Research Bio

Maureen C. Miller is the Jane K. Sather Distinguished Professor of History as well as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and its past-President (2022-2023).  Her research explores medieval Europe, with a focus on religion, politics, and material culture. Best known for her studies of the medieval church, her three award-winning monographs have examined how social and economic change shaped the institutions of the high medieval church (The Formation of a Medieval Church:  Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950-1150); how episcopal residences participated in political change (The Bishop's Palace:  Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy); and how distinctive clerical attire, emerged, changed, and communicated (Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800-1200).  This last volume was awarded both the Otto Gründler Book Prize of the Medieval Institute and the John Gilmary Shea Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association. 

Miller’s scholarship integrates social, cultural, and religious history to illuminate the interplay between material practices and spiritual ideals.  Her volume of translated sources—Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Conflict —has also been widely assigned in undergraduate courses and her articles have been published in leading journals: Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy; the American Historical Review; and Revue d’histoire ecclesiastique.  The recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Harvard's Villa I Tatti, Professor Miller was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2021). At Berkeley, she teaches medieval European history and mentors students in cultural and religious history.

Research Expertise and Interest

medieval history