#  Debra Blumenthal 

Associate Professor of History

University of California, Santa Barbara

 

 

 



   ![blumenthal](/sites/g/files/omnuum4141/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/historicizingconsent/files/screen_shot_2022-03-20_at_10.52.17_am.png?itok=lTreapMA) 

 



 

 email <blumenthal@history.ucsb.edu> 

 laptop\_windows [Publication](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801445026/enemies-and-familiars/) 

 

 



 

Debra Blumenthal is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara whose research is centered in late medieval Iberian history. Her publications explore the history of slavery and race in the premodern Mediterranean world as well as gender history and the history of medicine and women's health. Her first book, *Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth Century Valencia* (Cornell University Press, 2009), examines the lives of enslaved Muslim, Greek, Tatar, Circassian and Black African men and women at a key moment of transition: when slave status increasingly became associated with black skin color. The book was awarded the Premio del Rey by the American Historical Association in 2010. Her current book project, "*Comares*. Mothering in Uncertain Times," focuses on the construction of maternity in late medieval Iberia, exploring the interactions between midwives, wet nurses, and birth mothers as well as their respective relationships to the infants who circulated between them.