Kevin J. Madigan

Kevin J. Madigan is a historian of Christianity at Harvard University, where he has taught for over fifteen years. A member of the Faculty of Divinity, he has also served on Harvard's Committee on the Study of Religion, the Medieval Studies Committee, and the Center for Jewish Studies. Since 2009, Madigan has been Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Harvard Divinity School, an appointment offered by then-Dean of HDS, William Graham, and officially approved by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust. He has been married for thirty years to Stephanie A. Paulsell, Swarzt Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies at HDS. They have one child, Amanda P. Madigan.

Ph.D, University of Chicago Divinity School, 1992, M.A., University of Chicago Divinity School, 1985, M.A., University of Virginia (English Language and Literature), 1984, B.A., magna cum laude, College of the Holy Cross (English Language and Literature), 1982

Madigan trained in medieval Christianity at the University of Chicago under Bernard McGinn. While at Chicago, Madigan took courses with Professor Jon D. Levenson, with whom, after Madigan joined the Harvard faculty, he would collaborate in publication and in the editing of the journal Harvard Theological Review. After taking his doctorate, Madigan also trained at the Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, then held annually under the direction of Peter Hayes and sponsored by Chicago's Holocaust Educational Foundation. The following summer, he studied under the then-dean of American Holocaust scholars, the late Raul Hilberg at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. In 1994, Madigan took his first "ladder" job as Assistant Professor of Church History at Catholic Theological Union (CTU) in Chicago; he would be tenured there in the Spring of 1999. While on the faculty of CTU, Madigan came under the influence of distinguished scholars, such as Robert Schreiter, Zachary Hayes, Donald Senior, John Pawlikowski, and Carolyn Osiek. He would collaborate in publications with several of these colleagues even after leaving Chicago for Cambridge in the Summer of 1999.

With Professor Senior, he collaborated on the introductory material to Oxford University Press' Catholic Study Bible, writing an essay on the reception and interpretation of the Bible in the Catholic Church, c. 200–2000 CE, and with Professor Osiek he would, after leaving CTU, soon collaborate on a book on women and ordained office in Early Christianity. While Osiek handled the Greek texts, Madigan translated and commented on all extant Latin texts, including inscriptions, c. 100–66. The same year Ordained Women appeared, Antisemitism: An Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, edited by Richard Levy, and of which Madigan was associate editor, was published. Finally, with Pawlikowski, he published his first article on the Holocaust, based on the eleven volumes of the Actes and Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale ed P. Blet et al. A later version of this article, revised for popular consumption, would be published in 2001, entitled "What the Vatican Knew about the Holocaust, and When." The article inaugurated a long and fruitful relationship between Madigan and Commentary, for which he would publish articles in 2010 on Popes Pius XI and XII, in 2010 on the use made by "Nazis on the Run" of the Vatican's Pontifical Aid Commission", and in 2014 on the Vatican's relationship with the government of Benito Mussolini. This, in fact, was a review-essay of David Kertzer's Pulitzer Prize-winning "double-biography of Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. Madigan would later publish a review defending the distinguished Brown University historian, author of the brilliant and critically acclaimed The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, (about to be made into a movie by Stephen Spielberg) in the New York Review of Books after a book-length critique of Kertzer's study The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Antisemitism, a volume that had been translated into nine languages, had been published.

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