President Stephen Sundborg, S.J. awarded the Theiline Pigott McCone Chair in Humanities to History Professor Theresa Earenfight. The award is given to an outstanding teacher and scholar in one of the basic humanities disciplines in the College of Arts and Sciences.

As Pigott McCone Chair, Earenfight will further scholarship on “Health from a Historical Perspective” through symposia, conferences, and lectures. Presenters will include anthropologists who study health care, historians who study the social and political impact of epidemics in the modern world, and literary scholars who study depictions of health and disease in novels and nonfiction works.  An event focusing on how people in the Middle Ages understood fertility and responded to infertility and pregnancy-related conditions is also planned.

Earenfight is known internationally for her scholarship on medieval Europe and gender issues. She is the author of The King's Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and recently edited Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She is currently working on a textbook about queens who reigned during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

Earenfight received her Ph.D. from Fordham University and joined the faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1998. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and a Fulbright fellowship to Spain.

The College of Arts and Sciences, the largest college in Seattle University, offers 42 undergraduate and 7 advanced degrees.