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Jessica Goldberg

Assistant Professor of History

Jessica Goldberg Jessica Goldberg is Assistant Professor of Medieval History. She studies the medieval history of the Mediterranean basin, Christian Europe, and the Islamic world. After earning an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University (1991), Professor Goldberg spent several years teaching high school math, then completed a Ph.D. in the History Department at Columbia University (2006). She joined the Penn faculty in the fall of 2006 after a post-doctoral fellowship in the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program. Her teaching interests include surveys of medieval European and Mediterranean history, the history of the Crusades and the idea of Crusading, the history of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean economy, legal history, and the history of lay Christianity.

Professor Goldberg's research interests include the history of medieval trade, business, and industry, definitions of regions and regional identity, and the idea and practice of law in medieval societies. Her current project focuses on the geographies of medieval trade networks in the eastern Mediterranean. She looks particularly at the ways merchants engaged with local and long-distance economies, their strategies and techniques for managing spatially far-flung enterprises, and their ideas of who and what made up a regional economy. She looks at ways these issues are addressed on both the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, through the eyes of two business communities: a circle of merchants centered on Cairo in the eleventh-century, and the Genoese of the twelfth and early thirteenth century. She is currently completing a manuscript looking at the first of these communities, using documents—business letters, notes, accounts, powers of attorney and various business ephemera—found in the Cairo Geniza.

Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)

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