Teresa Shawcross is a historian of the Medieval Mediterranean world. Her research situates itself at the interstices between Byzantium, Islam and the Latin West. She is especially concerned with contact, conflict and exchange between different ethno-religious and social groups, often within the context of large-scale migration and the experiences of migrants such as colonisers, enslaved persons, and refugees. Much of her work studies the theories and practices of empire (and its alternatives) in a Western Eurasia where the memory of Rome remained an enduring influence. In recent years, she has developed lines of enquiry concerned with illuminating pre-modern interactions between the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. She has investigated modes of belonging and identity; language, multilingualism, translation and code-switching; and the interplay between written, visual and aural media. She has also contributed to the field of reception studies, publishing on medieval and especially early modern forms of antiquarianism (such as collecting, editing, lexicography, and historiography).

Professor Shawcross's first book (The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece) focused on the Crusader States, and discussed the evolution of the representation of identity in medieval historical narratives composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries within a volatile region where different ethnicities were obliged to live alongside each other and outside political interests frequently intruded. Research for her second monograph (Wisdom's House, Heaven's Gate: Athens and Jerusalem in the Middle Ages) was funded by a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation. Taking as its starting point an investigation into the physical topography and symbolism of two famous cities, this book offered a cultural history of the rival superpowers—the Byzantine Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate—that between them dominated the Mediterranean during the tenth to twelfth centuries. She is currently completing a third monograph, tentatively entitled Taking Liberties: Emperors and Cities of the Late Byzantine World, which analyses the struggle of imperial authority from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries to control its territory in the face of growing claims to civic autonomy by urban centres. In addition, she is engaged in several editions and translations, including: the treatises by the fourteenth-century Italo-Byzantine political theorist Theodore Palaeologus; and the seventeenth-century Ottoman reworking of Digenes Akrites by Ignatios Petritzes. Interested in the Digital Humanities, she directs the Medieval Black Sea Project, is a contributing author of the award-winning Bloomsbury Medieval Studies, and advises the Middle Ages for Educators and French of Outremer.

Professor Shawcross received an interdisciplinary education in Medieval and Modern Languages, Comparative Literature and History, earning her B.A., M.Phil. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and her Maîtrise from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She held a Hannah Seeger Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University and a Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, as well as the positions of Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University and of Assistant Professor of Medieval European and Mediterranean History at Amherst College. She returned to Princeton in 2012, where she is jointly appointed in the History Department and the Center for Hellenic Studies—in addition to being affiliated with the Department of Classics, the Department of French and Italian, the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, the Program in Medieval Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity. She has taken up visiting fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Cambridge; the Department of Asian and North-African Studies at Ca'Foscari-University of Venice; Harvard Divinity School; the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; the School of Middle-Eastern Studies at Leiden University; and the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. She is Affiliate Faculty at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University and a Senior Member of Robinson College, University of Cambridge.

Professor Shawcross is a Princeton Athletics Fellow for the rowing teams and has served for several stints on the Policy Committee for Athletics and Campus Recreation.

Teaching

Professor Shawcross has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Medieval Europe of the Central and Late Middle Ages; the Medieval Mediterranean; the Byzantine Empire; the Crusades and the Crusader States; and Medieval and Early Modern Venice and its Colonies. Other offerings have included seminars on the reading and writing of history, workshops on the responsible conduct of research, as well as training in codicology, palaeography, diplomatics and related skills.

Current Courses:

• The Byzantine Empire, 200-Level
• The Crusades, 300-Level
• Empire and Catastrophe, 400-Level
• Venice and the Mediterranean World, 400-Level
• Relics, Ruins and Robots: The Life of Things in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean, 400-Level
• Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Medieval Mediterranean, 500-Level
• Problems in Byzantine History, 500-Level