University of Reading

Faculty Member, Department of Archaeology

Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology

About

From October 2007 I've been a lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, University of Reading, teaching the archaeology of medieval Europe, crusader archaeology and zooarchaeology. I am also developing a course on the archaeology of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.

Before, I was a research fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Clare College, University of Cambridge. I finished my Ph.D. at the Department of Archaeology, Cambridge in 2003.

I specialise in the bioarchaeology of medieval Europe, with a particular focus on physical and conceptual responses to animals - especially large carnivores - and the different ways in which people constructed their environments or ecological 'niches'. More recently, my research and teaching has extended to the archaeology of crusading and colonisation in the Baltic. I have excavated in the UK, Italy, Montenegro, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Estonia. My research, rooted in zooarchaeology with an inter-disciplinary framework, is sub-divided into a series of themes and sub-themes:

+ Ecology and biodiversity in Medieval Europe
+ The ecology of crusading in the medieval Baltic
+ The environmental dimensions of religious conversion in medieval northern Europe
+ Human responses to wolves and other large carnivores in medieval northern Europe
+ Conceptualising predation in medieval Europe
+ Animals as Material Culture
+ Werewolves and cultures of shape-shifting
+ The Heritage of Serenissima Project: the material culture of Venetian colonisation in the Eastern Mediterranean

I am also editor of Brill’s Series in the History of the Environment, and co-organiser of the Animals as Material Culture in the Middle Ages conference series.

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