Professor Edwards teaches Renaissance and Reformation European history (c. 1400-1700), with special interests in the history of frontiers, religion, families, and folklore.

Professor Edwards regularly teaches the first half of the Western Civilization survey (Big Bang to c. 1600) as well as courses on the Renaissance and Reformation, magic and witchcraft, family history, ritual, and modern European historiography. Her publications include: Visitations: The Haunting of an Early Modern Town (forthcoming), The History of the Apparition of a Spirit, ed. and trans. with Susie Speakman Sutch (forthcoming 2008), Families and Frontiers: Re-creating Communities and Boundaries in the Early Modern Burgundies (2002), and Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe (2002). She has also published articles in a number of journals and collections.

Current Activities

I am beginning my next, large-scale project: a history of European belief in ghosts covering from c. 1300 to the beginning of the 20th c. This research will appear in two volumes; the first is tentatively titled "Living with Ghosts: The Dead in European Society from the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment." By following changes and continuities in this one belief through centuries, I can explore the effect of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment on European culture, variations in European folklore, any tensions between print and manuscript culture, and the transmission of ideas across many (false) boundaries. And I'm developing a great repository of ghost stories! I continue, too, to be interested in many of the themes in my earlier research and am publishing on the concept of frontiers as applied to European history, the history of poor relief, and the significance of religious and cultural disputes on the Franco-imperial border in the 15th and 16th centuries.

To see Professor Edwards' c.v., click here