Academic Advisory Board Prof. Dr. Patrick J. Geary

Patrick Geary is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and also holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Medieval History Emeritus at the University of California. He has taught at Princeton University, the University of Florida, UCLA and the University of Notre Dame, and held visiting professorships, among the others, at Peking University (2016), the University of Richmond (2011), and the Central European University (2003). His research focuses broadly on European culture and society between ca. 500 and 1200. He has written on memory, history, and identity as constructed during the Middle Ages as well as on contemporary attempts to ground modern European nations in a mythic medieval past. He has directed the St. Gall Plan Project, an internet-based initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that provides tools for the study of Carolingian monasticism. Currently, Geary is leading a major project that studies the migration of European societies north and south of the Alps through the analysis of ancient DNA in Longobard-era cemeteries in Hungary and in Italy.

Major publications include:

Manufacturing a Past for the Present: Forgery and Authenticity in Medieval Texts and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Europe (co-edited with J. Bak and G. Klanicza, 2015); Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages (2013); Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary (2006); The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (2002); Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the end of the first Millennium (1994); Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (1994).