I am Assistant Professor (Akademischer Rat a.Z.) of Medieval History (Later Middle Ages) at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany.
At the moment I am working on two book projects. The first, Rhetoric in Crisis: Speech, Media, and Power at the Council of Constance (1414–1418), argues that speech, not constitutional structure, was the fundamental concern of the council, showing how Constance became a microcosm of shifting relationships between media, power, and religious authority in the later Middle Ages.
The second, From the North Sea to North America: Adam of Bremen and the Discovery of the Middle Ages, traces how an eleventh-century episcopal chronicle evolved over the centuries from a regional history into a source of modern narratives about the medieval past and its imagined geography. I am also co-editor of A Cultural History of Transport and Mobility in the Middle Ages for the Bloomsbury Cultural History series.
I received my Ph.D. from Yale University and my A.B. from the University of Chicago, and also studied at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen and the University of the Faroe Islands (Fróðskaparsetur Føroya). Before coming to Heidelberg, I was Assistant Professor (Universitätsassistent) of Medieval History and the Auxiliary Sciences of History at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz in Austria.
My transatlantic career has given me two intellectual and institutional homes. I work between North American and European scholarly traditions—systems that approach the Middle Ages with different (and at times incompatible!) methods, periodizations, conversations, and expectations. This dual positioning shapes how I work and also the sorts of questions and problems I’m attracted to: I feel especially at home betwixt and between these cultures, juggling the assumptions that might seem self-evident in one or the other.
I grew up in the Bay Area, where my great-grandfather ran a hamburger stand at San Francisco’s Playland and my grandmother watched the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.
DeLuxe Coffee Shop, Playland, San Francisco (mid 1920s)