Ken Mondschein (website) received his PhD from Fordham University in 2010, his fencing master’s certification in historical fencing from the US Fencing Coaches’ Association in 2013, and his M.Ed. from UMass-Amherst in 2021. He is also certified as a Prevôt in modern foil and épée and has an M.Ed. from UMass-Amherst. Ken has studied fencing and historical martial arts for since the mid-1990s, and has competed successfully in several local historical fencing tournaments. He also holds a second-degree black belt in traditional Japanese karate and is an avid equestrian and jouster. Ken’s philosophy differs from that of most historical martial arts instructors, as it is based on both primary sources and living traditions of foil, épée, sabre, and European stick-fighting.

On the academic side of things, Dr. Mondschein is a college professor who was a 2008–2009 Fulbright scholar to France, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard from 2009–10 and at UMass Amherst’s Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies from 2010–12, and was a Research Fellow at the Higgins from 2009 until the Museum’s closing in 2013. Besides numerous other writings, invited talks, and conference presentations, he is the translator of Camillo Agrippa’s rapier treatise (Italica Press, 2009; revised edition, 2014), as well as a book on the Getty manuscript of Fiore dei Liberi (Getty Publications, 2011), the Italian school of the two-handed sword (SKA Swordplay Books, 2012), conference proceedings on HEMA subjects (Freelance Academy Press, 2014), Game of Thrones and the Medieval Art of War (McFarland, 2017), The Art of the Rapier (SKA Swordplay Books, 2020), and On Time, a history of timekeeping (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). Dr. Mondschein’s academic work concentrates on what fencing books can teach us about European history, and he is widely known as one of the foremost experts in this field.