Many congratulations to Dr Edward Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval History, and Dr Sarah Dustagheer, Reader in Early Modern Literature. who have been awarded prestigious British Academy Mid-Career Fellowships for the 2025-26 academic year. Read more about their projects here:
Dr Edward Roberts: ‘Bishops, Law and Society at the End of the First Millennium’.
The institutional power of the medieval church has traditionally been thought a product of the eleventh-century ‘Gregorian reform’, whereby newly invigorated popes liberated the church from secular interference and restored clerical integrity. But this was only possible because a bottom-up transformation was well underway across Latin Europe. This project traces changes in ecclesiastical governance across the tenth and early eleventh centuries by reassessing the activities and ethos of the church’s most important local leaders: the bishops. Through a study of contemporary episcopal manuscripts, this research shows how innovative approaches to religious law produced new conceptions of episcopal jurisdiction and group cohesion, which enabled bishops to operate as a transregional elite and paved the way for a wider transformation of European society.
Dr Roberts added:
“This is a project about how ‘the church’ became the dominant social institution in medieval Europe. It is still often said that this only came about after zealous reformers took over the papal curia around 1050 and began to establish a more bureaucratic, hierarchical church with universal reach. But institutions are not simply top-down organisations. They are interactive, requiring demand from below as well as supply from above. I therefore wanted to find out what was happening at local levels across Western Europe in the preceding period that might have encouraged this rapid growth of papal authority.”
Dr Roberts teaches early medieval European history in the School of Humanities and MEMS. He is always happy to hear from prospective research students who are interested in working on any aspect of European history in the period c.500 – c.1100.
Dr Sarah Dustagheer: Shakespeare and the Legacy of the British Empire
This project examines Shakespeare performance – in professional, amateur and educational settings – from key locations in the life of the British Empire. The project will cover six indicative case studies and interrogate the playwright’s evolution from cultural tool of the Empire to global icon. It argues that the largely unanalysed performance history of colonial Shakespeare complicates this alleged evolution, and reveals undocumented examples of complicity, resistance and hybridity between colonised and colonisers. It offers a unique contribution to critical debate on Shakespeare’s entanglement with the colonial project and how that legacy has an impact on contemporary culture. In sharing research with teachers, sixth-formers and the public via an educational film, exhibition and workshops, the project contributes to current debates around antiracist Shakespeare pedagogy, the decolonisation of curriculums and the Empire’s legacies in today’s ‘culture wars’.
Image: Contemporary portrait of Bishop Sigebert of Minden (1022–36), originally contained in his prayer book, now preserved as a single folio (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS theol. lat. qu. 3).