María Rosa Menocal is a scholar of medieval culture and history. Menocal earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Yale University faculty in 1986, she taught Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2002, Menocal wrote the book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which has been translated into many languages, and includes an introduction by fellow Yale Sterling Professor in the Humanities Harold Bloom. The book focuses on tolerance in Medieval Spain within the Muslim and Christian kingdoms through political examples as well as cultural examples.

Menocal also is the author of The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987), as well as Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth from Borges to Boccacio (1991) and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (1994).

Born in Cuba and raised in Philadelphia, Menocal is currently director of the Yale Whitney Humanities Center and the co-editor of The Literature of Al-Andalus in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series.