Director
CJ Jones, Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute
CJ Jones joined Notre Dame and became a Faculty Fellow of the Medieval Institute in 2012 and was appointed Robert M. Conway Director in 2025. Their vision for the Medieval Institute includes enhanced student experiences, international collaboration, and continued support for interdisciplinary research.
Professor Jones earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and holds an appointment as Professor of German Studies. Their interdisciplinary research draws together history, literature, music, liturgy, and manuscript studies to explore how religious women negotiated gendered and religious structures of authority. Their work has been supported by the DAAD, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center.
Jones is the author of two monographs on the medieval Dominican order—Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Penn Press, 2018) and Fixing the Liturgy: Friars, Sisters, and the Dominican Rite, 1256-1516 (Penn Press, 2024)—and has translated an important chronicle of the order's fifteenth-century reform movement as Women's History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer's Chronicle of the Dominican Observance (PIMS, 2019). Their publications also include co-edited volumes and special issues along with numerous articles and essays on late medieval religious culture in Central Europe, and their current research examines small-format manuscripts for worship to uncover how Catholic monks and nuns individualized and optimized the books guiding their community prayer lives. Jones is also the general editor of two book series: Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions and Liturgie und Volkssprache.
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