I am a Voluntary Employee (Vrijwillige Medewerker) in the Department of History. From 2019-21, I was a BOF Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and from 2021-2024, I was an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow. My primary affiliation is now as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the research group 'Social History of Capitalism' at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
I am a historian of the medieval Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Caucasus. My research has two main strands:
- The history of slavery in the Black Sea, and its connections with the wider Mediterranean and Afro-Eurasian world;
- The history of polities on the borderlands of the Byzantine Empire, notably in the Caucasus, and their interrelationship.
I did my PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London on the North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania, supervised by Prof. Hugh Kennedy and Dr. Teresa Bernheimer. I then taught at Saint Xavier University and Wilbur Wright College in Chicago, USA, before moving to Ghent University in 2019. From 2021 to 2024, I held an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship, which investigated comparisons and links between the medieval Black Sea slave trade and political developments in 14th-15th century Egypt and West Africa.
My book, 'The North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania, 850-1240', will be published this summer (2025) by Cambridge University Press. This introduces the Kingdom of Alania, the most powerful polity in the medieval North Caucasus, to a Western European and North American audience. It argues that it was possible for this kingdom to exercise sovereignty over the North Caucasus without a state structure, thus challenging the narrative which connects the rise of kingdoms on the Byzantine periphery to top-down Christianisation and state formation.
My previous research project, 'Strangled By Connection: The Northwest Caucasus and the Making of Global Slavery, 1261-1475', examines the medieval Caucasian slave trade in comparative perspective. The importance of this slave trade has long been recognised, providing the ruling elite of the Egyptian Mamluk sultanate from 1382 onwards, and a steady supply of household and productive slaves to the Italian States. However, we know very little about the social background of these enslaved people, why they were enslaved, and particularly why the indigenous Northwest Caucasian elite co-operated in their enslavement and sale. This project re-examines our written evidence for this slave trade in the light of Northwest Caucasian archaeological evidence and ethnography, which previously has been largely confined to specialist Russophone journals. This will therefore allow us a fuller picture of the social world from which these enslaved people were forcibly extracted. This research project suggested that political developments in the Northwest Caucasus influenced political shifts in Mamluk Egypt, and moreover that techniques of enslavement developed in the Black Sea were later repurposed by European merchants in West Africa.
Along with James Baillie (University of Vienna) and Nick Evans (University of Leeds), I am a co-ordinator of the Medieval Caucasus Network: an online network bringing together specialists in the medieval Caucasian region.
