Ana C. Núñez

Ana C. Núñez is a PhD candidate in Medieval History, focusing on the crusades, female rule, and material culture. Her dissertation presents a thematic and comparative examination of the five women who ruled the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291) in their own right, arguing that queenship in the crusader kingdom constituted a dynamic political office that persisted and changed in the face of shifting geopolitics across medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. She demonstrates how the reigning queens of Jerusalem were more than wives of kings and continuators of royal dynasty; they were also patrons, diplomats, and lords, actively involved in the foundation and preservation of a new, hyper-militant Christian polity. Her work reframes histories of the crusading Levant by demonstrating how all five of the reigning queens of Jerusalem were subjects in, rather than objects of, their society’s political culture. Ana is also a Digital Public Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and was previously a Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellow, and an Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Fellow.