Clare Monagle is a graduate of Monash and the Johns Hopkins Universities. She received her PhD in 2007. Between 2007 and 2014, Clare worked at Monash University. She came to Macquarie at the end of 2014.

She is broadly interested in history of intellectuals in the Middle Ages, as well as the histories of the institutions that housed them. More particularly, she is currently engaged with the uses of gendered categories in scholastic thought between 1150 and 1520. Her work is also concerned with the "medievalism" of twentieth and twenty-first century thought, that is, the uses to which the concept of the medieval is put within definitions of modernity and progress.