Kevin J. Madigan (born March 28, 1960)[1] is an American historian and theologian who has served as the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School since 2009.
[5] Madigan attended the College of the Holy Cross, graduating magna cum laude in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English literature.
[10][11] 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.
[citation needed] 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.
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.
[19] 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 Steven Spielberg)[20] 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,[21] a volume that had been translated into nine languages, had been published.
[22] Madigan's Chicago dissertation, on the influence of Joachim of Fiore and of controversies surrounding the "Spiritual Franciscans" on commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew in the high Middle Ages, especially that written by Peter Olivi (1248–98), was published in revised form in 2003.
Madigan is now working on a book, based on the rich resources of the Vatican, Jesuit, and Central State Archives in Rome, on the relationship between Protestants and Catholics during the Fascist period in Italy.