Dr. Wessell Lightfoot received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005. Her research focuses on the lives of women often seen as “powerless” in late medieval Europe—lower status women, Jewish women and converted Jewish women—and how they navigated marriage, property, family alliances and religion in 14^th and 15^th century Spain. Her book, Women, Dowries, and Agency: Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Valencia was published by Manchester University Press in 2013. Currently, she is working on a collaborative project with Alexandra Guerson (University of Toronto) entitled “Negotiating Conversion: Jewish Women, Conversas, and Migration in Late Medieval Catalonia”. This project is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant.

Dr. Wessell Lightfoot has published articles in Viator, the Women’s History Review, and book collections including "The Power to Divide? Germania Marriage Contracts in Early Fifteenth-Century Valencia" in Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property and the Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300-1800) (Routledge, 2010). Her article "The Projects of Marriage: Spousal Choice, Dowries and Domestic Service in Early Fifteen-Century Valencia" Viator 40.1 (2009) was named the 2009 article of the year by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

In September 2014, Dr. Wessell Lightfoot was named as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

She teaches courses on medieval and early modern European history, medieval Spain, European women's history, the witch hunts and the medieval Mediterranean.