Biography
On leave from teaching in Fall 2025 at the Huntington Library, CA
Esther Liberman Cuenca specializes in the history of the medieval and early modern world. Her book, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2025) focuses on the development of law in English towns from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Her essays have been published in Urban History, Continuity and Change, Popular Music, The Paris Review, and History Compass.
Her research interests include the history of the medieval world, law, women, urbanization, and medievalism (i.e., the Middle Ages in popular culture), and her teaching interests vary widely, ranging from medieval and modern Europe to global history, gender, and film. She is co-editor, along with M. Christina Bruno and Anthony Perron, of Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World: An Introduction through Film (Fordham University Press, 2025), a coursebook geared for undergraduate students on medieval law as imagined in film.
She is currently working on her second monograph, a global history of medieval tattooing customs, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press for its Elements in the Global Middle Ages series.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a yearlong Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; an Academic Term Fellowship at the Huntington Library; the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize, Olivia Remie Constable Award, and Schallek Fellowship from the Medieval Academy of America; the Lindsay Young Visiting Regional Faculty Fellowship at the University of Tennessee’s Marco Institute; and a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society.
She is also the organizer of History Day. If you would like, please to donate to our History Day fund.