Nicholas S M Matheou
I am a global economic and social historian, specialising in medieval Afro-Eurasia. My research combines Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Latin and Persian primary sources with material culture, epigraphy, numismatics, climate data and landscape approaches. At the core sits medieval eastern Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia and Caucasia as a global-historical region, and Armenian material as a crucially decentred and decolonising window on the Global Middle Ages. Through this research I theorise historical themes such as polity formation, urbanisation, hegemony and counterpower, ethnicity and nationhood, methodologically anti-state approaches, and critical political economy.
I studied Ancient & Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh for my undergraduate degree, before moving to the University of Oxford to complete first a master’s in Late Antique & Byzantine Studies, and then a doctoral dissertation in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies titled ‘Situating the History attributed to Aristakes Lastiverc‘i: The Empire of New Rome & Caucasia in the Eleventh Century’. During my time as a postgraduate student I co-founded the international research network The Long History of Ethnicity & Nationhood at The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH), running a number of workshops, conferences and seminar series. My first postdoctoral position was as Past & Present Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, with the research programme ‘Hegemony & Counterpower: Approaches to Global History in Medieval Caucasia’. Following this I was appointed programme manager at the Armenian Institute, London, before taking up my current post as Lecturer in Global Medieval History & Marxism at the University of Edinburgh.
My current research project is titled ‘“The Fate of Unjust Cities”: Commercial Revolution, Global History & the Abandoned City of Ani, 900-1400’. This radical global history of the abandoned city of Ani in central South Caucasia, straddling the border between the republics of Turkey and Armenia, situates the city’s emergence, development and decline between the tenth and fourteenth centuries in macro regional and interregional transformations, especially the Afro-Eurasian Commercial Revolution and the Mongol world-empire. The project draws on Ani’s rich material remains, particularly the large corpus of monumental epigraphy, as well as numismatics, ceramics and architectural remains, supplemented by Armenian, Georgian, Greek and Islamic (Arabic & Persian) literary sources. Exploring and theorising the political economy of different state-systems, especially long-term histories of commercial capitalism, as well as the agency of subaltern classes in processes of urbanisation, the project touches on global historical themes relevant across time and place.
I studied Ancient & Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh for my undergraduate degree, before moving to the University of Oxford to complete first a master’s in Late Antique & Byzantine Studies, and then a doctoral dissertation in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies titled ‘Situating the History attributed to Aristakes Lastiverc‘i: The Empire of New Rome & Caucasia in the Eleventh Century’. During my time as a postgraduate student I co-founded the international research network The Long History of Ethnicity & Nationhood at The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH), running a number of workshops, conferences and seminar series. My first postdoctoral position was as Past & Present Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, with the research programme ‘Hegemony & Counterpower: Approaches to Global History in Medieval Caucasia’. Following this I was appointed programme manager at the Armenian Institute, London, before taking up my current post as Lecturer in Global Medieval History & Marxism at the University of Edinburgh.
My current research project is titled ‘“The Fate of Unjust Cities”: Commercial Revolution, Global History & the Abandoned City of Ani, 900-1400’. This radical global history of the abandoned city of Ani in central South Caucasia, straddling the border between the republics of Turkey and Armenia, situates the city’s emergence, development and decline between the tenth and fourteenth centuries in macro regional and interregional transformations, especially the Afro-Eurasian Commercial Revolution and the Mongol world-empire. The project draws on Ani’s rich material remains, particularly the large corpus of monumental epigraphy, as well as numismatics, ceramics and architectural remains, supplemented by Armenian, Georgian, Greek and Islamic (Arabic & Persian) literary sources. Exploring and theorising the political economy of different state-systems, especially long-term histories of commercial capitalism, as well as the agency of subaltern classes in processes of urbanisation, the project touches on global historical themes relevant across time and place.
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Published Papers by Nicholas S M Matheou
For the final version see: https://academic.oup.com/past/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pastj/gtaf003/8003752
Edited Volumes by Nicholas S M Matheou
Podcasts & Blogs by Nicholas S M Matheou
http://torch.ox.ac.uk/genetics-archaeology-ethnicity-and-nationhood
For more details and the recordings please visit: http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/identity
Conferences Organised by Nicholas S M Matheou
For the final version see: https://academic.oup.com/past/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pastj/gtaf003/8003752
http://torch.ox.ac.uk/genetics-archaeology-ethnicity-and-nationhood
For more details and the recordings please visit: http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/identity
In spite of the stream of publications over the last thirty years on ancient and medieval ethnicity and national identity, the dominant paradigm in ethnicity and nationalism studies remains modernist – the view that nationhood is an essentially modern phenomenon and was non-existent or peculiarly unimportant before the 18th century. We believe it is time to reopen this debate. Scholars working on pre-modern collective identities too often avoid the challenge of modernism, either by using allegedly unproblematic terminology of ethnicity or by employing the vocabulary of nationhood uncritically. This conference, therefore, aims at tackling these difficult theoretical issues head on. This can only truly be achieved by bringing together a range of researchers working on ancient, late antique, early medieval, high medieval, late medieval, and early modern ethnicity and nationhood. Thus we hope to reinvigorate discussion of pre-modern ethnicity and nationhood, as well as to go beyond the unhelpful chronological divisions which have emerged through surprisingly fragmented research on pre-modern collective identities. Overall, the goal of our conference is to encourage systemic conceptual thinking about pre-modern identity and nationhood, and to consider the similarities and differences between the construction and use of ethnic and national categories both within those periods, and in comparison with modernity.
The Classical Roman Empire has been described as an ‘empire of cities’, and both the reality and ideal of civic life remain central to its late-Antique and Medieval successor. Indeed, the term ‘Byzantine’ itself shows the importance placed by scholars on Constantine I’s refounding of Byzantion as the New Rome. Yet in 330 A.D. Constantinople was part of an urban landscape which included other, more ancient civic centres, whilst by 1453 A.D. little else remained but the City, itself a collection of villages and the Theodosian walls the frontier. Across this Byzantine millennium Constantinople was inextricably linked to the other cities of the empire, from the Golden Horn to the ever-shifting frontiers. With the apparent seventh-century disappearance of city-life in the broad new Anatolian borderlands, the strength of the Greek mainland in the twelfth century, and the rise of post-Byzantine cities in the old western frontiers of southern Italy and Venice, the vicissitudes of urban life in the empire are undoubtedly linked to each moment of change. Constantinopolitan artistic and architectural forms are fleshed in the local materials of Ravenna in the sixth century, and in the eleventh and twelfth centuries provincially-born men, educated in the City, become the bright lights of the so-called Komnenian Renaissance. Yet how are we to understand this dialectic between the City, the cities, and the imperial frontier? Moreover, what are the methodologies and conceptual frameworks which we might use to approach these issues?