Helen Maud Cam, CBE, FBA, FRHistS (22 August 1885 – 9 February 1968) was an English historian of the Middle Ages, and the first woman to be appointed a tenured professor at Harvard University.
Educated at home by her father William Herbert Cam, the headmaster of Abingdon School, she did her undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway College gaining a First in History there, and later an MA in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish studies at the University of London, after a fellowship year at Bryn Mawr College This degree led to her first book, Local Government in Francia and England, 768–1034 (1912).
[2] On her retirement in 1960 she received as a seventy-fifth birthday present the two-volume Festschrift prepared in her honor by scholars of thirteen countries, which was published with the blessing of the Commission under the title Album Helen Cam.
[3]Cam's focus was on local administration, as opposed to the constitutional and legal history of the dominant historians of the age, Stubbs and Maitland.
Her work was of great scholarly value, but she was also able to write successfully for a wider audience, illustrated best by her England before Elizabeth (1950).