Pre-Modern

The UT history department offers an MA and PhD concentration in European and Mediterranean history before 1600, working closely with the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Candidates receive their degrees in history, but are encouraged to participate widely in the interdisciplinary life of the institute, which brings together faculty and graduate students from eight different UT departments. Within the Medieval and Renaissance History concentration, students are encouraged to focus in one of the department’s areas of strength: Mediterranean History, Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, Medieval Religious and Cultural History, the Later Middle Ages, and Continental Reformation.

Our faculty have won numerous national and international research awards, including the NEH, ACLS, and Fulbright Fellowships, the Rome Prize, and the National-Humanities Center Fellowship. We publish widely and actively encourage graduate participation in the scholarly world. We are supported by faculty in other departments who serve on graduate committees and take part in training students in the technical, linguistic, and methodological tools that are necessary to study late antique, medieval, and Renaissance history. There are presently about twenty students working on graduate degrees on Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Renaissance in the history department. Recent and ongoing dissertation topics include:

• Jordan Amspacher, “Troya Victa: Empire, Identity, and Apocalypse in Frankish Chronicles of the Fourth Crusade”
• Kelsey Blake, Healing and Suffering in Early Medieval Francia
• Joshua Durbin, “Inherited Masculinities: Noble Fathers and Sons Early Modern England, 1530-1630”
• Alexandra Garnhart-Bushakra, “If Life Were Verse: Masculinity and Memories of Violence in the First Crusade Narratives, 1095-1200 C.E.”
• Stefan Hodges-Kluck, “Ascetic Bodies: Philosophical Self-Presentation in Late Antique Cappadocia”
• Amy Huesman, “Supernatural Encounters: Mystical Experiences with the Demonic and the Divine among Italian Holy Women of the Quattrocento.”
• Kathryn Kleinkopf, “Second Skin: Ascetics as Body-Places in Late Antique Christianity”
• Michael Lovell, Rationality and Religious Exclusion in Merovingian Gaul and the Carolingian Empire
• Jeremy Pearson, “The Islamic World and the Latin East: William of Tripoli and His Syrian Context”
• Brittany Poe, “Beyond Paris: Alan of Lille and the Reception of Scholastic Theology in Occitania and Iberia.”
• Laura Roesch, “A Fine Spray of Blood”: Martyrial Violence, Sacred Landscapes, and Christian Identity in the Late Antique West”

Through the Marco Institute, this cadre of graduate students in pre-modern Europe can not only take advantage of one of the best summer medieval Latin programs in North America, but also interact with another two dozen graduate students from other departments, and all of whom take part in numerous annual activities, including scholarly symposia and ongoing interdisciplinary research seminar in Mediterranean Late Antiquity. Graduate students also are eligible for travel and research awards as well as a dissertation writing prize. The Middle Ages and Renaissance are a key focus of the UT Libraries collections and UT has all the resources necessary to conduct original research in Marco Institute fields, including complete sets of the Patrologia Latina and Graeca; the Corpus Christianorum; the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Rolls Series, the Acta Sanctorum, and important databases such as the Early English Books Online (EEBO) and the International Medieval Bibliography.