Dr Sarah Greer

I joined St John’s College in 2019 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. Earlier, I was based at the University of St Andrews: first as a doctoral fellow within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN ‘Power and Institutions in Medieval Islam and Christendom’, and more recently as a postdoctoral fellow within the HERA-funded research network ‘After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian World, c. 900 -1050’.

My research explores the intersections of politics and memory in the Middle Ages. My forthcoming book, Commemorating Power in Early Medieval Saxony: Writing and Rewriting the Past at Gandersheim and Quedlinburg, considers these themes by looking at the relationships female monasteries built with German kings and emperors in the long tenth century, examining how monastic women reshaped memories of the past to communicate ideas about power and rulership in the present. This work has led on to my current Leverhulme ECF project, which investigates how burial sites of previous royal dynasties functioned as memorial centres in the tenth and eleventh centuries. I look at how individuals in tenth- and eleventh-century western Europe interacted with these burial sites, and what that can tell us about ideas of power, kingship, and royal legitimacy in this period of rapid political change.

Recent publications

• Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire, c. 900 – c. 1050, co-edited with Alice Hicklin and Stefan Esders (Routledge: Abingdon, 2019). https://www.routledge.com/Using-and-Not-Using-the-Past-after-the-Carolingian-Empire-c-900c1050/Greer-Hicklin-Esders/p/book/9780367002527

• ‘The Disastrous Feast at Werla: Political Relationships and Insult in the Succession Contest of 1002’ German History 37:1 (2019), pp. 1-16. https://academic.oup.com/gh/article-abstract/37/1/1/5042775?redirectedFrom=fulltext