Jay Rubenstein

Jay Rubenstein is an American historian of the Middle Ages, a Rhodes Scholar, and a MacArthur Fellow. He grew up in Cushing, Oklahoma and attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota where he graduated with a B.A. in 1989. From 1989-1991 he studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In recognition of this achievement, his hometown of Cushing named a street after him. In 1991 he completed an M.Phil. from Oxford, writing a thesis on the veneration of saints' relics in England after the Norman Conquest. In 1997 he received a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, working under the supervision of Professor Gerard Caspary. After leaving Berkeley he taught one year at Dickinson College, one year at Syracuse University, and seven years at University of New Mexico. Since 2006 he has been based at the University of Tennessee where he is now the Alvin and Sally Beaman Professor of History. His published scholarship has focused on medieval intellectual history, monastic life, and the early crusade movement. "Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind" is based on his doctoral dissertation. His more recently published book, "Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse," is his first book aimed at both popular and scholarly audiences and received the 2012 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, aimed at recognizing books that have made a significant contribution to understanding the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.