Dr. Joanna Drell

Associate Professor of History

314 Ryland Hall
Office: (804) 287-1828
Fax: (804) 287-1992

Teaching:
The Early Middle Ages
Medieval Italy
Renaissance Italy
Seminar: History of the Family
Western Civilization

Research:
Medieval Europe, Medieval/Renaissance Italy
Households, Family, and Gender in the Middle Ages
Medieval Southern Italy and Sicily
Medieval Frontiers
The Crusades

Education:
M.A., Ph.D., Brown University

Selected Publications:
Medieval Italy:  Texts in Translation (in collaboration with Dr. K. Jansen, Dr. Frances Andrews), University of Pennsylvania Press: forthcoming.

Kinship and Conquest:  Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period, 1077-1194, Cornell University Press: June 2002.

"Family Structure in Salernitan Society,"  Salerno nel XII secolo: istituzioni, società, cultura, Paolo Delogu and Paolo Peduto ed., Centro Studi Salernitani "Raffaele Guariglia", 2004, pp. 103-118.
 
"The Aristocratic Family in Norman Southern Italy," in The Normans in Southern Italy, G. A. Loud, editor, Brill Publishers, 2002, pp. 97-113.

"Cultural Syncretism and Ethnic Identity:  The Norman "Conquest" of Southern Italy and Sicily," The Journal of Medieval History, XXV, No. 3, 1999, pp. 187-202.

Academic and Professional Activities:
I'm currently working on a book project, The Construction of Mediterranean Identity:  the Kingdom of Southern Italy and Sicily, c. 1000-1300.  I examine the various cultural and ethnic pieces that comprised the medieval multicultural Kingdom of southern Italy and Sicily (the 'Regno')--a place where Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Greeks, Latins, Lombards, Normans and Angevins commingled.  The diverse ethnic circumstances in the Regno fostered complex interactions in which neither conqueror nor conquered--or perhaps better to say--neither new settlers nor indigenous peoples adopted simple or consistence approaches to coexistence.  Cultural identity was peculiarly preserved:  it was encouraged, manipulated, abandoned, according to need.  This work grew out of my previous work on family strategies in the medieval Principality of Salerno.  I continue to be interested in issues of family and gender in medieval Italy.