Department of History

Jo Ann Moran Cruz is an associate professor of history at Georgetown University and former chair of the department. She is the co-founder and former director of the Medieval Studies program at Georgetown. She has directed International Initiatives in the Provost's Office at Georgetown and worked to establish Catholic Studies at Georgetown. She has held numerous positions in the Faculty Senate and has been involved with faculty governance at Georgetown in a great variety of areas, including athletics and continuing studies.

Her primary scholarly work has been in the field of late medieval education and literacy where she has published a prize-winning book, The Growth of English Schooling, and a number of articles on topics such as the methodologies for determining literacy, education and social mobility and common-profit libraries. She has published a recent introduction to Medieval history, Medieval Worlds, with Richard Gerberding, a study of ordinations in the diocese of York between 1340-1530, and an article on popular attitudes towards Islam in Medieval Europe. Most recently she completed an article on Dante, Purgatorio II and the Jubilee of Boniface VIII, which is forthcoming in Dante Studies. She is currently revising her often cited lecture on The Roman de la Rose and Thirteenth-century Prohibitions of Homosexuality for publication and co-writing a book on Religion and the State in the Islamic and Christian Worlds.

Professor Moran is also currently writing an article on the figure of Matelda in Dante's purgatorio, linking her with the empire and with Dante's politics. She has been working, for several years, on a book tentatively entitled "A Question of Obedience: The Marital Tributions of an Elizabethan Family," a study based on surviving letters from the Willoughby family outside Nottingham.