This page will be updated as I transition to my new role…
Current Projects:
Social Inequality, Structural Violence, and Marginalisation in Viking-Age Scandinavia (role: PI)
The goal of this project is to develop an interdisciplinary, multi-proxy framework for the identification and study of social inequality among Scandinavian communities during the Viking Age (c. 750-1050 CE). To date, research paradigms in Viking-Age archaeology have focused almost exclusively on elite populations. The lives of lower-status and subaltern groups, in contrast, have been neglected. In redressing this imbalance, the project team will combine bioarchaeological (osteological and isotopic) analyses of skeletal assemblages with critical studies of archaeological materials and context as a means of identifying vulnerable and marginalised populations within the burial record. Drawing on a rich corpus of burial evidence from excavated cemeteries in modern-day Sweden, the team will examine the ways in which overarching social structures, hierarchies, and inequality impacted the health and lifeways of different socio-economic groups. In addition to providing a new and crucially overlooked perspective on daily life and interaction in Viking-Age Scandinavia, the project will also make a positive contribution to salient discussions of systemic inequality and disparity that are of relevance to contemporary society.
Funded by: The Swedish Research Council, 2022-26.
Making a Warrior: The Social Implications of Viking Age Martial Ideologies (role: Co-I)
This project, led by Dr. Marianne Moen (University of Oslo), aims to critically appraise and redefine the concept of warriorhood in Late Iron Age/Viking Age Scandinavia. The initiative, which involves project partners based at research institutions in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland, will adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological, anthropological, historical, and literary perspectives on the life course and social role of warrior groups within the wider milieu of prehistoric Scandinavian society.
Funded by: NordForsk, 2023-26.
The Database of Religious History
The Database of Religious History (DRH) represents ‘the world’s first comprehensive online quantitative and qualitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history’. Directed by Prof. Edward Slingerland at the University of British Columbia, the DRH is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary project involving researchers from all over the globe. The project aims to encourage specialists working across the sphere of religious studies to contribute entries on specific religious belief systems to the database, which can then be used for the purposes of cross-cultural analyses. Each entry comprises several hundred questions that pertain to various aspects of religious belief systems, from the nature of human interaction with their gods, to the intersection of religious belief and socio-political structures and order, to beliefs in the afterlife and perspectives on the origins of the world. My role within the project as the ‘regional editor’ for Northern Europe is to recruit and assist experts in contributing entries to the DRH, to provide feedback to the project leaders and development team, and to assist in the development of new entry types.
Past Projects
Multi-cultural Archaeologies of the Pacific War
In 2014, I was given the opportunity to develop a lifelong interest in the archaeology of the Second World War as part of a joint initiative by the universities of Aberdeen and Uppsala to investigate the 1944 Battle of Peleliu. The project, directed by Profs. Rick Knecht and Neil Price, aims to study the archaeology and legacies of the Pacific War on the island of Peleliu, Palau, with a particular focus on the experiences of indigenous populations.
The Viking Phenomenon
From 2017-2023 I was employed as part of the Viking Phenomenon project at Uppsala University. The project, which is part of the Swedish Research Council’s Distinguished Professor (Rådsprofessor) programme was established in 2016 under the directorship of Prof. Neil Price. The project sought to examine and better understand the origins and development of the period that we often refer to as ‘the Viking Age’, with a particular focus on raiding activity and its associated motors, the Viking diaspora, and social and political developments in the Scandinavian homelands in the centuries either side of the year 800.
Evolutionary anthropologies of the early Viking Age
While employed as a postdoctoral research assistant at Simon Fraser University, I conducted research on an interdisciplinary project as part of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), based at the University of British Columbia. My role within the project was to develop research articles that applied theory and data from evolutionary anthropology, psychology, and the cognitive science of religion to the study of religious beliefs and their impact on conflict and cooperation in late Iron Age Scandinavia.