caroline Walker Bynum) "Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages." He also has contributed to numerous scholarly and reference books.

Freedman earned his B.A. at the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M.L.S. from the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He went on to earn his Ph.D. at the same institution. His doctoral work focused on medieval Catalonia and how the bishop and canons interacted with the powerful and weak elements of lay society in Vic, north of Barcelona.

The historian taught for eight years at Vanderbilt University before joining the Yale faculty in 1997. At Vanderbilt, he focused his research on the history of Catalan peasantry, papal correspondence with Catalonia and a comparative history of European seigneurial regimes. He was awarded Vanderbilt's Nordhaus Teaching Prize in 1989 and was the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Center Fellow there in 1991-1992. He currently serves as director of undergraduate studies in history at Yale.

He has been a visiting fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen and was directeur d'Études Associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1995.

Freedman's numerous honors include the 2001 Otto Gründler Prize, a book award in medieval studies given by The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, and the 2000 Eugene M. Kayden Award, a book award in the humanites administered by the University of Colorado. He won the American Historical Association's Premio del Rey Prize (a biennial book award in early Spanish history) in 1992 and shared the Medieval Academy of America's Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize in 1981. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994, Freedman has also been awarded a Griswold Fellowship and a Senior Faculty Fellowship from Yale and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

A fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, Freedman is also a corresponding fellow of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans in Barcelona.

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Campus Notes


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