E. Ann Matter

E. Ann Matter, Ph.D (born 1949) is Associate Dean for Arts & Letters and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in Medieval Christianity, including mysticism, women and religion, sexuality and religion, manuscript and textual studies and sacred music. She has written extensively on the life and work of seventeenth-century Italian Catholic nun and mystic, Sister Maria Domitilla Galluzzi.

Matter was educated at Oberlin College, where she received her B.A. in Religion (1971), and at Yale University, where she received her M.A. (1974), M.Phil. (1975), and Ph.D. (1976) in Religious Studies. In 1976, Matter began to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, where, in 1996, she was elected R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Religious Studies. In 2005, Matter was appointed William R. Kenan Professor of Religious Studies and in 2006 to the post of Associate Dean for Arts & Letters, with responsibility for all 12 of the University's humanities departments.

In 1992, she received the prized Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 2003, she was elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

In 1992, Matter published "The Voice of My Beloved," the history of interpretation of the Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity. Recently, she became the co-editor of both "The New Cambridge History of the Bible," and "Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance." She is also Christianity Editor of the "Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions."