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Short Biography
Short Biography
I am a professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester where I have worked since 1996. My research is wide-ranging and always interdisciplinary. It has two main strands: the materiality of the written word and connections between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Continent, especially in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. A recent book, focusing on a major Carolingian inscription extant in St Peter’s basilica, was published by OUP in 2023 (Charlemagne and Rome: Alcuin and the Epitaph of Pope Hadrian I). Another, on the pre-Conquest stone sculpture of the East Midlands, will follow in 2025 (Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture: Vol. XV).
Of particular relevance to this workshop is the news that I have just been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in the 2023 competition for a 5-year project called INSULAR. This will focus on the corpus of c. 850 extant books or fragments in written or annotated in insular scripts; Jiří Vnouček will be part of the INSULAR team and project partners include Matthew Collins (Copenhagen/Cambridge) and Dan Bradley (TCD). One element of the INSULAR project will build on the important preliminary work done by Beasts2Craft on Insular membrane. There is a lot of excitement about this project and its transformational potential – the biomolecular evidence is likely to be especially important.
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