Erika Graham-Goering studies the aristocracy of late medieval France, focusing on issues of lordship, succession, shared power, and reputation. She received her PhD from the University of York in 2016 with a thesis on princely power in fourteenth-century Brittany, which is now available as a monograph from Cambridge University Press. Her research focuses primarily on administrative and legal records, but delves also into chronicle materials. She has extensive experience working in the national and departmental archives of France, and has prepared a critical edition of key texts relating to the Breton succession of 1341 (Presses universitaires de Rennes).
She came to Ghent University in September 2016 as a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project 'STATE – Lordship and the Rise of States in Western Europe, 1300-1600', led by prof. dr. Frederik Buylaert. Within this project, she is looking at seigneuries in the provinces of Normandy and Languedoc in the fourteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the hierarchies of authority within the regional aristocracy and the ways in which these were mediated through the crown.
From November 2020, she is undertaking an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Project entitled 'Lordship as Corporative Government across Late Medieval France', which takes a comparative approach to the structures of co-lordship in different regions of France during the Hundred Years' War.
Her other interests include the medieval French language in all its variety (with forays into Occitan), and approaches to academic writing.
