Julia Smith, born in Cambridge, UK, in 1956. Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. Reader in Medieval History at the University of St. Andrews.
Fellow (1 September 1999 – 30 June 2000)
My year at NIAS has seen substantial progress on my major project, a book-length essay on “Europe After Rome, 500-1000”. I revised three chapters drafted some time ago and also researched and wrote a further three. Their geographical scope has ranged from Scandinavia to the Balkans, and their conceptual scope from the constructions of ethnic identity in sixth-century Italy to the politics of cattle-raiding in tenth-century Ireland. The immense intellectual stimulus of my fellow Fellows has been crucial to this wide-ranging work, and has helped me to sharpen and, at times, reformulate my perspective and approach. The library resources of NIAS have also been most beneficial, as has easy access to archaeological sites and archives the Netherlands, Belgium and Rhineland Germany.
In addition, I wrote one article and revised for publication in French another on women and gender in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In association with these, I co-organised a long strand of sessions to be held at the International Medieval Congress on “Gender and the Transformation of the Roman World”. I completed the editorial work on a volume of essays which was published shortly before the end of my fellowship, Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West.