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Dr. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau
Dr. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau

Jeanne and George Todd Professor of Religious Studies 
Chair of the Religious Studies Program

TEACHING AREA

Religious Studies

EDUCATION

  • Ph D, History, University of Michigan
  • MA, History, University of Michigan
  • BA Interdisciplinary Studies (History and Anthropology), with high distinction, University of Virginia

CONTACT

Dr. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, Jeanne and George Todd Professor of Religious Studies, joined the Religious Studies Program at Principia College after teaching for several years at the University of Kentucky. Her teaching focuses on comparative religion and the history of religion; she teaches courses covering world religions; the Holocaust; and gender, religion, and law. Dr. Starr-LeBeau's research addresses inquisitorial history, Jewish converts to Christianity, and popular piety. She has also published work on gender in inquisitorial courts in Spain and Venice, and on penance in the early modern world. She has previous chaired the Religious Studies program and the Department of Languages and Cultures, and currently serves as Humanities division head.

SCHOLARLY INTERESTS

Dr. Starr-LeBeau's research addresses inquisitorial history, Jewish converts to Christianity, and popular piety. She has also published work on gender in inquisitorial courts in Spain and Venice, and on religious penance in the early modern world. Her current research project focuses on forensic evidence in the Spanish Inquisition.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO FIELD

Dr. Starr-LeBeau is the author of In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition (Hackett, 2023). She also co-edited Judging Faith, Punishing Sin: Inquisitions and Consistories in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2017), translated into Spanish as Fe y Castigo (Catedra, 2018). Her most recent article is “A Global “Infection” of Judaizing: Investigations of New Jews and New Christians in the 1630s and 1640s” in Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean (Palgrave Press, 2021).

MEMBERSHIPS AND AFFILIATIONS

  • Sixteenth Century Studies Renaissance Society of America Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

AWARDS

  • Horace Edwin Harper Jr. and Evelyn Wright Harper Award for Teaching Excellence (2020)
  • Sabbatical Fellowship
  • American Philosophical Society Fellowship
  • American Council of Learned Societies (declined) Finalist
  • National Jewish Book Award in History
  • Fulbright Fellowship
  • Andrew W. Mellon Candidacy Fellowship
  • Phi Beta Kappa

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

  • Recent academic book reviews include a review of Lu Ann Homza, Village Infernos and Witches' Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608-1614 in The Journal of Modern History
  • Review of Byron Hamann, Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in Mediterratlantic World in Ethnohistory.
  • Recent presentations include "Inquisition Tales" at the Telling Stories, Telling Silences workshop at Boston College (June 2023) and "Embodied Epistemologies: Evaluating Evidence in the Spanish Inquisition" at the Renaissance Society of America meeting (March 2022).

Dr. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau CV