About

I am a social and economic historian of medieval Europe, with a particular interest in what is now Northern France and Belgium in from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. My research focuses on social status, hierarchies and stratification in medieval societies. In my work, I seek to understand how the deeply unequal societies of the middle ages came to be, how such hierarchies were justified ideologically and how the composition of various social strata changed over time.

The two major foci of my research are the two opposing poles of medieval society: the lay and clerical élites at the top, and the unfree peasants and servants at the bottom. Much of my published research to date has focused on the history of medieval élites, exploring how the ways in which they demonstrated their élite status shifted in the age of “Feudal Revolution” around AD 1000. My current research has shifted to examine the unfree people (variously called servi, ancillae, mancipia and coliberti in the Latin sources) who made up the lowest tiers of society in the middle ages.

Employment & Education

I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow, based in the Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale (CESCM), a mixed-research unit of the Université de Poitiers and the French Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). My fellowship is devoted to a research project, Practices of Unfreedom in Northern France, c. 888 – c. 1120 (PUNF); you can find more information about this project on the PUNF page. Before coming to Poitiers, I worked as both a lecturer and a researcher in the Department of History and the Medieval History Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin and in the Department of History at Maynooth University. In addition to my current funding from the European Research Council’s MSCA fund, my research has been funded in the past by the Irish Research Council, by TCD’s Grace Lawless Lee Fund and by the Society for the Study of French History.

I received my Ph.D. in History from Trinity College Dublin in 2020, with a thesis entitled Wealth, Violence and Status: Lay and Ecclesiastical Élites in the Middle Loire Valleyc. 850 – c. 1150. This work was supervised by Prof. I.S. Robinson and Prof. David Ditchburn and was funded by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. Prior to this, I received a BA (Hons) in History with Ancient History and Archaeology from Trinity College Dublin (2013) and an M.St. in Medieval History from the University of Oxford (2014).