I recieved my university education in Dublin and Oxford, culminating in my PhD in Medieval History in 2020, awarded by Trinity College Dublin. Since 2020 I have held research posts in Dublin and in Poitiers, funded by the Irish Research Council and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions fund respectively, as well as teaching posts at Maynooth University and at Trinity College Dublin. I joined the Department of History at King's in September 2025.

Research interests

• Social Transformations and the 'Feudal Revolution' in post-Carolingian Europe
• Slavery and Unfreedom in Medieval Europe
• Medieval Social Elites and Hierarchies, particularly in Francia/France
• Charters and Documentary Culture in the Early and Central Middle Ages

I am a social and economic historian of the early and central middle ages, with a particular focus on what is now northern France and Belgium between the ninth and the twelfth centuries AD. My research explores how social hierarchies were created, enforced and reproduced in medieval societies, both at the very top of the social scale (among lords, knights, churchmen and monks) as well as at the very bottom (among peasants, slaves and other unfree people). My work draws on the ideas and methodologies of historians working outside medieval Europe, particularly in the global history of slavery, as well as borrowing from anthropology, sociology, archaeology and post-colonial studies.

Teaching

At King's, I teach primarily on medieval history modules in the first and second years of the department's BA programmes, with a particular focus on the period AD 750 -1000. I also contribute to core skills modules for first-year undergraduates and for students on the interdisciplinary MA in Medieval Studies.

Selected publications

• ‘Ecclesiastical Proprietary Communities and the Restitution of Local Churches in the Loire Valley during the Age of Reform, c. 1050 – c. 1150’ in Tristan Martine (ed.) Communautés déchirées ? Violences et divisions au sein des communautés de l’Occident grégorien (mi XIe-mi XIIe siècles) : entre pratiques et discours (Rennes ; Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2025), pp. 155-64.

 

• ‘The Meaning of Miles: Knighthood as Social Signifier in Early Capetian France’, French History 38;4 (2024), pp. 393-404. Winner of the French History Article Prize 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crae041 

 

• ‘Landholding in the Loire Valley and the Late Carolingian Economy (c. 840 – c. 1000)’, Early Medieval Europe 31;2 (2023), pp. 274-296. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/emed.12634

 

• ‘Enduring Bonds: Social Pressure, Church Reform and Grants of Lay Societas in Central France, c. 950-1150’, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 51;2 (2022 for 2020), pp. 131-54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.128751

 

• ‘Mórmaors, Mayors and Merchants; The Early Development of Municipal Government in Dublin’ in Seán Duffy (ed.) Medieval Dublin XIII; Proceedings of the Friends of Medieval Dublin Symposium 2011, (Dublin; Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 108-15.