Duncan Hardy Joins UT History Faculty
Hardy is a historian of late medieval and early Renaissance and Reformation Europe.
Associate Professor Duncan Hardy joined the UT history department in 2026.
Hardy is a historian of late medieval Europe, especially the peculiar entity known by the thirteenth century as the Holy Roman Empire.
His first book, Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346-1521 (2018), shows that the late medieval empire was not disjointed and chaotic. Rather, its political landscape consisted of intertwined networks of princes, bishops, nobles, and cities formalized by and within associations and assemblies, whose members presented themselves as a multilateral body politic.
In 2025 he completed a book of translated and edited primary sources that illustrates this multilayered sociopolitical system. He is currently writing a concise history of late medieval Germany and co-editing the Oxford Handbook of the Holy Roman Empire.
His next monograph will examine the political reform of the empire in the “long” fifteenth century—a project that has so far been supported by fellowships from Trinity College, Cambridge and the University of Erfurt.
Hardy earned his PhD in history from the University of Oxford and was a member of the history faculty at the University of Central Florida before coming to UT.
He grew up between the United Kingdom and France, and his hobbies include fencing (in the sabre discipline), historical strategy games, and walking a spirited Yorkie called Camembert.