Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak


Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak is a historian of medieval northern France. She has been a professor of history at New York University since 2002.
Bedos-Rezak focuses on medieval seals, studying what they can tell us about the culture that produced them and the individuals who used them. She researches how the meaning and significance of seals has changed over time and what those changes can tell us about personal and social identity. More generally, she is an expert in semiotics, i.e., how signs are constructed and function metaphorically and actually in religious and other contexts.
Philippa Hoskin and Elizabeth New called her work on seals as "pioneering", noting how both the matrix and the impression express the owner's will.

Background

Born in France and educated at the École nationale des chartes and the Sorbonne Paris IV, she received her Ph.D. in 1977.  Afterward, she was the curator and head of the Seal Department at the Archives Nationales in Paris for three years. On coming to the United States, she was a visiting scholar and Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, an adjunct associate professor of history at SUNY Stony Brook, and a visiting associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park before joining their faculty as an associate professor in 1989. She served as its director of graduate studies from 1990 to 1993, and was promoted to professor in 1994.

Fellowships and awards

In 1984, Bedos-Rezak was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. In 1985 she was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She participated as a fellow at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) in 1996-97. in 2007 she was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and In 2008 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. In 2012 she was made a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and was made a fellow of the International Committee on Diplomatics, Comité des sciences historiques in the same year. Bedos-Rezak was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in.
Bedos-Rezak has been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, and the Ecole nationale des chartes.

Major publications

Form and Order in Medieval France. Studies in Social and Quantitative Sigillography
  • "Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept," The American Historical Review, 2000
  • "Replica: Images of Identity and the Identity of Images," published in The Mind's Eye
  • ''When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages''