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Dawn Marie Hayes received her Ph.D. in medieval European history from New York University in 1998.
Professor Hayes’ teaching experience began at NYU, where she served as a Teaching Assistant from 1991-1994, winning a Golden Dozen Distinguished Teaching Award in May 1994. Upon completion of her dissertation, she joined the faculty of Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. She taught at Iona for four years and during her tenure there received a number of campus awards and was named a Speaker in the Humanities by the New York Council for the Humanities for the 2000-2002 term. The summer before she joined Iona, Professor Hayes was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in a Paris-based summer seminar, Gothic in the Ile-de-France, an experience that allowed her to learn more about the fertile marriages some medievalists have achieved between computer technology and medieval art history. Most of her research has an interdisciplinary focus, drawing on disciplines outside history to make sense of the sources she studies. Her first book, Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389, a revision of her doctoral dissertation, was published in 2003. It is a work of cultural history that lays bare the symbiotic relationship between human bodies and churches in the Middle Ages. A few months after the publication of her book, Dr. Hayes joined the faculty of Montclair State University. She teaches various courses on the history of the Middle Ages in the Department of History and was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2007. In the fall of 2004, after visiting Sicily for the first time, she began discussions to create MSU’s International Summer Institute in Sicily, which she directs. Trained in medieval French and English history, she eventually turned her attention to the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Her most recent publication is “French Connections: The Significance of the Fleurs-de-Lis in the Mosaic of King Roger II of Sicily in the Church of Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio, Palermo” Viator 44 (2013): 1-31.