Bio and Featured Works
Jo Ann Moran Cruz is a 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, continuing studies, and faculty/staff benefits. She was Ombudsman for the Faculty on the Main Campus from 2016 through 2019. Professor Moran Cruz has taught in Georgetown’s SFS program in Qatar, as well as in Georgetown’s programs in Florence, Italy and Alanya, Turkey. She returned to the University in 2012 after serving as Dean of Humanities and Natural Sciences at Loyola University, New Orleans from 2008-2012. 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, 1340-1530 and a number of articles on topics such as methodologies for determining literacy, education and social mobility and common-profit libraries. She has co-authored a textbook on Medieval history, entitled Medieval Worlds, with Richard Gerberding, has published a study of ordinations in the diocese of York between 1340-1530, and an article on popular attitudes towards Islam in medieval Europe. In 2006, she published “Dante, Purgatorio II and the Jubilee of Boniface VIII,” in Dante Studies and the second of two articles on E.M. Forster in Modern Fiction Studies. In 2016 she published in Viator an article on the figure of Matelda in Dante's Purgatorio. Professor Moran Cruz is currently revising her often cited lecture on “The Roman de la Rose and Thirteenth-century Prohibitions of Homosexuality” for publication and writing a book on Women and Power 800-1600 for Routledge Press. In 2018 she published An Account of an Elizabethan Family: The Willoughbys of Wollaton by Cassandra Willoughby (1670-1735), in the Camden Series by Cambridge University Press. She is currently preparing additional articles based on materials in the Middleton Collection at Nottingham. Her edited volume on A Cultural History of Education in the Middle Ages for Bloomsbury Publishing was published in 2020.