Heidi Hansen

Heidi began her PhD in the History department at Columbia in 2022, with a specialization in medieval social and religious history. Her research focuses on the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Venetian scuole, or lay devotional confraternities, and their links with ecclesiastical institutions. She is also interested in exploring the topics of class and hierarchy, how these were articulated along religious lines, and the ways in which the scuole both upheld and challenged prevailing notions of social and spiritual stratification. Her dissertation advisor is Neslihan Senocak.

Heidi graduated with a B.A. in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2020. Her senior honors thesis, “Prayer and Personal Identity: The Book of Hours and the Middle Class in Fifteenth-Century France,” received the Arthur Kouguell Memorial Prize for that year. She also completed an M.A. in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 2021.