I am a historian of late antique and early medieval West with a particular interest in the use of Roman legacy as a governance resource and early medieval manuscript cultures.

In the past I have worked on travel and trade in Early Medieval Northern Sea basin, as well as literary reception of classical archetypes in British literature.

Now my main project investigates the use of Roman assets (especially infrastructural ones) as governance resources in late antique and early medieval Britain; the social impact as well as the role that the Roman infrastructure played in the early medieval economy and politics of the island make it a important but also rarely problematized topic.

I also work extensively in the area of Digital Humanities, exploring spatial presentation of written sources.

You will find my academic CV here

Publications

Books:

Medieval Monasticism and the Inheritance of the Roman City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022) [in print]

The Past Through Narratology. New Approaches to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, with Jakob Riemenschneider (Eds.) Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung / Beihefte, Band 18. (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2022)

Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain. The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2021)

Beowulf by All, with Jeannie Abbott and Elaine Treharne (Eds.) (Leeds: ARC 2021)

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

“Facsimile Narratives: Researching the Past in the Age of Digital Reproduction”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37 2022 (1): 94–108. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab017.

with Jakob Riemenschneider, “Literarised Spaces. Towards a Narratological Framework for Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages”. In The Past Through Narratology. New Approaches to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Mateusz Fafinski and Jakob Riemenschneider, 7–23. Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven Mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte 18. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press 2022.

“Glocal Matters: The Gospels of St Augustine as a Codex in Translation”, in: Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age ed. by Elaine Treharne, Benjamin Albritton, and Georgia Henley (London: Routledge 2020), 93-99.

with Piotrowski, Michael, “Modelling Medieval Vagueness. Towards a Methodology of Visualising Geographical Uncertainty in Historical Texts, in: INFORMATIK 2020: 50. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik; 3. Workshop InfDH 2020 “Methoden und Anwendungen der Computational Humanities”. Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), ed. by Ralf H. Reussner, Anne Koziolek, Robert Heinrich (Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik), p. 1303–1312. read online

with Piotrowski, Michael, Nothing New Under the Sun? Computational Humanities and the Methodology of History, in: CHR2020: Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Humanities Research, ed. by Folgert Karsdorp, Barbara McGillivray, Adina Nerghes, and Melvin Wevers (Amsterdam 2020), p. 171–181. read online

“Faraway, so close: Liminal thinking and the use of geography in Old English Orosius”, Studies of Warmia 56, 2020.

“On the Road Again – Das Nachleben der römischen Infrastruktur”, Antike Welt 6, 2017, 49-57.

“The moving centre: trade and travel in York from Roman to Anglo-Saxon Times”. In: Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider (ed.) The Anglo-Saxons: The World through their Eyes, BAR British Series 595 (2014), 71-77.

“The Overseas Contacts of Anglo-Saxon England. A reassessment”, Echa Przeszłości XIV (2013), 7-29.

Public humanities:

‘Die Macht der Karten’. Übermedien, 11 March 2022.

‘In Putin’s War, the Map Is Not the Territory’. Foreign Policy. 7 March 2022.

‘Boris Johnson’s Roman Fantasies’. Foreign Policy. 1 November 2021.

‘The Past Doesn’t Tell Easy Stories About the West’. Foreign Policy. 20 June 2021. .

Interviews:

‘Ukrainekrieg: »Man kann mit Karten hervorragend lügen« – Interview mit dem Historiker Mateusz Fafinski’. Der Spiegel, 15 April 2022, sec. Wissenschaft.

‘Die Macht der Karten’. Die Profis. Berlin: Radio Eins, 26 March 2022.