Ken Mondschein is a scholar, teacher, and author with expertise in subjects ranging from the Middle Ages to modern pop culture, as well as (fittingly for a medieval historian) an expert swordsman. He received his PhD in history from Fordham University, has also studied at SUNY Buffalo, Boston University, and Harvard, and was a Fulbright scholar to France. Though Ken's scholarly concentration is the Middle Ages and Renaissance, he has taught, lectured, spoken, consulted, and published on everything from the origins of contemporary sexual mores to medieval science to the political uses of the past, and worked with organizations ranging fom the J. Paul Getty Museum to the History Channel to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Ken began writing professionally in his late teens. He has authored several books, and his work has appeared in the New York Press, various consumer magazines, as a columnist for Nerve.com and The Faster Times, and elsewhere.
Driven to study swordsmanship by the same love of the past and desire to relate it to the present—and to teach others—that led him to become an academic, Ken is also internationally known as an authority on, and instructor of, historical fencing. He primarily teaches at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester (where he is a Research Fellow), and is the translator of several historical fencing treatises. One of his goals in this is to show how the study of such books is valuable to historians of art, ideas, society, and science.
Born, raised, and having spent most of his professional life in New York City and also having lived in Buffalo, Boston, and Paris, Ken currently resides near Northampton, Massachusetts. He has made several radio and TV appearances in support of his work, and is available for consultation and interviews. Publishers may contact Ken through his literary agent, Scott Gould of RLR Associates. His academic curriculum vitae may be downloaded here, and he may be contacted personally at <his first name> at <this URL>. You can connect to him on LinkedIn here.