María Rosa Menocal is a Cuban-born scholar of medieval culture and history. Menocal earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Yale University faculty in 1986, she taught Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2002, Menocal wrote the book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which has been translated into many languages, and includes an introduction by fellow Yale Sterling Professor in the Humanities Harold Bloom. The book focuses on tolerance in Medieval Spain within the Muslim and Christian kingdoms through political examples as well as cultural examples.
Menocal is currently director of the Yale Whitney Humanities Center and the co-editor of The Literature of Al-Andalus in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series.
She has been the mentor of numerous scholars of medieval Iberia, including Howard Miller, Maria Willstedt, Lourdes Maria Alvarez, Ryan Szpiech, Nadia Altschul, and the author Carolina Sanin.