Paul Freedman

Paul Freedman
Freedman in 2016
Born	Paul Harris Freedman (1949-09-15) September 15, 1949 New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Professor
Spouse	Bonnie Roe
Awards	Haskins Medal Otto Gründler Prize American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2010) Guggenheim Fellowship
Academic background
Education	Walden School
Alma mater	University of California, Santa Cruz (BA) University of California, Berkeley (MLS, PhD)
Thesis	The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia (1983)
Academic work
Discipline	Medieval studies
Institutions	University of California, Davis (1978–1979) Vanderbilt University (1979–1997) Institute for Advanced Study (1986–1987) Yale University (1997–present)
Main interests	Food History

Paul Harris Freedman (born September 15, 1949) is an American historian and medievalist who serves as the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University; he is a recipient of the Haskins Medal for his work regarding Medieval Europe. Freedman specializes in medieval social history, the history of Catalonia, the study of medieval peasantry, and the history of American cuisine. Freedman is the author of more than 10 books and 40 academic papers having been published by Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard University, Cambridge University, University of Toronto, and the University of Bologna, among others. He wrote extensively on the history of the Middle Ages during his career as a historian though he has recently shifted to culinary history.

Freedman was awarded a BA at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.L.S. from the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a doctorate in History at Berkeley in 1978 and then taught for 18 years at Vanderbilt University before joining the faculty of Yale University in 1997. Freedman was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1986 until 1987 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011. He served as the director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University from 1993 to 1997 and was chair of the Department of History at Yale University from 2004 until 2007. Freedman also currently serves as a member on the editorial board of Speculum at the University of Chicago and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

His book, Images of the Medieval Peasant (published 1999) won the Medieval Academy's Haskins Medal and the Otto Gründler Prize of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University.

Early life and eduation

Freedman was born in New York City, NY to a Jewish family, his father was a doctor and his mother was an economist. He attended the Walden School for high school and spent time at Barcelona, Spain and in Indonesia studying the local culture in college before moving on to earn his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Upon earning his doctorate, Freedman taught history briefly for one year at the University of California, Davis.

Bibliography

• The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia, 1983
• The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia, 1991
• Images of the Medieval Peasant, 1999
• Food: The History of Taste (ed.), 2007
• Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, 2008
• Ten Restaurants That Changed America, 2016
• American Cuisine: And How It Got That Way, 2019

Lectures

• (video) HIST 210: The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000 (Fall 2011), by Paul H. Freedman at Open Yale Courses.

External links

• Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National, on his book "Out of the East:spices and the medieval imagination".
• His page at Yale.edu
• His website