Rowan Dorin

Rowan Dorin is a historian of western Europe and the Mediterranean, primarily during the high and late Middle Ages. Much of his research tries to understand how law and society interact with each other, especially where legal norms conflict with social practices. Another strand of his research explores the history of economic life and economic thought, especially medieval debates over usury and moneylending. He has also written on the circulation of goods, people, and ideas in the medieval Mediterranean.

Rowan's recent book, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 2023), was awarded the 2023 Salo Baron Prize from the American Academy for Jewish Research; the 2024 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical Association; the 2023 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize from the Canadian Society of Medievalists; and the 2024 American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Book Award.

His current book project examines the ways in which medieval canon law was adapted, reinterpreted, or resisted in local contexts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Born and raised in western Canada, Rowan did his undergraduate and doctoral work at Harvard University, earning an MPhil in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge along the way. Before coming to Stanford, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.