Education
BA Trinity College, 2013
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Dissertation: Historiographical Narratives of Violence, Sacrality, and Community in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Italy: Genoa, Pisa, and the Mezzogiorno, c.1080-c.1170.
Research Interests
I am a cultural historian specializing in interregional, interdisciplinary, and narratological approaches to the study of medieval Italy, with research projects on medieval history-writing, twelfth-century political and religious culture, and ideologies of holy war. My dissertation is an analysis of the ways in which medieval historical narrative texts represented and reconciled anxieties regarding the experience of violence and its role in shaping political life in Latin Christian society, with particular reference to the historiographical projects of Genoa, Pisa, and the Mezzogiorno. I argue that – for these societies – narrative historical texts functioned as articulations of political myths, in that they were discursive spaces within which the experience of political life, specifically the anxieties surrounding boundary-making and the infliction of harm, could be sublimated within a shared religious culture system. This project offers a contribution to our understanding of the development of political cultures within Latin Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, presents an analytical framework for approaching ambiguous medieval historical narratives, and demonstrates a way of considering northern and southern Italian history together as thematically interrelated.