I am a sixth-year PhD student. I am a social, cultural, and institutional historian of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, specializing in the western Mediterranean world from the fifth through the seventh centuries. My dissertation project is entitled War and the Transformation of Communities in the Early Medieval West, 420-565. It is a reassessment of the fall of the Roman empire that moves beyond the discourse concerning the causes of this monumental event and focuses instead on how war and the militarization of elite society affected the urban communities that comprised the Western Roman Empire and the barbarian kingdoms that succeeded it. It is also a new look at a variety of materials that have been under-exploited. While sermons, poems, and hagiographies have not received much attention from political and military historians, my research shows that they can tell us a great deal about how war and soldiers impacted the urban communities of the former Roman state and their civic, religious, and cultural leaders, and likewise how those leaders responded to such stimuli.

I received my M.A. in History from Princeton in 2012, and my M.A. in Classics from the University of Colorado in 2008, where my thesis explored rulership and political institutions in the post-Roman Burgundian kingdom. My examination fields have included the Early Middle Ages (Helmut Reimitz), The High Middle Ages (William Chester Jordan), the Comparative History the State in the Medieval Mediterranean (John F. Haldon), Late Antiquity (Noel Lenski), the Roman Empire (Noel Lenski), and Roman Religion (Noel Lenski).