Professor and Chair, Religion, Spirituality, and Society
Greta Austin is Professor of the History of Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies, and Director of the Gender & Queer Studies Program. Her academic research focuses on the law of the Catholic Church during the central Middle Ages. Her publications include a book published by Ashgate, Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000: The Decretum of Burchard of Worms, as well asarticles on feuds, just war, and the Middle Ages in movies, and studies of church law during the central Middle Ages in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Medieval Canon Law and in journals such as Speculum and Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistiche Abteilung. She has given invited talks and keynote lectures at the National University of Singapore, the University of British Columbia, and Yale University. Her essay “Living with Pain: The Desert Fathers, the Hindu Festival of Thaipusam, and the New York City Marathon,” appeared in Pangryus and “St. Augustine and the Hall of Memory” in The American Scholar. She serves as Secretary of the Board of the Iuris canonici medii aevi consociatio (ICMAC), the Society for the Study of Medieval Canon Law, and is on the Advisory Board of the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law. At Puget Sound she chairs the Graduate Fellowships Advisory Committee, which works with fellowship applicants. She teaches courses on the history of Christianity, including Violence and Religion, law and Christianity, an interdisciplinary Magic and Religion class, as well as on classes on religious theory and on gender, feminist and queer studies. She has won the Thomas A. Davis Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Puget Sound as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.