I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and earned bachelor’s degrees in English and Classics from Georgetown University. I fell in love with the looks, the textures and even the smell of old manuscripts when I studied the Middle Ages in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship. After earning a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies at Cornell, I taught at Stanford and Washington State University. My book, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, won the Harry Levin Prize from the American Association for Comparative Literature (1990) for the best book in comparative literature that year. I am currently translating and contextualizing a German WW2 memoir, and editing and translating the Wack-Woehrmeyer Family archive of German letters from 1855-1975.