María Rosa Menocal is a Cuban-born scholar of medieval culture and history. Menocal earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

. Before joining the Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 faculty in 1986, she taught Romance philology

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2002, Menocal wrote the book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which has been translated into many languages, and includes an introduction by fellow Yale Sterling Professor

Sterling Professor

A Sterling Professorship is the highest academic rank at Yale University, awarded to a tenured faculty member considered one of the best in his or her field...

 in the Humanities Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

. The book focuses on tolerance in Medieval Spain

Spain in the Middle Ages

After the disorders of the passage of the Vandals and Alans down the Mediterranean coast of Hispania from 408, the history of Medieval Spain begins with the Iberian kingdom of the Arianist Visigoths , who were converted to Catholicism with their king Reccared in 587...

within the Muslim and Christian kingdoms through political examples as well as cultural examples.

Menocal is currently director of the Yale Whitney Humanities Center and the co-editor of The Literature of Al-Andalus in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series.

She has been the mentor of numerous scholars of medieval Iberia, including Howard Miller, Maria Willstedt, Lourdes Maria Alvarez, Ryan Szpiech, Nadia Altschul, and the author Carolina Sanin.

Other publications

• The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage
• Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccacio
• Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric
• The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

External links

• The Culture of Translation http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-culture-of-translation/