Bonnie Effros
I joined the Department of History at the University of British Columbia in January 2022 as the Departmental Head and Professor.
Prior to this I was appointed at the University of Liverpool from 2017 to 2021 as a Professor of European History and the Chaddock Chair in Economic and Social History. This followed eight years as a faculty member at the University of Florida where I served as the inaugural Rothman Chair and Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at the University of Florida.
I earned my Ph.D. in history at UCLA (1994), where I specialized in the European Middle Ages. My dissertation, based on written and archaeological evidence for burial rites in Merovingian Gaul, provided the basis for two subsequent books: Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World (Penn State University Press 2002) and Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages (University of California Press 2003). My abiding interest in ritual practice thereafter formed the material for a series of essays on early medieval feasting and fasting published as Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul (Palgrave 2002). This research enabled me to explore pagan-Christian interactions, female and clerical ascetic practice, food rites associated with burial custom, and dietary discussions in the post-Roman West. In 2020, with Isabel Moreira, we co-edited the Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World.
My articles on related topics have also appeared in Antiquity, British Journal of the History of Science, Early Medieval Europe, Journal of the History of Collections, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, Speculum, and Viator, and elsewhere. I have also published chapters in the Transformation of the Roman World series (published by E. J. Brill), the supplementary series of the Reallexikon für Altertumskunde (published by Walter de Gruyter), the series Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters (published by the Austrian Academy), and MittelalterStudien (published by the Institut zur interdisziplinären Erforschung des Mittelalters und seines Nachwirkens at Universität Paderborn), and a variety of other edited collections.
Over the past two decades, my work has taken a more historiographical direction, some of it related to the early Middle Ages and more recently to the late Roman period. My chief interests are in the history of archaeology, collecting, and museums, whether with respect to Roman-era or early medieval artifacts. My recent works considers the impacts of colonialism and Christian ultramontanism on medieval studies and the development of the discipline of archaeology.
In 2012, I published a study of early medieval antiquarianism and archaeology in nineteenth-century France titled Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2012). It describes how the unexpected discovery during the industrial revolution of long-forgotten cemeteries containing "Germanic warriors" caused the French to reconsider the role of the Franks in their national origins. This work also examines the professionalization of the discipline of archaeology in the late nineteenth century, a subject that led me to my next project, Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa (Cornell 2018), which looks at French colonial archaeology in Algeria from 1830-1870. In this work, I highlight the support that Roman archaeology provided to the colonial undertaking and underline the entanglement of exploration of the Roman past with French military operations in the Maghreb. My interest in colonial archaeology also led to a conference and collection of sixteen essays co-edited with Guolong Lai and entitled Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology 2018).
Address: Department of History
8-14 Abercromby Square
University of Liverpool,
L69 7WZ United Kingdom
Prior to this I was appointed at the University of Liverpool from 2017 to 2021 as a Professor of European History and the Chaddock Chair in Economic and Social History. This followed eight years as a faculty member at the University of Florida where I served as the inaugural Rothman Chair and Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at the University of Florida.
I earned my Ph.D. in history at UCLA (1994), where I specialized in the European Middle Ages. My dissertation, based on written and archaeological evidence for burial rites in Merovingian Gaul, provided the basis for two subsequent books: Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World (Penn State University Press 2002) and Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages (University of California Press 2003). My abiding interest in ritual practice thereafter formed the material for a series of essays on early medieval feasting and fasting published as Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul (Palgrave 2002). This research enabled me to explore pagan-Christian interactions, female and clerical ascetic practice, food rites associated with burial custom, and dietary discussions in the post-Roman West. In 2020, with Isabel Moreira, we co-edited the Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World.
My articles on related topics have also appeared in Antiquity, British Journal of the History of Science, Early Medieval Europe, Journal of the History of Collections, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, Speculum, and Viator, and elsewhere. I have also published chapters in the Transformation of the Roman World series (published by E. J. Brill), the supplementary series of the Reallexikon für Altertumskunde (published by Walter de Gruyter), the series Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters (published by the Austrian Academy), and MittelalterStudien (published by the Institut zur interdisziplinären Erforschung des Mittelalters und seines Nachwirkens at Universität Paderborn), and a variety of other edited collections.
Over the past two decades, my work has taken a more historiographical direction, some of it related to the early Middle Ages and more recently to the late Roman period. My chief interests are in the history of archaeology, collecting, and museums, whether with respect to Roman-era or early medieval artifacts. My recent works considers the impacts of colonialism and Christian ultramontanism on medieval studies and the development of the discipline of archaeology.
In 2012, I published a study of early medieval antiquarianism and archaeology in nineteenth-century France titled Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2012). It describes how the unexpected discovery during the industrial revolution of long-forgotten cemeteries containing "Germanic warriors" caused the French to reconsider the role of the Franks in their national origins. This work also examines the professionalization of the discipline of archaeology in the late nineteenth century, a subject that led me to my next project, Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa (Cornell 2018), which looks at French colonial archaeology in Algeria from 1830-1870. In this work, I highlight the support that Roman archaeology provided to the colonial undertaking and underline the entanglement of exploration of the Roman past with French military operations in the Maghreb. My interest in colonial archaeology also led to a conference and collection of sixteen essays co-edited with Guolong Lai and entitled Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology 2018).
Address: Department of History
8-14 Abercromby Square
University of Liverpool,
L69 7WZ United Kingdom
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