Ken Mondschein is a writer, scholar, educator, jouster, and fencing master.
Ken received his PhD in history from Fordham University and his fencing master's certification from the United States Fencing Coaches' Organization; holds an M.Ed. in Learning, Media, and Technology from UMass-Amherst; and was a Fulbright scholar to France. He has taught, inter alia, at the University of Massachusetts, where he was also a Visiting Fellow at the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Renaissance Studies, and at Boston University.
Having begun writing professionally in his late teens, Ken is the author or editor of numerous academic and non-academic books, including On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping (Johns Hopkins), Game of Thrones and the Medieval Art of War (McFarland), the introductions to numerous Canterbury Classics leather-bound volumes, and several translations of medieval and early modern fencing treatises. Ken's non-academic work has appeared in print publications such as Renaissance magazine and the New York Press; online outlets such as McSweeney's and Medievalists.net; and in Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's DODO files.
Ken is well-known as a public historian. Besides his long record of speaking out against racism, sexism, and classism in modern medievalisms to audiences both academic and non-academic, his interests lie in the history of time and timekeeping; the history and social meaning of fencing and related arts; the history of romantic love; and the Middle Ages in popular culture. He has taught, spoken, consulted, and published on topics ranging from medieval swordfighting to the history of science to the political misuse of the past for organizations ranging fom the J. Paul Getty Museum to the History Channel to the Society for Creative Anachronism to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Ken is the translator of several historical treatises, and is widely known as an authority and instructor in this field. He was employed at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, MA (where he was a Research Fellow) until the Museum's closing in 2013 and currently teaches fencing privately in Western and Central Massachusetts. Ken's work with the history of swordsmanship originates from the same love of the past and desire make it relevant to the present that led him to become an academic; one of his goals in this is to show the value of the study of such sources 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. In addition to being interviewed in print and online journalism (example), he has made many radio, podcast, and TV appearances in support of his work (click here for selection of interviews), and is available for consultation and interviews. His academic curriculum vitae may be downloaded here.
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Email: ken -at- kenmondschein dot com