Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Spiegel's commitment to the historical profession and post-secondary teaching is well evidenced by her years of service on the American Historical Association and in university administration at Johns Hopkins. Before her election as president to the AHA in 2007, she had served as vice-president (research division) from 2000 to 2003. While chair of the history department at JHU, she also served as dean of faculty from 2005 to 2007 and returned to those duties once again as interim dean in 2010. She has supervised the completion of seventeen PhDs by her graduate students at JHU and continues to teach both graduate- and undergraduate-level courses on medieval history and historiography.

Spiegel has been a full professor at Johns Hopkins since 1993, where she has served as chair of the history department from 1999 to 2002 and from 2005 to 2008. During her time at JHU, she has twice served as directeur d'Etudes associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. In 2011, she was named a Gilman scholar.

Her best known theoretical work is "History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," published in the academic journal, Speculum, in 1990. In this article, Spiegel addresses the challenges that the linguistic turn poses to the historical profession and offers the "social logic of the text" as an interpretive lens that locates written sources within the social, political and economic currents that shaped the discourse of the moment while simultaneously foregrounding the active nature of the author’s work as he seeks to reconstitute and reshape reality as he writes. Her 1993 monograph, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France sought to demonstrate the utility of such an approach to historical sources.

Spiegel's work focuses on the theory and practice of historiography, both in the Middle Ages and in the modern era. Her publications on these topics include The Chronicle Tradition of Saint‐Denis: A Survey (1978), Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (1993), The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (1997), and Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (2005), as well as some sixty articles on medieval historiography and contemporary theories of historical writing. Many of her articles and books have been translated into other languages such as Japanese, French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Chinese.

Spiegel began her lecturing at her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, from 1972 to 1973. In 1974, she taught as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, where she stayed until 1992 (having been made an associate professor in 1979 and a full professor in 1992). During her time at the University of Maryland, she held fellowships with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Residency Program in Atlantic History at Johns Hopkins.

Spiegel received a Bachelor of Arts from Bryn Mawr College in 1964. The next year, she completed a Master of Arts in teaching at Harvard University. She received her PhD in 1974 from Johns Hopkins University.

Gabrielle Michele Spiegel (born January 20, 1943) is an American historian of medieval France, and the current Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University where she served as chair for the history department for six years, and acting and interim dean of faculty. She also served as dean of humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004–2005, and, from 2008 to 2009, she was the president of the American Historical Association. In 2011, she was elected as a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.