Joëlle Rollo-Koster

EURIAS Fellow, SCAS.
Professor of History, University of Rhode Island, Kingston

Joëlle Rollo-Koster holds an MA from Université Nice and a Ph.D. from Binghamton
University, NY, where she worked on three censuses of the population of late medieval
Avignon. After her Ph.D., she continued her study of the Avignonese population, focusing
on women, labor, and immigration, while adjunct teaching at Castleton State College in
Vermont. In 1996, she joined the ranks of the Department of History at the University of
Rhode Island, Kingston, where she teaches freshman to upper-level and graduate courses.
She was Chair of the Department of History in 2011–13 and Vice Chair and Chair of the
URI Faculty Senate in 2014–16. She is foremost a historian of papal Avignon (1309–1378)
and the Great Western Schism (1378–1417, when Christianity split between two and even
three papal obediences).

She has published extensively on a variety of topics, including immigration, merchants,
confraternities, prostitution, women labor, medieval urban history, symbolism, and historical
anthropology. Among her most recent publications are Raiding Saint Peter: Empty Sees,
Violence, and the Initiation of the Great Western Schism (1378) (2008) and The People of
Curial Avignon (2009). She edited with Thomas Izbicki A Companion to the Great Western
Schism, 1378–1417 (2009) and with Kathryn Reyerson For the Salvation of My Soul:
Women and Wills in Medieval and Early Modern France (2012). Recently she has published
Avignon and Its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society (2015) and edited Death
in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed (2016). At SCAS, Rollo-Koster
plans to draft several chapters of her forthcoming book, Popes and Intruders: A History of the
Great Western Schism (1378–1417).

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2017-18.