Robin S. Reich, PhD

Dr. Reich uses methods of material culture to explore the exchange of scientific knowledge across language, religion, space, and time in the medieval Mediterranean. Her expertise lies in the transmission of medicinal substances through texts, objects, and practice in southern Italy, Sicily, and North Africa in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She has published articles and book chapters on the meaning of visual language and materials to medieval science. She is currently preparing her dissertation for publication as a monograph, titled Materials of Medicine: Exchanging, translating, and using transformative substances in the medieval central Mediterranean.

Dr. Reich’s work also focuses on medievalism, or the imagination of the Middle Ages in later periods. She is the co-founder and Managing Director of the Medievalist Toolkit, an organization that studies the use of the medieval in modern politics and pop culture, and promotes evidenced-based discourse in journalism, social work, education, and social media. Her current research project is a history of female medical practitioners in the medieval Mediterranean, interwoven with an analysis of the modern Wellness movement and how it has adopted ideas of herbalism and witchcraft to market alternative medicine to women.

Robin S. Reich CV