Lucy Pick
Office: Swift Hall 400 C
Email: lucypick@midway.uchicago.edu
Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer in the History of Christianity in the Divinity School; Associate Faculty in the Department of History
M.S.L. (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Canada)
M.A., Ph.D. (University of Toronto)
Background:
There is a personal component to it: the reason I became interested in the particular program and topic I chose from my dissertation was finding out at age 21, after my father died, that he was Jewish and never having known that. So trying to understand Spain, another community where there were secret Jews, hidden Jews, and how they relate to Christians and to Muslims.
So it was very personal for me, my area of interest. I did not realize that at the time. I didn't realize that until after I had written my dissertation that I was doing this not just as an academic enterprise, but as a personal enterprise too. So as an academic enterprise, I was interested in the crusades. I was always interested in moments where people of different cultures come into contact with each other. And in the Middle Ages the most interesting kind of cultural differences tend to be religious differences. So I was interested in studying those sorts of moments. I moved from working on an interest in crusades as an undergraduate to working on Spain. Because I realized I wasn't so much interested in the military history as I was in the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of contact. And I'm interested not so much in how relationships fall apart, which is numerous; and a sad story that has been studied often. But I'm really interested in how relationships work when they work, and why they work. So I chose a moment when Jews were moving into Christian Spain and were being rather successful there. I chose to study how Christians accommodated Jews. I guess I'm sort of an optimist.
What type of student would benefit working with you:
Because I am in the undergraduate program in Religious Studies, I don't work with graduate studies, although I teach one graduate course a year. So I don't have any advisees. I don't advise graduate students. Informally I am happy to work with anyone.
The courses that I teach always tend to have some kind of comparative component and I work on Medieval Christian History predominately. But most of the courses I teach have some kind of comparative component, because you can't really study Medieval Christian History in isolation without studying a Jewish presence, certainly in Spain, without studying an Islamic presence.
This year actually it is more Christianity and Islam because I am doing a course on the crusades. But when I do a course on Medieval Biblical Exegesis there is always a class on Jewish Biblical Exegesis. I teach a class on Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval Spain. And even in the crusades class we always look at the attacks on the Jews. So it is always a part of my teaching, it is actually a challenge, some of the courses I teach, like religious polemic. It would be interesting to teach a course on Christian, Jewish religious polemic, but it is hard.
How is the interdisciplinary study within the Committee beneficial:
I think that is fine, although because of my area of interest I end up on a lot of these sorts of studies. I am in Gender Studies and Medieval Studies and what we do in Medieval Studies is we have a retreat. We just retreat to the alumni house and have a fabulous lunch at the end of September. It is a wonderful thing for all of us to meet once and talk about our own work and chat and be social. I don't know if Jewish Studies does something like that, but I think it would probably be a good idea. I think for a graduate program students should be able to cope with creating their own program. Jewish Studies is vast. It is not necessarily the case that all people working in an area in Jewish Studies are going to want to talk to each other about their research because they are working in different time periods, in different languages, in different parts of the world, and different methodologies. I think it is ok to let the students create the coherence. It would be harder for an undergraduate program, but for a graduate program it could work.
Can you talk about your work in Gender Studies:
That is my current book. It is on early Medieval Spanish royal women; daughters and queens and the kind of power that they held and the religious role that they performed in the kingdom. That is an old interest that I am kind of picking up again.
Do you accept gender studies students informally:
Sure, I taught a class last year on gender, power, and religion in the Middle Ages and people from all over the university were taking it.
What advice would you give students who are interested in your field:
Well I think if you are going to have a loosely constructed program, you have to be very careful about admitting students who have a very good idea about what they want to do and who they want to work with. I think you don't want to admit someone who says 'you know I'm really interested in Jewish Studies, that is kind of neat.' They really have to come in with an idea of what it is they are doing, if it is going to be a fairly loosely constructed program.
Courses teaching now:
Right now I am teaching a course on: Medieval Europe and its encounter with Islam, which is an undergraduate course. In the winter I will teach a graduate course on the crusades. And in the spring I am going to teach a course on Theresa Avila, who is descendent from Conversos actually.
Do you accept grad students in your courses:
It depends. This course that I am teaching now, I wanted to keep the numbers down. There was one grad student who wanted to take it, but it was similar to crusades so I told him to wait.
Publications:
Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Thirteenth-Century Spain