History Department & Director of the Program in Medieval Studies, Princeton University
I study late Antique and early Medieval History and have been teaching at Princeton since 2008. Before that I was the head of the early medieval department at the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. My research focuses on the formation of some of the distinctive features of Western civilization such as the creation of a specific conception of ethnicity, the politics of identity, the history of historical thinking, and on law and legal pluralism in the late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Research related to commentary
I don’t have a long research trajectory working on commentary, but have been working for two decades now on the writing and rewriting of history, how historians built on older building blocks, arranged and rearranged them into a usable past for their own time. I have particularly studied these processes in the transmission of late Antique and early medieval texts such as late Antique chronicles, the Histories of Gregory of Tours, or Carolingian histories and history books.
Publications related to commentary
After Gundovald, before Pseudo-Isidore: Episcopal jurisdiction, clerical privilege and the uses of Roman law in the Frankish kingdoms, in: Early Medieval Europe 27, 1 (2019), pp. 85–111. with Stefan Esders
Livres d’histoire et l’histoire du livre a l’époche Carolingienne, in:, Imago libri. Représentations carolingiennes du livre, ed. C. Denoël/A.-O. Poilpré/S. Shimahara, Biblioglogia 47 (Paris, 2018), pp.107–119.
The early medieval editions of Gregory of Tours‘ Historiae, in: A Companion to Gregory of Tours, ed. A.C. Murray (Leiden, 2016), pp. 520–65.
“The social logic of historiographical compendia in the Carolingian period”, in: Herméneutique du texte d’histoire, ed. Osamu Kano (Nagoya, 2012), pp. 17–28.
”Ein fränkisches Geschichtsbuch aus St. Amand: der Cvp 473“, in Text, Schrift und Codex. Quellenkundliche Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, ed. Christoph Egger and Herwig Weigl, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Ergänzungband 34 (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 2000), pp. 34–90.
Other publications
(ed.), Historiography and Identity III. Carolingian approachesPost-Roman multiplicity and new political identities (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021, forthcoming), with Rutger Kramer and Graeme Ward.
(ed.), Historiography and Identity II. Post-Roman multiplicity and new political identities (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), with Gerda Heydemann.
History, Frankish Identity and the Rise of Western Ethnicity, 550–850 (Cambridge University Press, 2015, Pb, 2017)
The History of Merovingian historiography, in: The Oxford History of the Merovingian World, eds. B. Effros and I. Moreira (Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 463–488.
‘Historiography and identity in the post-Roman West, an introduction ’, in: Historiography and Identity. Post-Roman multiplicity and new political identities, eds. G. Heydeman and H. Reimitz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 1–26.