Pauline Moffit Watts '66
Pauline Moffitt Watts ‘66 received the Distinguished Alumna award in 2012.
Pauline is an academic at heart who “grew up in a house filled with books… in a family for whom reading was like breathing.” She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and then earned her PhD in history from the University of Michigan in 1976. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Carter Brown Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, and the American Academy in Rome.
Pauline is an academic at heart who “grew up in a house filled with books… in a family for whom reading was like breathing.” She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and then earned her PhD in history from the University of Michigan in 1976. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Carter Brown Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, and the American Academy in Rome.
She is the author and editor of books and articles in the areas of Medieval and Renaissance religious and cultural history, and cross-cultural contacts in sixteenth-century Mexico. These include Nicolaus Cusanus: A Fifteenth-Century Vision of Man, The Game of Spheres: A Translation of Nicolaus Cusanus’ De ludo globi, “Prophecy and Discovery: On The Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise of The Indies’,” The American Historical Review, “Pictures, Gestures, Hieroglyphs: ‘Mute Eloquence’ in Sixteenth-Century Mexico” in The Language Encounter in The Americas 1492-1800, “A Mirror for The Pope: Mapping The Corpus Christi in the Galleria delle Carte Geograrfiche” in I Tatti Studies: Essays in The Renaissance.
After some years of traveling and research in Europe with her husband, Pauline returned to her alma mater to teach and was a member of the History Faculty at Sarah Lawrence from 1985-2009. In 2006, Pauline became the interim Dean of the College and served as Dean of The College from 2007-2009. She then returned to San Francisco, where she continues her scholarly work and has also finally found the time to pursue her lifelong dream of drawing and painting. She has never stopped gardening.
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