Cecilia Gaposchkin, assistant professor of history and assistant dean of faculty for pre-major advising, has accepted a fellowship at Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, where she will work on a project tentatively titled “Crusade, Liturgy, Ideology, and Devotion.”
Associate Professor of History Cecilia Gaposchkin will will work on a project tentatively titled “Crusade, Liturgy, Ideology, and Devotion” at Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. (photo by Joseph Mehling ’69)
“I am exploring the different ways that Western Christian ecclesiastical ritual underwrote crusade ideology in the period stretching from the 11th to the 15th century,” says Gaposchkin, a medieval historian. “I began teaching courses on the Crusades in 2005. This book grew out of that experience and has thoroughly informed it.”
Gaposchkin’s work will contribute to the Davis Center’s two-year theme “Authority and Legitimation,” which focuses on explorations of popular claims of authority. A medieval historian, Gaposchkin chose the Princeton fellowship from among several other prestigious fellowships she was offered, calling the Center’s theme a good match for her project. The topic, she says, “is essentially what I have focused on in one form or another in all my work.”