º¬Ð߲ݴ«Ã½

My research interests fall into two main tenets.

In the middle ages, my research explores written culture, multilingualism and cultural transmission across languages and political contexts. I am concerned with how meaning is locally created, and how medieval actors used textual production to seek to bring about changes in their socio-political circumstances.

 My first monograph, currently in preparation,  Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople, explores the earliest texts concerned with the invention of the Slavonic alphabet. It analyses how the alphabet continued to be contested and re-invented the first century after its invention (ca.860-950), and how the changing context of its use in turn affected ideas about writing, script-creation and conversion more broadly.

Relatedly, my work explores the historiography of Byzantium and Central and Eastern Europe. I am interested in how nineteenth- and twentieth- century interpretations of medieval sources have been guided by nationalist projects, and continue to permeate scholarship as the common sense assumptions about medieval sources or people.  To this end, I spent three years co-convening an international research network based at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, entitled , which sought to bring historical theory to the study of the Byzantine World.  Springing from this, I am currently co-editing a book with Benjamin Anderson (Cornell) entitled Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Towards a Critical Historiography.