Caroline Walker Bynum
Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA (born May 10, 1941 in Atlanta, Georgia) is a Medieval scholar from the United States. She is a University Professor "emerita" at Columbia University and Professor "emerita" of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was the first woman to be appointed University Professor at Columbia. She is former Dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, served as President of the American Historical Association in 1996, and President of the Medieval Academy of America in 1997–1998. Education and career. Bynum attended Radcliffe College before completing  a bachelor's degree with high honors in history at the University of Michigan in 1962, and master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in 1969. Her honors include the Jefferson Lecture, a MacArthur Fellowship, and fourteen honorary degrees including degrees from the University of Chicago in 1992, Harvard University in 2005, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. She taught at Harvard University from 1969–1976, the University of Washington from 1976–1988, Columbia University from 1988–2003, and the Institute for Advanced Study from 2003–2011. In 2015, she was the Robert Janson-La Palme Visiting Lecturer  in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Bynum's work has focused on the way medieval people, especially women, understood the nature of the human body and its physicality in the context of larger theological questions and spiritual pursuits. Bynum's work centers around late-medieval Europe. Her focus on female piety has brought increased attention to the role of women in medieval Europe. Awards and prizes. In 2016 Bynum was elected a Fellow of the Ecclesiastical History Society. In July 2017, Bynum was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's  national academy for the humanities and social sciences.