Tracey Billado, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Department of History

Profile

Tracey L. Billado, Ph.D. specializes in the history of the social, political and legal culture of the central Middle Ages in Europe, with a focus on conflict, violence, and dispute-processing in France. She also has an interest in palaeography, codicology and archival studies which she pursued as a graduate exchange student at the École Nationale des Chartes (Sorbonne) in Paris. Her current research focuses on the relationships among lay lords, ecclesiastical lords, and peasants in western France. Her current project is a study of what 11th-century monastic scribes called "evil customs" (taxes, tolls, peasant labor services, rights over justice). A close examination of these conflicts, she argues, provides a new and different picture of eleventh-century lordship and also illuminates the legal culture of a time often presumed to have been lawless and excessively violent. Not surprisingly, many of the classes that she has previously taught at Seton Hall, Cornell University, and Emory University have focused on medieval conflict, violence, and noble culture. She has also taught a course on cinematic representations of the Middle Ages, and a class on medieval heresy and persecution.
 

Education

• Ph.D., Emory University, 2006
• M.A., Emory University, 1999
• A.B., Smith College, 1994

Publications and Academic Distinctions

• Tracy L. Billado and Belle S. Tuten, eds. Feud, Violence and Practice:  Essays in Medieval Studies (forthcoming from Ashgate Press, 2009)
  “Rhetorical Strategies and Legal Arguments: ‘Evil Customs’ and Saint-Florent de Saumur, 979-1011,” in Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter, eds., Oral History of the Middle Ages: The Spoken Word in Context (Medium Aevum Quotidianum and Central European University, 2001) pp. 128-141
  
• University Research Council Research Grant (Seton Hall University), 2008-2009
• National Endowment for the Humanities, 2008
• American Historical Association. 2008
• Fellowship, École Nationale des Chartes (Sorbonne), 2000-2001
• Dean's Teaching Fellowship (Emory University), 1999-2000