Dr Nick Evans

Biography

Dr Nick Evans is an early medieval historian, specialising in Byzantium, the Caucasus and the Eurasian steppe. His undergraduate and postgraduate studies were at the University of Oxford. Nick has worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the Moving Byzantium Project at the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, and a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Byzantine economic and social history
• Late Antique and Medieval Caucasus
• Medieval Eurasian steppe societies
• Approaches to pre-modern imperialism
• The history of archaeology in Russia and the former Soviet Union

My research integrates material culture and the textual sources to investigate the social and economic history of the West Eurasian steppe and the frontiers of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. I am also interested in the cultural and intellectual contexts of Russian and Soviet archaeological scholarship.

Teaching

Nick Evans teaches comparative approaches to a range of aspects of early medieval history.

Selected publications 

• ‘The Womb of Iron and Silver: Slavery in the Khazar Economy’, in F. Daim, H. Melller and W. Pohl (eds.), From the Huns to the Turks – Mounted Warriors in Europe and Central Asia (State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (LDA)) (Forthcoming)
• ‘The Hidden Centre: Ibn Fadlān and the Khazars’, in J. Shepard and L. Treadwell (eds.), Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age: Diplomacy and Islam in the World of Ibn Fadlan (London: I.B. Tauris) (Forthcoming)
• ‘Kastron, Rabad and Ardūn: the case of Artanuji’, in N.S. Matheou, Th. Kampaniaki & L.M. Bondioli (eds.), From Constantinople to the Frontier. The City and the Cities (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 345–64.