Prof. Lehfeldt joined the faculty of the History Department at Cleveland State in the fall of 1995 and received her PhD in Early Modern European History from Indiana University in 1996. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Lawrence University (Appleton, Wisconsin) in 1988. Her research interests include early modern Spain, the history of women religious, and the history of women and gender.
She has published extensively on the subject of female monasticism in late medieval and early modern Spain. In a series of articles and essays she has also investigated the subject of female rule in early modern Europe, focusing on the reign of Isabel of Castile. More recently she has examined the construction of codes of masculinity in seventeenth-century Spain. Prof. Lehfeldt has also directed teacher workshops and given presentations on the history of the woman suffrage movement in the United States.
Currently, she is at work on two projects: a study of the gendered construction of political legitimacy in the chronicles of the reign of Isabel of Castile (r. 1474-1504) and a comparative study of the state-led reform of early modern English and Spanish convents from 1490 to 1550.