Gabrielle Spiegel, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, chair of the History Department and dean of the faculty of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, has been elected president of the American Historical Association. The AHA is the largest and oldest association of historians in the United States, and its presidency represents the greatest honor that can be bestowed upon an American historian.

Spiegel is the first serving member of the History Department to be so honored since Philip Curtin in 1983. Her election represents a double honor for the department because she also received her doctorate from Johns Hopkins, in 1974.

Spiegel, a historian of the Middle Ages, is the author or editor of four books and more than 40 academic articles. Among the books are Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1993) and The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Her article "History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," which appeared in Speculum in 1990, has been hailed as one of the most important analyses of medieval historiography ever written, and a critical intervention in debates over historians' use of postmodern theory. It has been widely reprinted, translated and commented upon, and won the article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

Before coming to Johns Hopkins for her doctorate, Spiegel received a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of Maryland, College Park, before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1993. She was named a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in 2003 and dean of the faculty in 2005. She has also taught at the L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and served as dean of the humanities at UCLA. She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, among many other honors.

Spiegel will serve as president-elect of the AHA during 2007 and assume her duties as president at the January 2008 conference in Washington, D.C.

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