Olivia Remie Constable, the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, died at her home in South Bend, Indiana, on April 16. She was 53 years old and had been suffering from cancer.
A native of Boston, Dr. Constable was a graduate of Yale University and earned a Ph.D. in Near Eastern history from Princeton University. She taught at Columbia University in New York for six years before joining the faculty at the University of Notre Dame in 1995.
Professor Constable was the author of Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), and Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2004).