Scott C. Wells

Scott C. Wells joined the History Department at Cal State LA in 2003 as an assistant professor, with promotion to associate professor in 2009 and to full professor in 2014. He served as department chair from 2014 to 2017 and again from 2023 to 2025. He received the status of professor emeritus in 2026.

Dr. Wells was a member of the university’s Academic Senate from 2020 to 2025 and associate director of the Honors College from 2017 to 2019, and served on numerous governance committees at the department, college, and university level, including as a committee chair.

An online profile of Dr. Wells’ career at Cal State LA, up to his transition from full professor to professor emeritus, was created by the editorial team as one of the special features for the 2026 issue of the History Department’s student research journal, Perspectives. A link can be found in the volume’s table of contents:  https://www.calstatela.edu/centers/perspectives/volume-53

Dr. Wells received his Ph.D. in medieval European history from New York University in 2003, with minor in early modern European history, and taught both lecture and seminar courses in these fields for the History Department. In addition, he taught broader methods and theory courses in historiography to both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as classes in broader world history – including history of religions, history of emotions, and history of biopower and biopolitics in the modern  era – as general education courses.

• "The gendering of power in the family and the state,” co-authored with Ping Yao, in The Cambridge World History, Volume 4: A World with States, Empires and Networks 1200 BCE-900 CE, edited by Craig Benjamin (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 55-75.
• “Discourses on gender and sexuality,” co-authored with Ping Yao, in The Cambridge World History, Volume 4: A World with States, Empires and Networks 1200 BCE-900 CE, edited by Craig Benjamin (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 154-178.
• “The Exemplary Blindness of Francis of Assisi,” in Disability in the Middle Ages, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (Ashgate, 2010), pp. 67-80.
• “The Warrior Habitus in Early Eleventh-Century German Monasticism: Spiritual Athleticism in the Benedictine Reform Movement Patronized by Henry II at the Millennium,” in Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (Palgrave, 2010), pp. 57-85.
• Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe: Power, Patronage and the Authority of Religion in Latin Christendom, co-edited with Katherine Allen Smith (Brill, 2009).  
• “The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity in East Francia: The Case of Gandersheim, ca. 850-950,” in Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe, pp 113-135.

As an emeritus professor, Dr. Wells is currently working on two interrelated projects: a study of the lives of anchorites (holy men and women who lived enclosed in cells attached to monastic or episcopal churches) in tenth and eleventh-century Germany, and a study of the role of Irish monks and hermits in shaping monastic and broader ecclesiastical reform in Germany from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.