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Research
Constance Berman developed an interest in medieval history at Carleton College in Minnesota and did her graduate work at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she was admitted into the research seminar of the late David J. Herlihy. In her first book, Medieval Agriculture (1986) she argued that the contributions to medieval economic growth of the Cistercians (a monastic reform group of the twelfth century) were as entrepreneurs who reorganized the landscape rather than pioneers; this changed what historians expect to find in investigating Cistercian economies in medieval Europe. Her second monograph The Cistercian Evolution (2000), did something of the same for the organizational aspects of the Order. Berman’s concern about undergraduate teaching has led to two books, Medieval Religion: New Approaches (2005) and Women and Monasticism in Medieval Europe (2002), and has just completed "Secular Women in the Documents for Late Medieval Religious Women," Church History and Religious Culture 4:88 (2008), edited with Michelle Herder (who starts this fall as the medieval historian at Cornell College!), which will appear as well as a stand-alone book from Brill. This spring she is trying to finish up The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys for Women and their Property, the edition of an account book "Achatz d' heritages: the Account Book of Blanche of Castile for the Abbey of Maubuisson," which will appear in Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, and a book on Women’s Work and Economic Development in Medieval Europe, 1050-1250 AD, for which she received initial support from a University of Iowa May Brodbeck Fellowship in the Humanities in 2000 as well as an NEH and Guggenheim Fellowship. She has contributed to the AHA efforts to evaluate graduate and undergraduate history programs as one of the committee that contributed to The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2003), Thomas Bender, Philip M. Katz, Colin Palmer, and committee members, and of the working group for the recent AHA/national History Center/Teagle Foundation report, The History Major and Undergraduate Liberal Education (2008). Berman is currently a Collegiate Fellow in our College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a Councilor of the Medieval Academy America, and a board member for Matrix, the on-line data-base for medieval religious women and communities.
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