(Dallas, TX) Rebecca Lynn Winer, associate professor at Villanova University, is the recipient of the 2023 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship.
Established to honor well-known medievalist Bonnie Wheeler, The Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship Fund of The Dallas Foundation
supports the research of women medievalists with tenure below the rank
of full professor. In addition to a generous stipend, each recipient is
paired with a distinguished mentor in the field who engages with the
recipient and her project to its successful completion. The fellowship
aims to help women who have been at the associate level for too long to
get “unstuck” and move to full professor. In addition, the Fellowship
cultivates women as academic leaders.
Rebecca
Lynn Winer will receive the $25,000 fellowship and the support of a
mentor in her field as she completes her research in breastfeeding,
mothering, sexuality, and reproductive work among free and enslaved
women in Medieval Catalonia and beyond. The fellowship will allow
Professor Winer to work on her book project, Sweet Milk? Wet Nurses,
Mothers, and the Medieval Jews and Christians of Catalonia and Beyond,
which deals with breastfeeding as a central concern in the lives of most
medieval women. The economy of women’s bodies and their work as
caregivers entails biopolitics of medieval religious difference and
slavery, Christian-Jewish relations, and global connections from Europe
to Latin America.
Chair
of the Selection Committee, Professor Anne Yardley, Drew Theological
School (retired), noted that the committee expressed “great enthusiasm
for Professor Winer's ground-breaking book project which ranges across
geographical boundaries in methodological approach, across linguistic
worlds in Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic, and across wide-ranging archival
sources. We are eager to see this cross-cultural, interdisciplinary book
come to fruition.”
Professor
Winer received her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA). Her first book, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan
c.1250-1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval
Mediterranean Town (Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006) was shortlisted
for the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Book Prize, and
another work which she co-edited with Federica Francesconi, Jewish
Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present (Wayne State University
Press, 2021) was “the finalist” for the Barbara Dobkin Award, the
National Jewish Book Award in the category of Women’s Studies.