Ada Kuskowski

Ada Kuskowski is a medievalist whose work is driven by a fascination with how and why foundational legal ideas develop. She explores law as a form of literature, culture, and knowledge in medieval Europe in order to understand its broader place in medieval culture, European history and legal history. She is especially interested in how legal knowledge is constructed. How did the basic categories, narratives and forms through which we think about law develop? This question animates her first book, Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches course on medieval justice, war and conquest, love and lust, Vikings, histories of property and foundations of law.