Connecting people to the past through stories and objects is my passion. I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and earned bachelor’s degrees in English and Classics from Georgetown University.  As a student at the University of Heidelberg on a Fulbright fellowship, I fell in love with the looks, the textures and the stories hidden in the physical makeup of medieval manuscripts. In graduate school at Cornell, where I earned my Ph.D. in Medieval Studies and won the Goethe Prize, I delved into medieval Latin medical manuscripts on lovesickness and how they influenced and were influenced by literary depictions of love. The book that resulted, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), won the Harry Levin Prize from the American Association for Comparative Literature for the best book in comparative literature (1990).  

Later in my career in teaching and administration at Stanford and Washington State University, I plunged into a trove of documents, photos, and artifacts I inherited from my Irish-American great-aunt. A series of articles in The Winding Roe, Familia, and talks at Irish Studies conferences in the United States developed from these genealogical and historical materials. 

 Not to be outdone by the Irish, my father’s French-German side of the family recently blessed me with ten moving boxes containing a five-generation archive of Franco-German family letters, photos and documents: the Wack-Woehrmeyer Family Archive. The preservation and dissemination of this five-generation archive containing histories of the French-German frontier is the focus of my most intensive writing and research currently.