| 1 | Name: | Dr. Paul Freedman | |
| Institution: | Yale University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2011 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 404a | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1949 | ||
Paul Freedman is Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale and was chair of the Department from 2004 to 2007. In 2010-2011 he was acting chair. His field is medieval Europe and he has written on Spain, the church, peasants and most recently on food and luxury products in the Middle Ages. Freedman has taught in the freshman Directed Studies (Great Books) program at Yale and offered courses in the Humanities Department. His History Department courses include lectures on the Middle Ages, a course on the history of food and cuisine, and seminars and a number of topics from the Crusades to the European ideas about Asia and Africa. Graduating from the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California, Freedman received his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1978. He taught at Vanderbilt University from 1979 until 1997 when he came to Yale. He has received research fellowships from the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as from government cultural agencies in Spain, France and Germany. Freedman is the author of several books on medieval Spain, including The Diocese of Vic (1983) and The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (1992). In 1999 he published Images of the Medieval Peasant which deals with Europe generally and how the vast majority of medieval society were depicted in literature, art and sermons. Yale University Press in 2008 published Freedman’s book Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination which considers why spices were so popular in the Middle Ages as to become major items of trade and the stimulus to exploration of Asia and the New World. In 2007 Freedman edited Food: The History of Taste, a book about cuisine from prehistoric hunter-gathers until the present-day trends. His recent books include American Cuisine and How It Got That Way (2019). | |||