Rate My Professor Jennifer McNabb

Jennifer McNabb serves as Department Head and Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2003, focusing on England from 1350 to 1714, her M.A. in History of Early Modern Europe from Bowling Green State University in 1996, and her B.A. in History summa cum laude from Adrian College in 1994. Before joining UNI in 2019, McNabb was Chair of the Department of History at Western Illinois University from 2016 to 2019, where she advanced to Professor in 2014 and earned tenure in 2011 after starting as Assistant Professor in 2005. Earlier, she taught as Lecturer at Colorado State University from 2004 to 2005 and Instructor from 2003 to 2004. She has earned teaching awards at multiple institutions and acted as Chief Reader for the College Board Advanced Placement European History program from 2018 to 2021.

A scholar of early modern England, McNabb's research examines the legal and social processes of courtship and marriage during the long Reformation, alongside topics in early modern women and religion, the history of witchcraft in Europe and America, and Renaissance and Reformation Europe. Her key publications include the forthcoming book An Introduction to Medieval England with University of Toronto Press (submission September 2024), the chapter “ ‘Many tokens passed betwixe them’: Negotiating Meaning in the Matrimonial Market of Early Modern England” in Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (Routledge, 2022), and “ ‘She is but a girl’: Talk of Young Women as Daughters, Wives, and Mothers in the Records of the English Ecclesiastical Courts, 1550-1650” in The Youth of Early Modern Women (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). She has published refereed articles in The Sixteenth Century Journal, Women’s History Journal of the Wooden O, Quidditas, and Cheshire History. McNabb has created multimedia courses for The Great Courses/Wondrium and Audible.com, such as Sex in the Middle Ages (2023), Sex, Love, and Marriage in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2021), Witchcraft in the Western Tradition (2020), and Renaissance: The Transformation of the West (2018). As co-principal investigator, she secured a 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Connections grant ($35,000) and a 2023 UNI Office of Research & Sponsored Programs Capacity Building Grant ($10,000) for “Humanities for Civic Education: Preparing Teachers and Students for Engaged Citizenship.” She previously served as president of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association (2015-2017), is incoming president of the Midwest Conference on British Studies, co-leads UNI’s Center for Civic Education, and facilitates American Historical Association department chairs’ workshops.